By Jon Bauer / Herald Opinion Editor
Is it just our retirement account website, or are others who go to check their 401(k) balances being redirected to inspiring stories of plucky seniors who have worked into their 90s?
In other more-chutes-than-ladders news this week:
Trading insults: Elon Musk and President Trump’s top trade adviser Peter Navarro are at odds over the administration’s tariffs that touched off a trade war and roiled financial markets. Navarro, responding to criticism called Musk a “car assembler” rather than a “car manufacturer,” because Teslas rely on parts and assemblies from around the world. Musk responded by calling Navarro a “moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks,” later adding the zinger, “That was so unfair to bricks.”
Car assembler? Sack of bricks? American manufacturing really has lost a step if these are the best insults that American know-how can fabricate. No surprise if Americans are willing to pay higher prices for a well-made and affordable Chinese put-down.
Past performance is not a guarantee of future results: It’s estimated that Musk has lost about $31 billion of market value since the tariffs were announced on April 2.
Musk, Special Government Employee™ and Richest Man in the World (At Least for the Time Being)™, should have listened when we warned him not to put everything into $TRUMP and $MELANIA memecoins.
Thanks, Joe: The tariffs may also interfere with President Trump’s plan to increase drilling of oil and American energy production. Market turmoil has started to drive down the price of oil to about $60 a barrel, making oil exploration and start-up of drilling operations less lucrative for U.S. oil companies.
Fox News, keyed to the interference of “green energy” goals with Trump’s agenda, immediately blamed the Biden administration for its destructive tariff policies, prompting President Trump to sign an executive order rolling back last week’s tariffs that Biden sneaked in and signed with his autopen.
The Art of the Cave: Noting that people were getting “a bit yippy,” President Trump on Wednesday announced he would pause all but 10 percent of his global tariffs for 90 days, while at the same time increasing the tariffs on China to 125 percent. After struggling for more than a week to explain the purpose of the tariffs, Trump’s economic team, specifically Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, insisted the imposition then pause of high tariffs was “his strategy all along,” adding: “No one creates leverage for himself like President Trump.”
Pushing global markets — and retirement accounts — into a $10 trillion hole of equity value would tend to “create leverage”; when you’re not the one in the hole.
Speaking of going down the drain: In other momentous action this week, President Trump signed an executive order that directs the Department of Energy to rescind regulations — first put in place by President Obama, rescinded by Trump, then rescinded by Biden — that limits the amount of water that flows from shower heads to no more than 2.5 gallons a minute. The low flow of water from shower heads was a common riff during Trump’s campaign rallies. “No longer will shower heads be weak and worthless,” the White House said in a press release.
Nope, the showers are fine now; it’s your 401(k) that’s weak and worthless.
AP cannonballs back into the press pool: A judge has ordered the White House to lift a ban on Associated Press reporters’ access to the Oval Office, Air Force One and other official White House events that the Trump administration imposed after the press organization and its widely used stylebook declined to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, as President Trump had decreed. The judge has given the White House a week to comply.
In response, President Trump signed an executive order that makes changes to the Gregorian calendar; the next 45 months will be called “a week.”
Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” must have already been checked out: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ordered the removal of 381 books from the U.S. Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library at Annapolis, Md., because the books’ subject matter was seen as related to issues of diversity, equity and inclusion. On the list are Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to be an Antiracist” and “Horse” by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks, a novel about an enslaved groom training a racehorse in 1850s Kentucky.
Not wanting to risk the slightest exposure of the naval academy’s students to dangerous ideas, a team of Navy SEALs — equipped with special vision-obscuring goggles — stormed the library and neutralized and contained the books before placing them on a flight to Guantanamo Bay for extraordinary rendition and waterboarding. Sadly, one of the SEALs began exhibiting symptoms or “wokeness” after carelessly reading a dust-jacket blurb from the Angelou book. He has been quarantined and will be treated with a stream of Joe Rogan podcasts.
Email Jon Bauer at jon.bauer@heraldnet.com. Follow him on BlueSky at @jontbauer.bsky.social.
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