Man-Baby Gains Control of US Economy: Unimposes Tariffs, Bounces Markets, Creates Mass Upheaval

In a move that baffles experts, the wealthy, and just about everyone with a pulse, Trump is abusing his power to create needless chaos.

Just about everyone I know who even dipped their toe into the news ecosystem yesterday was exhausted from living through the chaos of Trump’s second major “reinstatement” of tariffs for Canada and Mexico, specifically for USMCA-manufactured products. It was a day of economic and political kneejerk, arguably aggravating the stock market instability that’s brewing under the surface.

For many Americans, the on-again, off-again approach caused negative sentiment toward the Trump regime. The White House seemed to be playing quite seriously with Canada and Mexico over items that consumers in the states buy, use, and replace with relative frequency: cars, light-duty trucks, appliances, grocery produce, imported frozen foods, and much more. Price spikes on these items are likely to directly influence inflation, which is estimated at 2.8-3.3%.

Data: The Fountain of Truth

To dive into some necessary statistics, we’ll go to the source. This morning, according to the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the news on labor and unemployment was released, showing a small rate drop. The Consumer Price Index, which is widely used as a benchmark for inflation, rose to 0.5%, and year over year rose 3.0%. These effects have added to the cost of everything consumers pay for, from groceries to automobiles. The behavior sharply contrasts the president’s campaign rhetoric, indicating he’d bring inflation, including grocery prices, down. There have since been no direct statements from the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on the inflation uptick in the past month.

Unemployment numbers came out early this morning, showing unemployment at 4.0% aggregate, with 143,000 jobs added in January. This information will likely impact a few specific stocks as early as today.

Stock prices rebounded slightly yesterday after Trump announced that the US would hold off on imposing across-the-board tariffs on Canada and Mexico, limiting them to only items not sold under the USMCA agreement (which replaces NAFTA). This drastically reduces the scope of tariffs but doesn’t eliminate them entirely. The tariffs will still apply to goods such as clothing, electronics, and cars with less than 75% regional content, including car parts used by repair shops and consumers nationwide.

Tariff Whiplash

The whipsaw effect, including its effect on stocks, is the most publicly visible. To give you a sense of the NASDAQ, this closing-bell visual from finviz.com tells a compelling story about the major stocks and their closing prices at the bell yesterday:

Consumers are struggling with the complex dynamics of the stock market and short-term company reactions to tariffs, further compounded by corporate forecasting of product demand. This tangled web is becoming more difficult for the average consumer to make seemingly common-sense conclusions. This lack of certainty spills over into consumer confidence, which, while a good measure companies use to forecast demand, is a “soft statistic.” That means the higher the tension, the more the cycle feeds on itself, worsening the situation.

So, if you’re confused by now, you are not alone. The total system of inputs and outputs, and the connections between them, is complicated and becomes infinitely more difficult to predict when multiple strong forces push on systems and humans economically, politically, and emotionally.

Economic Uncertainty on the Rise

I titled this article starting with “Man-Baby.” That is accurate, because Trump’s reactionary, daily changes across so many areas are devastating to people’s livelihoods (and have likely not shown yet in the unemployment numbers just released). It’s the bitter reality pill we must swallow to get over what appears to be happening and studying it from a more clinically detached perspective. It’s the recommended way to achieve personal sanity when watching this unfold in waves day after day.

In that view, many people rush to point to Project 2025’s agenda and call out the 1:1 relationship between executive orders issued by Trump and line items in the P2025 manifesto. There is no suspense about the content for those who’ve read the 900-page document or one of the many online summaries available. I think, on the contrary, there is another dominant factor in play which is highly relevant.

In my estimation, there’s a deeply polar opposite bubble reading of the current situation, one in which conservatives, republicans, and radical Christians are viewing all of the noise quite differently than progressives. It takes almost no effort to get on X/twitter, now that it is almost exclusively controlled by conservative echo chambers, and see that the discourse remains an angry one towards liberals and Democrats. They are seen as the source of the problem, predating Trump’s first term in some cases, and therefore the target of blame, often citing Trump as the “savior” by cleaning up a big mess that Democrats created.

They don’t care in the least about Executive Branch overreach or, at least not yet, any of the services potentially being disrupted, including Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid due to job and funding freezes. In the short term, the “trickle-down” of lost services, which is inevitable due to cutting the federal workforce to significantly lower costs, has not yet been widely felt.

It is frankly impossible for these federally funded, congressionally approved entities to deliver the services they are legally required to provide, with a fraction of the staff they used to have.

That is how we get to Man-Baby: A human operating on near-infant instincts, with his handlers allowing him to inflict near-immediate chaos that permeates across the world. As I wrote about in my previous article, those instincts have incited a trade war that’s impossible to justify. When you strip away any remaining veneer surrounding the creature in the Oval Office, you can only see someone with the impulsivity of a baby crawling to a ledge, with no adult present to grab and stop him.

Interlude: Real Life Stories

Fortunately for us, there’s a ready-made, EZ-bake copy of the Trump regime’s actions in the annals of somewhat recent history. For those of you who were possibly not alive when this happened, I want to share a quick analog to Trump and Musk’s behavior regarding this mission to find “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

I lived through the 1990’s when a guy named Al Dunlap, or as he was affectionately known (in circles made of demonically possessed executives) “Chainsaw Al,” tore through several companies on a mission. Al’s notable career started at Crown Zellerbach in 1986, where he sold the headquarters for $57 million and closed a whole boatload of distribution centers, streamlining 19 buildings worth of people out of existence. He went on to repeat this playbook at a number of other corporations, until he landed at Sunbeam in 1996.

Trump and Musk have a scary, upside-down view of how to cut government waste that’s eerily similar to Chainsaw Al’s approach. When he got to Sunbeam, he was faced with the usual problem of declining profits and sales. The board of directors there was super-happy to see Al, and Al was happy to begin chopping away with his chainsaw. (Does the picture of Musk holding his chrome-plated chainsaw at CPAC come to mind? It does with me.)

And from there, Al started on his mission to cut waste, fraud, and abuse.

How that mission was accomplished depended on your point of view and, in the long run, on a judge's perspective. To Good Ol’ Al, it was a “mandate,” just like Trump says he has from voters, but Trump’s “mandate” is a little hard to sell because his actual voter margins were razor thin.

Al Dunlap was a heat-seeking missile of a CEO, just like Elon cosplays in his role at DOGE. (Officially, he barely exists, especially on paper.) To put a point on it, Sunbeam’s shares initially rose 50% on the announcement of his hiring. Shortly after, Sunbeam reported record earnings of $189 million and, in March of ’88, acquired Coleman Company, Signature Brands, and First Alert, pushing the stock price through the roof to $52 per share within two days. On paper, Sunbeam shareholders got rich very quickly.

The problem was that it was all Performance Art, not reality. In the reality where Judges and Courts exist, Al Dunlap engaged in some extremely shady accounting to boost Sunbeam’s reported sales. Those practices led to overstocked retailers and unsold inventory, resulting in losses of $80 million in 1998.

Good ol’ Chainsaw Al was also complicit in asking the board to contribute its own money, who were arguably unaware of his swing to the dark side. No board, any executive will tell you, wants to put their own money at risk. Fortunately, shortly after, the board discovered the shady accounting practices during routine auditing and summarily fired Mr. Dunlap in June 1998. Sunbeam never recovered and filed for bankruptcy in 2000.

The story's moral was, and is, if it sounds too good to be true for the bottom line, it probably is.

We have yet to see one shred of evidence that has been independently confirmed by a third party auditor regarding DOGE’s efforts. Nada. Zip. Zilch. So, just like Al Dunlap, there is nothing stopping the over-zealous fox-children Elon has at his beck and call from getting into the proverbial henhouse and committing mass murder of the fiscal chickens.

Given the boastfulness of the claims on Musk’s “Wall of Receipts,” there’s no reason not to have an independent auditor come in and verify it’s all “for real”. Many groups have already called out Trump and Musk’s claims about the veracity of this “wall,” stating that many of the contracts listed expired long ago. It doesn’t count when you do time travel in your accounting, Elonia.

Republican Tax Bill

In addition, the Republican House passed a budget resolution in late February, setting the stage for a tax bill extending the ultra-wealthy tax cuts, which expire at the end of this year. The bill purports to cut $4.5 trillion in spending and $2 trillion in additional spending reductions over 10 years.

The House Ways and Means committee was ordered to draft the legislation, including the tax cuts. Other committees are focused on finding the desired savings to pass on to the wealthy in their respective budget areas.

Other notable directives in the bill that passed for committees in Congress on the 2/25/2025 were:

· The Energy and Commerce committee needs to find $880 billion, which can only come from the programs it controls, which have that kind of cash: Medicare and Medicaid.

· The Education and Workforce Committee is tasked with finding $330 billion that will impact the Department of Education and Workforce Development programs.

· The Agriculture Committee is seeking $230 billion, which will likely impact farm subsidies and the SNAP program. These programs ensure food security for many Americans, many in deeply red states.

To no one’s surprise, this has caused a backlash among voters from both parties. The backlash has been so intense that Republicans are scrambling to find ways to avoid their constituents, which isn’t working out for them yet.

The budget resolution passed by a razor thin majority vote of 217 to 215. Democrats are finally finding their sea legs and standing up against the Republicans against this bill that will have career-ending consequences for many of them if cuts are made to key programs like SNAP and Medicaid. Ironically, voters in deep red states have become the biggest beneficiaries of these entitlement programs.

Low Information Voters (LIVs)

I’ll close today by honing in on a term that I see more and more, perhaps just coincidentally, in almost every media channel. The idea of a “low information voter” is actually a euphemism for a few possible things. The first is “a redneck ignorant hillbilly from somewhere down south.” No shame; it just means they’re likely to be less exposed and engaged with opposing opinions of issues. Sometimes it’s applied to city-folk as well. In that setting it’s a stand-in for something much more polite, the single white mother working two jobs to feed her family.

I’ve keyed in on this at the close of my message today, because it’s apparent that LIVs are getting limited news, or partial coverage of news, from outlets that serve both Conservative and Progressive channels – X and Reddit, to name two. Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok are all full of half-truth perspectives that LIVs end up seeing.

This ties off with my article title, essentially calling Trump a baby acting dangerously. The conservative side doesn’t see it that way, and I doubt they will until it literally takes a chunk out of their checking account every payday. The problem with the Republican tax bill isn’t just for left-wing voters. If and when it is allowed to see the light of day, there will be active resistance to its implications coming from Conservative media outlets. Those LIVs will know it when it hits them.

This creates an obvious problem: How do we endeavor, as people who are deeply engaged with the news every day, to ensure we are speaking to people on both sides of important issues—whether they be tariffs, the stock market, or economics? We don’t have the luxury of appearing to condescend into these areas where LIVs exist and are key to keeping our basic democracy intact.

That’s really what’s at stake here – I’m speaking plainly about it. On one front, we are witnessing the dismissal or impending firing of people who carry decades of civil service in their heads, who are not going home with a parting prize of enough money to start their own business or begin a new career. On the other front, we have actions happening in the stock market with repercussions that could last longer than a few decades.

In 2026, even if Democrats reclaim the House, and somehow force through a resolution to restore the pieces of government being stripped away, we will not get the best people back in the positions that were fired now. It is gone.

That’s why I’m asking for your advice in closing. I can appeal to every media outlet for coverage on content targeted to underserved groups—conservatives or progressives. What message do you think we owe people on “the other side” of the issues? I’d appreciate your thoughts in the comments.

As I always say, please mind your mental health. Unplug from this social media for at least a few hours each day. Keep your engagement time on a fixed schedule. Only you can care for yourself in the best way possible, so I gently remind you to consider your needs.

Be well.

Rick Herbst

March 7, 2025