Where to start on a week like this

To kick off, I seem to have a slew of new ORGANIC subscribers. That is people who have just clicked on the "Subscribe" button, and were not moved over from Substack. That feels good.

So, welcome to the madness. Hopefully you read the introduction email you get on subscribing and that didn't frighten you away.

As a side note, about once a month, I go to Substack and manually move people over here since I haven't posted anything serious there since July 2025 or so.

What a week

I remember listening to The Bulwark podcast whilst walking my dog on December 31 (I think that was the date of publication), and it was hopeful that Trump had done all the badness that he could, and that going into the midterms, where all common wisdom was that Trump's ability to inflict damage was "over". Reminds me of this clip:

Oh, how fucking naive they were.

Januay 3, we arrest Maduro and kill 80+ Venezuelans, ICE descends on Minneapolis to punish the Somali community and shoots Renee Nicole Good in the face, Trump hosts a roundtable of oil executives that pretty much tell him to pound sand on their investing tens to hundreds of billions in Venezuela, Trump sells the first $500M of Venezuelan oil and deposits the receipts in a Qatari bank, and then he had the temerity to have the DoJ serve the Fed with Grand Jury subpoenas that they are investigating the Fed chair, Jerome Powell, for fraud in the renovation of the Fed buildings.

Oh, and he first threatened the leaders of Iran to not be violent to the peace loving protesters in Iran, while his ICE thugs are escalating the chaos in Minneapolis.

But, today, I am going to focus on the threat at the Fed. Buckle up, it's an interesting story.

Why now?

Jerome Powell's term expires in May, and he will be replaced with a limp jizz rag that will do whatever Trump wants. That is like 4 months from now, why is Trump so anxious to accelerate that change?

That is one thing I hear a LOT from the punditocracy, and I swear they usually have something like "poor impulse control" or "impatience". And sure Trump really fucking wants Powell replaced with someone who will usher back in the ZIRP regime of monetary policy.

But 4 months, what difference will it make? I mean that's an instant in the grand scheme of things ... RIGHT?

But it isn't an instant. If you've been paying attention to the economy and what the administration's cabinet cake-flaps have been saying (Bessent, Lutnick, Rollings) that the economy is great, prices are coming down, that people need to stop believe their lying eyes, and that in the first 6 months of 2026 were gonna be FIRE.

It's the "Just trust us Bro" approach, but the people are not fooled. Case in point, I wanted some Ruffles Cheddar and Sour Cream chips, so I tossed a 12 oz package in my cart and moved on. Sue me, its a rare indulgence.

Anyhow, I opened them and then were enjoying them when I glanced at the freshness/price stamp on the satchel, and the next thing I knew I had paramedics standing over me with defib paddles...[1]

The price of this less than one pound bag of flavored potato chips was $7.29. I checked the receipt to see if maybe that was a mistake, and nope, it was $7.29 for 12 ounces.

That is sixty one cents per ounce. Bonkers...

So, no, the public knows that they're lyin' about inflation and the cost of things.

And it isn't going to be magically better in the first half of this year, when voters begin tuning in, and making up their minds about who to blame for the homeless abortion that is their grocery bill, their electricity and gas bills, and they are going to blame Trump and the Republicans.

The only way they can even hope to address this is to make it essentially free to borrow money, and that means setting the Fed overnight rates to just about 0%.

And that happening in June with the new Fed chair forcing through massive rate cuts will not save the Republicans.

They need that juice to the economy now.

So, the DoJ goes for the jugular, and is threatening Powell over some ridiculous pretext of cost overruns of a refurbishment of buildings that are over 100 years old and on the cultural preservation registry.

As if Trump's construction projects never went over budget. Gimme a fuckin' break.

Powell's response

The miscalculation of the administration has been breathtaking.

First, they dropped the notification of the serving of the subpoenas on Friday afternoon, where they usually put things they expect to land like a turd in a punchbowl.

Second, they assumed that the Fed chair would hew to the hesitancy of speaking out in public. It's likely they expected him to quietly announce that he would be leaving the chairmanship early to avoid the 'scandal', thus paving the way for a hand-picked Trumpian plant (the betting line is that it is between two 'Kevin's, Bessent or Walsh) to swoop in and do Trump's bidding.

But, unlike Christopher Wray, the former director of the FBI who stepped down before Trump's inauguration to make way for Ka$h Patel to step in, Powell did probably the most uncomfortable thing he has ever had to do in his life. He took to the somber dais at the Federal Reserve briefing room, and recorded a 1:55 message that was clearly not something Powell is comfortable with, and just called Trump and the DoJ out for doing what they plainly wanted to do.

As I mentioned, this is less than two minutes, and if you haven't watched this, I highly recommend playing it:

In this, he defanged the DoJ, and put the administration on defense. But what this also did was to assure the markets that were going to sell off biggly last Monday because of this fuckery, and they remained calm.

This isn't over yet, but clearly Trump has once again TACO'd, and I am going to give kudos to Jerome Powell, and the PR team at the Federal Reserve. They played this masterfully, and that is why your 401k's didn't shit the bed this week.

That might be coming, but Trump likely will have to wait until his term is up to change the guard, and that will leave not much time to pour gasoline on the fire that the economy is.

That's all for now

Alas, with so much fuckery, so much shitty things happening, and even Anne Applebaum thinking it is better than 50% odds that we go to war to seize Greenland, and we still have a tiny, obfuscated, fraction of the Epstein files, it is going to be a long slog.

Oh, and I woke up to a carrier group being moved from the South China Sea to being positioned for strikes on Iran...

And fuck you to Tim Miller of the Bulwark for your "Trump has done the worst of his damage" on the last podcast of the year. You fucking jinxed it.

Keep the faith, do what you can, support where you are able, and never give up, never surrender.

1 - not really