Trump’s One Weird Trick to Wreck the Economy

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday described a “curious balance” in the labor market, in which both supply and demand have sunk “sharply,” thanks to President Donald Trump’s immigration policies and potentially his tariffs.

Asked whether tariffs have created the weakened U.S. job market, Powell said that is “certainly possible.” But while trade policy “may” be affecting the labor market, Powell said, “the change in immigration” is the primary reason “employment is doing what it’s doing.” The change, of course, being Trump’s disruptive mass deportation campaign, which has dramatically decreased the supply of workers.

Amid this decrease in supply, Powell added, “demand for workers has also come down quite sharply,” leading to a “curious balance,” he said, repeating a term he used in a speech last month. “Typically when we say things are in balance that sounds good,” he added. “But in this case, the balance is because both supply and demand have come down quite sharply.”

The situation Powell described, some observers noted, resembles stagflation—the dreaded combination of stagnant economic growth, rising prices, and high unemployment. “‘Curious balance’ … Say the S word Jay,” tweeted Kevin Green, a markets correspondent at the Schwab Network, alongside a crying-laughing emoji.

At least eight members of the military have been punished for comments made in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death, and dozens more have been doxed and reported.

Task and Purpose reports that at least five Army officers and one Air Force sergeant have been suspended, one Marine was fired from his recruitment job for posting a meme of Kirk captioned, “Another racist man popped,” and one Army reserve major is under investigation.

“The Department of War maintains a zero-tolerance policy for military personnel or DOW civilians who celebrate or mock the assassination of Charlie Kirk,” the Pentagon posted from its rapid response account last Friday on X.

Even so, it won’t be as simple to just fire soldiers for posting things that don’t align with the current administration’s politics as the Pentagon is making it out to be.

“People who join the military have less First Amendment rights than those who don’t, but they still have robust First Amendment rights,” former military colonel, judge, and prosecutor Don Christensen told CNN. He went on to note that nothing says, “Pete Hegseth doesn’t like what you’re saying so I’m going to prosecute you.”

“You can’t just say out of the blue, ‘If you say something on social media about Charlie Kirk that Pete Hegseth doesn’t like, that’s a crime,’” Christensen continued.

While that may be true, it’s likely that the Pentagon’s gag order has already had the desired chilling effect.

House Republicans wouldn’t even let their Democratic colleague finish reading a motion to subpoena Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent Wednesday for information about alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.

During Kash Patel’s House Judiciary Committee hearing earlier, the FBI director repeatedly deferred Representative Mary Gay Scanlon’s questions about $1.5 billion in suspicious transactions, which major banks had flagged to the government related to Epstein and his alleged collaborators, to the Treasury Department.

After the hearing, Scanlon attempted to introduce a motion to subpoena Bessent to produce the suspicious activity reports—but her Republican colleague Tom McClintock wouldn’t even let her get the words out.

Scanlon said she was seeking reports “in the possession of the Treasury Department identifying the roughly $1.5 billion in suspicious transactions—”

“Uh, Mr. Chairman?” McClintock interjected.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan then recognized McClintock, who made a motion to table Scanlon’s request. Jordan replied that the motion was “not debatable.”

“I didn’t finish,” Scanlon said.

“She hadn’t completed the motion,” said Representative Jamie Raskin. “It’s improper to cut it off before it’s completed, Mr. Chairman.”

Jordan said she could finish her last sentence.

“OK, so we’re asking them to identify the roughly $1.5 billion in suspicious transactions related to the sex trafficking crimes of Epstein, Maxwell, and their co-conspirators—” Scanlon continued, before being interrupted by McClintock yet again.

This time, Jordan moved straight to vote on McClintock’s motion to table, and Republicans promptly squashed her attempt to call Bessent in.

Scanlon wrote on X that her Republican colleagues had “voted for continuing the cover-up.”

McClintock also moved to table Representative Jasmine Crockett’s motion to subpoena the head of the Bureau of Prisons to produce records relating to Maxwell’s transfer, and Representative Eric Swalwell’s motion to subpoena deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino for witness interviews.

The Trump administration is taking its recent assault on alleged drug boats from Venezuela very seriously—not.

Recalling a recent conversation he had with War Department Secretary Pete Hegseth about the unprovoked air strikes in the Caribbean, Vice President JD Vance joked Wednesday that he “wouldn’t go fishing right now in that part of the world.”

So far this month, the United States has destroyed two small Venezuelan boats traversing international waters, which Trump administration officials deemed—without an investigation or interdiction—were smuggling drugs.

The first attack killed 11 people on September 2, while a second attack on September 15 killed an additional three individuals, according to Donald Trump.

Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, said that the Trump administration had violated U.S. and international laws by striking the boats. He condemned the attacks as a “heinous crime” and also suggested that the strikes were an attempt to goad Venezuela into a “major war.”

In a rare interview, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil told CNN last week that the nation is not looking for a military confrontation with the U.S.

“We are not betting on conflict, nor do we want conflict,” Gil told the network.

Another incident late last week, in which the U.S. military “illegally and hostilely” detained another boat off the coast of a Venezuelan island, further intensified relations between the two countries.

In a statement, Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry said that the U.S. was “looking for an incident to justify escalating war in the Caribbean, with the aim of regime change” in Venezuela. It further demanded that the U.S. “immediately cease these actions that endanger security and peace in the Caribbean.”

But the White House is apparently not looking to deescalate the situation. Instead, Trump and Vance have openly boasted about the unconstitutional killings. On Monday, Trump publicized that the second attack was on his orders, while promising to continue the “hunt,” and Vance has claimed that the needless deaths were the “highest and best use of our military.”

When a political commentator noted that killing citizens of another country without due process is a war crime, Vance simply retorted, “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”

Some Republicans back at home, meanwhile, have not been impressed by the aggressive international display. In an interview last week, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul told Fox News that he felt compelled to address the attacks, underscoring that not every ship sailing in the Caribbean is smuggling drugs.

“The reason we board them before we blow the crap out of them is some of them don’t have drugs,” Paul said.

Paul additionally lamented that the Trump administration was involving itself in affairs thousands of miles off U.S. coastlines, and expending federal resources on the lowest echelons of the global drug trade.

Representative Nancy Mace’s crusade against Representative Ilhan Omar has dredged up an old, Islamaphobic rumor.

The pair were going back and forth on X Wednesday, ahead of a scheduled floor debate over Omar’s potential censure, and Mace referred to the Minnesota lawmaker as “Somalia Ilhan Omar.”

“Is your ridiculous censure about me being born in Somalia? Because that’s just as crazy as you are,” wrote Omar.

But then Mace reached for the top shelf to offend her colleague.

“Who knows, maybe it’ll be about you marrying your brother next!” Mace responded. “Tune in!”

MAGA conservatives have rumbled for years—without evidence—that Omar married her brother to bring him into the United States. The conspiracy first emerged during Omar’s 2016 campaign for the Minnesota state legislature, in a since-deleted post on the conservative blog Power Line, where an anonymous source was quoted as saying that Omar’s ex-husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, was related to her by blood.

Omar has vehemently and repeatedly denied the unfounded allegations, which have been disproven by her marriage certificate. At the time, Omar described the insinuation that she had married her brother to be “absurd and offensive.”

But that hasn’t stopped Mace from digging the details back up. Over the last week, Mace has advocated stripping Omar of her committee assignments and censuring her, and has publicly suggested that Omar should be deported back to Somalia for having allegedly “smeared Charlie Kirk and implied he was to blame for his own murder” during an interview with Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan.

Clips from that interview were similarly picked up by far-right personalities, who claimed that Omar had said Kirk deserved to die. But that’s not accurate.

“No one said he deserved to die. Ilhan Omar said the exact opposite to me,” Hasan wrote on X. “She condemned his killing. And she said her heart goes out to Kirk’s widow.”

Omar also pushed back against Mace, arguing that she never made the comments that Mace was attempting to silence her for.

“Her [resolution] does not contain a single quote from me because she couldn’t find any,” Omar said. “Unlike her, I have routinely condemned political violence, no matter the political ideology. This is all an attempt to push a false story so she can fundraise and boost her run for Governor.”

Even other Republicans didn’t appear to galvanize behind Mace’s cause, apparently wiping their hands of the South Carolinian’s vendetta.

“It just seems like every week or so we want to censure somebody for something,” Texas Representative Troy Nehls told Fox News’s Chad Pergram on Tuesday. “A lot of people say a lot of stupid stuff around here.”

Ironically, Mace’s mudslinging comes just days after she insisted that she never bad-mouthed her Democratic colleagues.

The Trump administration has finally managed to make something significantly cheaper for Americans: cocaine.

The Wall Street Journal reported that President Trump has been committing so much manpower to fight dual wars on fentanyl and immigration that he’s opened up a new and fruitful hole in the drug trafficking ecosystem, which Mexican cocaine trafficker Nemesio “Mencho” Oseguera and his Jalisco cartel have filled with record amounts of cocaine in the United States—and at a new low cost.

Record levels of cocaine production in Colombia are driven by the fentanyl crackdown near the border and a significant surge in usage here in the U.S. Now prices for the powder have fallen to $60–$75 per gram, a 25 percent decrease, according to researcher Morgan Godvin. “The price of pure cocaine has plummeted,” he told the Journal.

The 2016 arrest of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s more recent crackdown on his cartel, the Sinaloans, handicapped Mexico’s top fentanyl trafficking cartel. Trump’s overzealous deportation campaign has also pulled officers away from two main fentanyl checkpoints along the southern border.

The U.S. has placed a $15 million bounty on Oseguera.

This news comes as the Trump administration conducted drone strikes on what it claims were two speedboats carrying cocaine and fentanyl from Venezuela in the Caribbean. Trump has made multiple threats of military intervention against cartels, even positing bombing Mexican soil.

Oseguera reportedly transports his product via speedboat, from Colombia and Ecuador to Mexico. As the economy continues to struggle, Americans everywhere can now powder their noses for cheap thanks to Trump.

Bill Cassidy, the moderate Republican senator who helms the Senate Health Committee, gave a feeble reaction to the committee’s Wednesday hearing with fired CDC Director Susan Monarez.

As a physician, Cassidy’s pro-vaccination stance has put him at odds with President Trump’s anti-vax health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Cassidy voted to confirm in February. At a September 4 hearing, for instance, the Louisiana senator questioned how Kennedy could reconcile being staunchly anti-vaccine while heaping praise on his boss’s 2020–21 initiative to develop and distribute Covid-19 vaccines. Kennedy’s answers laid bare his cravenness.

But Cassidy had his own low moment Wednesday. Seemingly keeping his own political future in mind, he remained reticent after Monarez’s testimony.

As he seeks reelection in 2026, Cassidy faces a competitive GOP primary. He is already on the president’s bad side—due to his past criticism of and impeachment vote against Trump—and his chances would worsen if Trump were to publicly oppose him. Before the hearing, a Republican source close to the White House told CNN, “The White House is watching” and that Cassidy could “seal his own fate” with the hearing—“if he hasn’t already”—if it was perceived as too anti-Kennedy.

Perhaps that accounts for Cassidy’s tight-lipped response to the hearing—during which Monarez revealed that RFK Jr. told her to either fire CDC scientists and rubber-stamp recommendations by his overhauled vaccine advisory committee, or resign.

After the damning testimony, CNN congressional correspondent Manu Raju reported on X that he could only eke out the following answer from Cassidy on Monarez’s claims: “I’ll let her speak for herself.” Pressed further on his feelings about the hearing, the senator replied, “What do you think?” before disappearing behind closing elevator doors.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said Wednesday that she doesn’t want Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA to be taken over by Jews.

Using a final message from the late right-wing activist, Greene hit back at Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s claim that Kirk had been an ally of Israel, delivering an antisemitic plea to keep his conservative youth organization in the control of Christians.

“Do not allow a foreign country, foreign agents, and another religion to tell you about Charlie Kirk. And I hope a foreign country and foreign agents and another religion does not take over Christian Patriotic Turning Point USA,” she wrote on X.

Kirk’s message showed that he had offered her an appearance at America Fest 2025 to debate about AIPAC. “Not with me,” he wrote. “No pressure. Well do whatever you want.”

Greene appeared to be claiming that his openness to debate about Israel meant that he wouldn’t be interested in his organization falling into the hands of Jewish people. She also pointed to Tucker Carlson’s claim that Kirk was appalled by Netanyahu’s catastrophic military campaign in Gaza, and Candace Owens’s claim that Kirk had started having “rational thoughts about Israel” before his death, causing a rift with other conservatives.

Greene reminded her followers that Kirk was a “Christian movement leader, a giant in American history,” and a “Christian martyr for Jesus Christ.” There has been widespread speculation that Kirk’s wife, Erika, will take over for her husband as CEO of Turning Point USA.

Last week, the Israeli prime minister appeared on American media to assure its audience Israel had absolutely nothing to do with Charlie Kirk’s death but that some anonymous cabal of Muslims and leftists was behind it.

Dr. Susan Monarez, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention head who was ousted by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., thinks that his upheaval of the CDC will lead to the return of diseases America hasn’t seen in decades, including polio.

“What is your concern? What are the long-term implications for the well-being of our kids and the future of our country if faith in vaccine science is undermined?” Senator Bernie Sanders asked Monarez, who was testifying before the Senate about Kennedy Jr.’s time at HHS.

“I believe preventable diseases will return,” Monarez responded. “And I believe that we will have our children harmed for things that we know they do not need to be harmed by. Polio, measles, diphtheria, whooping cough. I worry about the ramifications for those children, in illness and in death. I worry about our school systems. I worry about our medical institutions having to take care of sick kids that could have been prevented by effective and safe vaccines. I worry about the future of trust in public health.”

This is an absolutely damning response from a former CDC head who said she was pushed out of a job that used to value science and research for reasons that were likely completely political. It’s hard to see Monarez’s firing by Kennedy as purely coincidental, as her extensive research background in immunology and microbiology directly contradicts Kennedy’s pseudoscientific MAHA agenda.

“Would you agree with me in suggesting that the overwhelming body of scientific and medical thought believes that vaccines have been a major public health advance for the people of this world?” Sanders followed up.

“I absolutely agree with that,” Monarez replied.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave Susan Monarez two worrisome ultimatums before she was fired as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Monarez told a Senate committee Wednesday.

On the morning of August 25, Monarez said, Kennedy “demanded two things” of the then director “that were inconsistent with my oath of office and the ethics required of a public official.”

One was “to commit, in advance, to approving every” recommendation by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, “regardless of scientific evidence.” The ACIP, responsible for providing national vaccine guidance, has undergone an upheaval under Kennedy—who has fired all of its members and appointed new ones, including vaccine skeptics, in their place.

Kennedy’s other directive, Monarez said, was “to dismiss career officials responsible for vaccine policy without cause.”

“He said if I was unwilling to do both, I should resign,” Monarez said. When she resisted, Kennedy told her that “he had already spoken with the White House several times about having me removed.”

Monarez’s story Wednesday aligns with the account of former acting CDC Director Richard Besser—a confidant of the former director—who last month said she’d been asked to do “two things she would never do”: “one in terms of firing her leadership” as well as “to rubber-stamp [vaccine] recommendations that flew in the face of science.” It also matches Monarez’s recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, in which she wrote she was “told to preapprove the recommendations of a vaccine advisory panel newly filled with people who have publicly expressed antivaccine rhetoric” on August 25.

Kennedy, for his part, offered his own version of events in a congressional hearing earlier this month. Straining credulity, the health secretary claimed that he directed Monarez to resign because he asked her, “Are you a trustworthy person?” to which she replied, “No.” He has denied Monarez’s claim that she was asked to blindly approve ACIP recommendations, but does not dispute that he told her to fire scientists.