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Donald Trump is in panic mode. You’d think he knows what’s coming in November. No administration in my lifetime has moved this quickly and recklessly on fronts unimaginable just a year prior.
What happens when a bully is threatened? He lashes out. When this president is threatened, he accelerates his power grabs. If you thought 2026 would be less chaotic and exhausting, apparently, we haven’t seen anything yet.
Trump ran for a second term to avoid prison; now he is running the country to avoid impeachment. At a meeting with Republican lawmakers last week, Trump said, “You got to win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms… I’ll get impeached.”
It wasn’t a threat so much as a plea.
Don’t think for a second Trump doesn’t see his horrible, no-good poll numbers, which have been underwater since March. Ten months before the midterms, the only recent president with numbers as bad as Trump today is Trump in 2018, when Democrats regained control of the House.
To say he and his policies are unpopular would be a gross oversimplification of the mess he’s made of both domestic and foreign affairs. He ran on fixing the economy, but for most Americans, dollars don’t go as far as they did a year ago. The fallout from the Epstein files is still unfolding as large portions of evidence have not yet been made public. And his secret police force is terrorizing Americans, one city at a time.
Some of his madness could be slowed, if not stopped, if Democrats win in November. So, how does he avoid losing the House and Senate? As of this writing, Trump appears clueless. His scattershot, imperialist foreign “policy” is not a show of strength, but the actions of a man desperate to retain his ill-gotten power.
Need a distraction? Trump is lighting fuses on powder kegs around the globe — Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Greenland — not to mention upending the essential independence of the Federal Reserve.
Sunday night, the normally spotlight-averse Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell released an extraordinary video announcing that “the Department of Justice served the Federal Reserve with grand jury subpoenas, threatening a criminal indictment.”
Powell, who has served in several different capacities under four administrations, went on to say, “The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the president.”
This was the latest step-on-a-rake move by Trump, who is weaponizing the Justice Department — again — to attack his perceived enemies. The timing of these drummed-up charges is a bit of a head-scratcher, though, since (a) Powell’s term as Fed chair expires in May, and (b) he lowered interest rates for three consecutive months at the end of last year.
Trump’s own treasury secretary, Steve Bessent, is perturbed with his boss’s decision to go after Powell. According to Axios, he told Trump the investigation could cause a “mess” and would be bad for financial markets. On Monday, markets reacted by dropping the value of the dollar and raising the value of bonds in reaction to the Powell news.
Blowback from the Senate, which has thus far rubber-stamped just about all of Trump’s appointees, was swift. A growing number of Republican senators already vowed to block any new appointments to the Federal Reserve unless the probe into Powell is abandoned.
Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, said in a statement, “The stakes are too high to look the other way: if the Federal Reserve loses its independence, the stability of our markets and the broader economy will suffer.”
When he grows weary of violating the independence of federal agencies, Trump is hellbent on getting involved in one war or another. War in Trumpworld gives him cover. It gives him emergency powers and distracts from his domestic woes.
By most definitions, the January 2 abduction and extradition of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro was an act of war. Since then, the Trump administration has seized five of the country’s oil tankers. On Monday, Trump (jokingly?) declared himself the acting president of Venezuela in a social media post.
On Friday, he met with American oil company executives to discuss the estimated $100 billion needed to refurbish the dilapidated Venezuelan oil industry, while forcefully encouraging them to cough up the money.
ExxonMobil didn’t want to play ball, perhaps because Venezuela owes the company billions after seizing its assets in 2007. CEO Darren Woods said the Venezuelan oil market is “uninvestable” in its current state, to the chagrin of the president. “I didn’t like Exxon’s response. You know we have so many that want it. I’d probably be inclined to keep Exxon out.”
Cuba, which is in the midst of an electricity crisis because of aging infrastructure and fuel shortages, is heavily dependent on Venezuelan oil. Trump, who would like nothing more than to strong-arm his way onto the communist island, is using his newly acquired control of Venezuelan oil to threaten Cuba.
“THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA - ZERO! I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE,” he wrote on social media Sunday. He has not specified what kind of deal or what the consequences would be of not making said deal.
Venezuela was sending 35,000 barrels of oil a day to Cuba, partially in exchange for Cuba providing security for Maduro. Thirty-two Cubans were killed during the U.S. raid that captured the former president.
Now to Iran, yes, Iran, where widespread unrest and protests of the Islamic regime have resulted in at least 500 deaths and 11,000 arrests as the government attempts to maintain control. Trump is weighing the possibility of military intervention to assist the protesters. Please don’t overlook the irony of this.
Trump’s demand that Denmark sell its territory of Greenland to the U.S. is the most concerning of his recent saber-rattling. The prime minister of Denmark said the Arctic territory is not for sale, but the U.S. is welcome to continue or beef up its military presence in the region.
That’s not good enough for Trump, who claims nothing short of ownership will keep Russia and China at bay. On Sunday, on Air Force One, Trump repeated his threat of annexation, “One way or the other, we are going to have Greenland.”
Besides the obvious issues with threatening to take an ally by force, Denmark is a NATO member. The mission of NATO is to safeguard its members through political and military means, primarily by ensuring collective defense. So what happens when one of its members attacks another? More chaos.
France, Germany, and the U.K. — our allies! — are reportedly forming a plan to send troops to defend Greenland. The ongoing existence of NATO is now an open question. The myriad ramifications of that will be a topic for another Steady.
The firehose of hostile threats unleashed by Trump in the last week is an indicator not of strength but of desperation. If he breaks with NATO, if he takes over Cuba, if he bombs Iran, if he indicts the Fed chair, maybe no one will notice that the prices of milk and eggs are sky-high.
Dan
