Trump's Knees Are Buckling - For Good Reason

Indivisible's Ezra Levin joins us for a No Kings preview at 2pm ET today

Indivisible’s Ezra Levin is coming by today at 2pm ET to give us a preview of the next No Kings events on March 28th. You can join us live by clicking here and expect a recording to be sent later this afternoon. Excited for this one!

Morning all. Yesterday, in the midst of his bumbling, incoherence, and repeated lying about everything Trump signaled retreat, claiming the war had been won and would soon come to an end. As I wrote yesterday this was both the likely scenario and the most welcome - for “the war” had gone to shit for him in every way imaginable, and we need to get out.

Here’s the homepage of the Financial Times right now:

In the last few months Trump has become something like a comic book character running around a town manically trying to steal everything he can get his hands on. Sometimes he gets away with it. Other times he gets repelled. But he just keeps going for his blood lust for power, money, acquiring things has become all that matters. Not the welfare of the nation, or the American people. Just pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth 24/7/365.

Maintaining power means preventing Democrats from taking possession of either House of Congress next January. Part of why we are seeing his knees buckle now is because this ridiculous war has made winning the elections through conventional means far harder. For whatever happens in the coming days Trump has done enormous damage to an American economy that was already weakened and heading towards recession, higher inflation, and worsening deficits - a vicious and ugly cycle; and thus is in the process of doing even more damage to the GOP’s already deteriorating election prospects.

Let’s review some data, data the knee buckling team in the White House has been looking at these past few days.

Here’s the Fed’s favorite measure, PCE. The inflationary impact of the tariffs is very evident here:

Here’s PPI. The trend line is ugly!!!!!!

Tomorrow we get third of the US government’s major inflation reports, the Consumer Price Index, and it is likely to also be an ugly one for Team Trump.

As all of this inflation data was collected before gas prices have spiked it is fair to say Trump has literally thrown gasoline on the inflation fire. Here’s this morning data on gas prices in the US:

While oil did fall back from a pre-knees buckling peak yesterday, it is still 25-30% higher than where it was a few weeks ago, and higher this morning than last night:

Not only did Trump get very bad inflation readings in recent days he also got a bad q4 GDP number, and ended 2025 with the slowest year of growth since the last time he was President:

Our addled leader also got a disastrous jobs report last Friday - the US LOST 92,000 jobs last month, and we’ve now lost jobs in 5 of the last 9 months:

The Supreme Court’s striking down of his tariffs also took a significant source of revenue away from Trump, further weakening our already deteriorating fiscal condition from Trump’s unaffordable tax cuts (bigger deficits = higher interest rates = slower economy = even bigger deficits = vicious cycle):

Not surprisingly the American people are not happy with Trump, his war, his inflation, and his worsening economy. Consumer sentiment from the U of Michigan consumer sentiment survey is hovering around its lowest reading in 65 years (!!!!):

The NYT has this nifty bit of data on its front page right now (yes Trump is a titanic fuck up):

Trump’s standing with the public was already very low, in a dangerous place for him and his party in the mid-terms. The likely scenario is that as these new prices hikes ripple through the economy and the economy slows further his degraded standing will erode even more. We should be getting a lot of public polling in the coming days but the daily Civiqs track out fresh this morning is a bad omen for the knee buckling crowd - Trump’s job approval hits -20 for the first time this term:

Given what was happening to the American economy - job loss, rising inflation, deteriorating fiscal condition - Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran looks even more reckless, ill-considered, unhinged, and Epstein desperate. Seriously, what the f-ck were they thinking? What’s happening with oil/gas prices and the global slowdown that has begun was always the LIKELY SCENARIO. Whether our addled leader understood this, didn’t care, or believed that his shock and awe would cower the Iranians into immediate surrender is hard to know. But here we are now - and things are likely to get even worse for the economy, his party and for the perception of the strength of his leadership here and around the world.

Perhaps anticipating all this yesterday a Republican Congressman, Rep. Kevin Kiley, left the GOP and became an independent, shrinking Johnson’s conference to 217, below the 218 required for a majority. This has only happened a few times in American history:

Shambolic shitshow. Operation Epic Fail. The Third Republican Gulf War. Whatever we are going to call this thing it needs to end as soon as possible. And we need to be very, very loud today and demand that Congress do its job and work to rein in the Epstein desperate, reckless, and dangerous man currently in charge of our country; and begin the long and difficult process of cleaning up the historic mess he is leaving the American people.

For space reasons our daily projects can be found here. Lots to do everyone!

Keep working hard all. We have a mighty nation to save, and important elections to win this November - Simon