Trump's Affordability FUBAR

Plus: China First?

Dec 11, 2025

Taps the mic. Really, you are not the crazy ones.

But let’s try to catch up a bit:

Apparently, we’re pirates now. The U.S. seizes a tanker off the coast of Venezuela. And the winner of the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize threatens the president of Colombia that “he’s going to be next”.
Grounding Pete? “Defense policy bill includes provision limiting defense secretary’s travel budget unless unedited boat strike video is released.”
Just in time for the World Cup. “U.S. Plans to Scrutinize 5 Years of Social Media History for Foreign Tourists” - The New York Times
Travelers visiting the United States from countries like Britain, France, Germany and South Korea could soon have to undergo a review of up to five years of their social media history, according to a proposal filed on Tuesday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
RFK Jr. is Making Measles Great Again. “South Carolina measles outbreak worsens, with hundreds in quarantine” - The Washington Post
Meanwhile, Trump tightens his embrace of friendly oligarchs and their Arab paymasters who want to take over major networks, including CNN; accelerates his surrender of Ukraine to his dom, Vlad; and hands China a stunning and dangerous gift.

Happy Thursday. A note to readers:

If your find all of this discombobulating, you are not alone. It’s disorienting: this mixture of absurdist buffoonery and obscene lawlessness. Trump is both ridiculous and deeply dangerous. The president may have the mentality of an 8- year-old (which can be hilarious), but his peculiar kink is brutality, with a side of snuff videos. The world’s most ludicrous man is also its most malevolent. So some days, it’s hard to decide whether to laugh at the cartoonishness or set our hair on fire over the outrages.

But we have to keep our balance and our wits and that’s what we try to do here every day. But I can’t do this without you — we few, we happy few, we band of brothers and sisters standing athwart the madness, saying “You can’t be serious!” Please consider joining us.

Trump’s Affordability Botch

How is Trump’s pivot on “affordability” going? You might as well ask the passengers on the Hindenburg whether the hors d'oeuvres were tasty.

Indeed, if Republican midterm hopes rest on his come-to-Jesus pivot on the issue, they ought to realize that they are well and truly fuqqed.

Consider what we saw this week, when he left his Golden Tower of Fluffery to mix with the unwashed in Pennsylvania. We were told this was the moment he would get in touch with the pain of the proles.

Instead, what we got was a master class in tone deafness.

Trump, who recently gave himself an A++++++++++ grade on the economy repeatedly mocked the word “affordability,” which he has dismissed as a hoax. Via the Wapo: “What was supposed to be a speaking tour to connect with Americans struggling with higher prices and stagnant wages was instead a greatest-hits campaign speech.”

His greatest hits included his bit of Marie Antoinette let-them-eat-cake cosplaying. The man who is building himself a golden ballroom told the proles they didn’t need more stuff like pencils and dolls. Really.

“You know, you can give up certain products. You can give up pencils,” he said, suggesting that he was focused on promoting American-made steel while China was focused on providing multiple pencils to its citizens.
“You always need steel. You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter,” he said. “Two or three is nice, but you don’t need 37 dolls. So, we’re doing things right. We’re running this country right well.”

FFS.

Politico’s Playbook rounds out the fiasco:

More broadly, Trump made clear his lack of conviction in the whole premise — mocking the word “affordability,” mocking his own price charts, mocking his pre-prepared speech — and admitting he was only on tour at the urging of chief of staff Susie Wiles.
And Trump strayed way off topic, revealing his team had asked him not to discuss the border — before doing exactly that.
In one of several long passages on immigration, Trump launched his most vitriolic attack yet on America’s Somalian community, describing their homeland as “filthy, dirty, disgusting” and wondering why the U.S. couldn’t take migrants from Scandinavia instead….
In the same breath, Trump confirmed 2018 reports — denied at the time — that he’d described certain African and Asian nations as “shithole countries.”

What he didn’t talk about was his plan to lower medical costs. Because he doesn’t have one.

We know that Trump has infinite confidence in his ability to bend reality to his whim. But actually there are some limits.

“In early December, half of Americans say they were worse off financially than a year ago,” said Claudia Sahm, chief economist at the investment management firm New Century Advisors. “That’s not the White House crushing it; that’s people getting crushed.”

Polls show that Americans feel worse about the economy now than when President Joe Biden was in office and that a majority of voters blame Trump for it.

And the hits just keep on coming:

Only 31% of U.S. adults now approve of how Trump is handling the economy, the poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds. That is down from 40% in March and marks the lowest economic approval he’s registered in an AP-NORC poll in his first or second term.

Exit take: His Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, is promising that 2026 will see a lot more of Trump on the stump. Which should make Republican sphincters tighten from coast to coast.

China First?

ICYMI: Trump took time out from toe-sucking V. Putin to lavish China’s Xi with an extraordinary gift: greenlighting the sale of powerful H200 AI chips to our most dangerous foreign foe.

As David French noted, “There is absolutely no way that permitting one of our most vital tech companies to sell our most advanced chips to our chief military and economic rival is ‘America first.‘“

How bad is this? Tech commentator Alec Stapp calls it a “Massive own goal to export these AI chips to China.”

The H200 is 6x more powerful than the H20, which was previously the most powerful chip approved for export.

Our compute advantage is the main thing keeping us ahead of China in AI.

Why would we throw that away?

A brief by Michael C. Horowitz, Chris McGuire, and Zongyuan Zoe Liu for the Council on Foreign Relations — The Consequences of Exporting Nvidia’s H200 Chips to China — is even more dire, noting that “The decision effectively undid much of the export-control posture that the Trump administration itself had helped build, supplying the tools the U.S. had previously tried to withhold.”

The sale of advanced Nvidia H200 AI chips to approved customers in China does more than signal policy inconsistency: It undermines much of the original purpose of the restrictions. By re-opening the flow of powerful computing hardware to China, Washington risks supplying exactly the tools it once tried to withhold.
But the damage is deeper and more strategic. First, by imposing and then relaxing restrictions, the United States has forced China to accelerate the development of domestic export-control regimes, self-reliance strategies, and an awareness of U.S. economic and systemic vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, China learns that the U.S. will—under pressure or for expedience—back down. That reduces the leverage of future controls.

The chips also have military applications.

Many U.S. military leaders believe that Chinese President Xi Jinping is seeking to build the capacity to invade Taiwan by 2027, though whether Beijing intends to do so remains unclear. Research shows that China’s military is actively seeking Nvidia chips to fuel AI-enabled military capabilities.

So how’s the whole America First populism thing going? Erick Erickson offers this exit take:

“China gets NVIDIA chips. Trump gets his ballroom. You get 1 doll and 2 pencils.”

Speaking of selling out…

Colby Hall: Trump’s Family Is Helping Saudi Arabia Royalty Buy CNN.

Imagine if Hunter Biden were helping assemble billions in Saudi and Qatari financing so a progressive media owner could take over Fox News while quietly assuring the White House that he planned to replace hosts and reshape the network’s direction. The national reaction would be immediate. Congressional hearings, emergency ethics panels, a weeklong media frenzy.

Oliver Darcy: The CNN Sacrifice.

Once upon a time, a chief executive openly signaling that he’d reorient a newsroom to appease a sitting president would be a five-alarm corporate scandal, the sort of fire that would send the company’s public relations teams sprinting through the hallways to extinguish. Indeed, the notion that Ellison would assure the president that he would overhaul the news network’s editorial posture to be more obedient to him and his administration should be a downright scandal that Paramount would seek to address. As one veteran media executive confided to me, “This is Pravda style stuff”—the playbook of Russian oligarchs, not aspiring Hollywood moguls hoping to buy themselves a sprawling entertainment conglomerate that houses an iconic global news network.

Quick quiz: Try to imagine the GOP reaction if Obama or Biden had allowed the masters of Al-Jazeera to make a play for CNN or any other major US network.

Meanwhile, In Indiana…

Why Indiana Republicans Are Standing Up to Trump - The Atlantic

In an era when politicians typically operate at arm’s length from their voters, the public’s easy access to elected representatives is refreshing. In Indiana this week, it’s also a bit jarring. The state Senate is meeting under threat. Trump and his allies have vowed to target Republican lawmakers who vote against a redistricting plan that could wipe out the state’s Democratic congressional representation, protecting the U.S. House GOP majority. Over the past several weeks, Republican state legislators have faced a wave of “swatting” incidents, bomb threats, and other anonymous acts of intimidation, leading some to worry about their personal safety. The current climate of fear in Indiana, lawmakers in both parties told me, is without modern precedent in the state….
Over the past few days, I’ve asked both Republicans and Democrats here to explain why Indiana has become the new hotbed of GOP resistance to Trump. It is not the only state to rebuff the president’s redistricting demands; Kansas Republicans also have been unable to muster the votes for gerrymandering, and success in Florida is not assured. But no state has faced the White House–directed onslaught that Indiana has.
I received several answers. Most, however, said that the push for mid-decade redistricting simply ran afoul of the small-c conservatism on which many Indiana Republican legislators still pride themselves. “Midwesterners being midwestern,” one anti-redistricting advocate replied with a shrug outside the senate chamber. Republicans told me that state Senate opponents of redrawing the maps tended to be more institutionalist than MAGA, echoing a divide that still crops up among the party’s lawmakers in Washington. “I’m such a rule follower, it’s not even funny,” Walker said during his committee speech on Monday.