THE SET-UP: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent looked and sounded completely overmatched today during his product launch presser for the latest re-brand of the Iran War.
Now he gets the honor of wearing the burning tire around his neck.
That said, he’ll probably do a better job of communicating than the hormonally-obsessed Hegseth … although Hegseth’s orgasmic celebration of kinetic force did set the bar awfully low. It’s no accident that Hegseth hasn’t held a presser since the first week of May. But now Trump’s turning to the man who convinced him that the early stages of the current tech bubble was actually sparked by Wall Street’s alleged belief that Trump would win the 2024 election. Therefore, Bessent told Trump (according to a tale Trump told daily on the stump), the stock market’s rise during Biden was Trump’s accomplishment.
In other words, Bessent is a salesman.
America’s “top bond salesman,” said Bessent when he launched his widely panned bond buyback. He was not nearly as confident in his new role as the face of Trump’s failing war. His dry mouth and quavering voice announced the start of “economic D-Day” with a nervousness that shows he knows he’s out of his depth.
Just how deeply he’s in it came through loudly and clearly when he blurted out an unintentional admission to a probing question about decision to announce the sanctions without implementing them:
"Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?"
Why indeed?
Why would Bessent entertain any approach that runs the risk of blowing up the global financial system? That he said it at all seems like he’s tipping his hand and, if Trump’s track record is any indication, it may be just another threat … a bluff … one that Iran quickly laughed off and one that didn’t seem to affect Wall Street.
The reality, though, is that this new-ish strategy—inartfully dubbed Operation Economic Outcast—is more like a surrender than an escalation. It’s a rather explicit admission that the military campaign has failed. Hegseth shot America’s wad, supplies are thin, sailors are suffering and the war is a political disaster. Trump no doubt sees this as way out of the military campaign … one that he can sustain through the midterms.
But therein lies the rub.
Bessent can try to coyly shift the Iran War away from kinetic action and into a post-war version of the sanctions regime that was in place when Trump started his deadly misadventure started, but that political battle is already lost. The war is a sunk cost that’s not nearly as pressing as the issue of affordability … or data centers. The two are intertwined, in fact, with the preferences Trump’s given Silicon Valley looming as a damning example of wealthy oligarchs buying favoritism from Trump while ignoring the concerns of the American people.
It’s all made worse by the mounting evidence that those favors often translate into higher utility bills for wage earning Americans. And it’s all underscored by his renewed trade war with Canada, which means he’s currently got America fighting two costly economic wars of choice.
Meanwhile, millions of Americans have and will continue to lose SNAP food assistance, and millions more are facing the end of Medicaid coverage. In effect, they are and have been fighting an economic war here at home. Wasn’t that a major reason why Trump was elected? - jp
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