Kevin Drum

Being the revenge president goes two ways. First, you have to screw your enemies. Second, you have to make sure your friends have impunity to break the law. After two weeks, here is Donald Trump's scorecard:

1. Dropped prosecution of former Republican Rep. Jeff Fortenberry for lying to the FBI.
2. Dropped charges against his pals in crime, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, Trump aides who helped him cover up his theft of classified documents.
3. Ordered the firing of all DOJ prosecutors associated with the documents case.
4. Pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, who founded an organization for large-scale drug trafficking and spent nearly a million dollars paying for the murder of five enemies.
5. Dropped the investigation of Republican Rep. Andy Ogles over campaign fraud.
6. Placed dozens of USAID workers on immediate leave over unspecified "insubordination" issues.
7. Ordered DOJ to fire prosecutors involved in January 6 cases and ordered the FBI to "scrutinize" hundreds of agents who were involved in the prosecutions, in preparation for a possible purge.
8. Demanded "details" about FBI employees involved in a case against a Hamas terrorist involved in taking Americans hostage on October 7.
9. Pardoned or commuted the sentences of everyone involved in the January 6 insurrection, including rioters convicted of assaulting police officers.
10. Pardoned two DC police officers convicted of covering up their role in the death of a man they chased at high speeds because he was driving a moped without a helmet.

Am I missing anything?

I know I have to let this stuff go. Life is too short. But but but....

Is this a joke? That's a picture of a creek somewhere, not a part of the Central Valley Project that supplies about 5 million acre-feet of water to California farms annually. Here's what that looks like:

That's Shasta Dam, one small part of the Central Valley project. Behind it is Shasta Reservoir, which stores about 4.5 million acre-feet of water. Like all of California's reservoirs, it's currently at capacity. It was never turned off and Trump didn't turn it back on.

Tomorrow morning around 6 am I expect a Truth Social post announcing that Trump has turned the sun on and soon everyone will have daylight.

POSTSCRIPT: But seriously, who is this for? Does Trump these days think that if he says something it magically becomes true? What's the point?

ZOMG! He actually did it. Trump ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to release water from Terminus Dam and Schafer Dam:

It was not clear where federal officials intended to send the water that was being released from the dams.

Winter is the season for filling reservoirs, not emptying them. Idiot. Literally no one wanted this.

I'm running out of archival cat pictures and I'm not at home where I can take more. Luckily I have one left of Hilbert, so catblogging continues this week even in the face of Influenza A.

Now fess up. Could you resist burying your hands in that vast, furry tummy?

Our final PCE inflation reading of 2024 is a mixed bag:

Headline PCE is higher than we'd like, but core PCE is below 2%, right where we want it.

The old fashioned year-over-year measurement, which you shouldn't care about except that everyone else does, was 2.6% for headline PCE and 2.8% for core PCE. Not bad.

Do budget deficits cause inflation? It's been years since I've done one of these, so take a gander:

Cases where the deficit increased and so did inflation: Once, around 1974-76.

Cases where it didn't: Six times. In 1951 the budget deficit went below zero but inflation spiked. 1957: Ditto. 1968-74: the budget deficit puttered along around ~2% but inflation rose steadily. 1982-86: Reagan spikes the deficit while inflation plunges. 1991-2008: The deficit goes up, down, up, then down again while inflation hovers around 2-3% the whole time. 2009: The budget deficit skyrockets while inflation drops below zero.

One (1) special case: In 2020, the deficit exploded like never before and the pandemic constrained supply. This did indeed produce a two-year inflationary surge. It also rescued the economy.

The real answer, of course, is that deficits don't usually cause inflation during recessions (1982, 2008). They just help put people back to work. But deficits can cause inflation if the economy is already running strong (1968) or people can't go back to work (2020).

I know this is Trump, so the answer is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. But over the past two weeks his wrath has been aimed at Denmark, Colombia, and now Canada and Mexico—all of them among our staunchest allies. You could hardly pick a group of better friends to the US than these.

On a concrete basis, Denmark has agreed to increase its defense spending to 2%, meeting a Trump demand. Colombia has been accepting US deportation flights for years. Mexico has agreed to reinstate Trump's beloved Remain in Mexico policy. And Canada has been cooperating on the fentanyl front even though nobody thinks there's very much it can do. The United States simply doesn't have any big gripes against any of these countries.

Shouldn't Trump try to pick on at least a few countries that we don't actually like very much? Why the focus on longtime friends and allies?

This is the Maria Therese chapel at Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna. I wasn't supposed to be where I was to take this picture, but there was no one around to tsktsk me and what's the harm? But it does show that you have to keep an eye on photographers every second or they'll just ramble all over the place.

Yesterday brought news that NAEP test scores had dropped yet again. If you disaggregate by race here's what they look like:

First look at the green bars. They're for 2024 and they show only a minuscule one-point drop—except for Hispanics, who dropped a full six points. They account for almost the entire overall drop.

Why? Who knows. But this kind of thing is weirdly common. In 2022, for example, there was hardly any drop except among white kids. There have been other recent years where only Black kids fell.

I don't have any point to make here, and this is just one set of results (NAEP also released math scores and 4th grade scores). But overall, the entire last ten years have been pretty grim. Test scores have dropped substantially for everyone except Asians, and most of the drop had nothing to do with the pandemic. If NAEP scores are accurately reflecting actual outcomes, we've lost roughly a full grade level in a single decade.

The Atlanta Fed, at the last second, turned out to be spot on:

Not too hot, not too cold. For now it's a Goldilocks economy.

For the last few weeks the Atlanta Fed has been forecasting nice, healthy GDP growth of 3% or more for the final quarter of 2024. Then their algorithm suddenly got the heebie-jeebies and they're now forecasting growth of only 2.3%:

Tune in tomorrow for the actual answer!