POTUS And His Toadies
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Donald Trump’s delusional state mind was on unmistakable display during his rambling press conference yesterday. As he purported to celebrate the greatest first-year achievements of any President in American history, he actually made if perfectly clear that none of the toadies around him have either the knowledge or gumption to tell him he’s flat-out full of baloney.
As a consequence, virtually everything he said was either flatly untrue or it was so egregiously cherry-picked and taken so badly out of context as to be laughable. For instance, right out of the box he claimed that his utterly unhinged and idiotic tariff policies have worked like a charm, causing America’s trade deficit to drop by a whopping 62%.
Well, yes, the US had suffered an historic record $163 billion monthly trade deficit in March 2025, which, as shown below, was off the charts of history by a country mile. Self-evidently, however, the March disaster had been caused by the Donald himself, whose announced 100%+ Liberation Day tariffs scheduled for April 2nd had triggered a massive pull-forward surge of import shipments in March designed to beat these crushing taxes.
Thereafter, the trade deficit fell sharply as payback from the March pull-forward worked in the other direction for a few months—until in late September when the Donald precipitously announced another big tariff increase to commence the following week. Of course, that caused imports to surge again, thereby generating a $78 billion trade deficit in September, which naturally dropped sharply to just $59 billion in October owing to the prior month’s pull-ahead.
And so, apparently, one of the toadies around the Oval Office gave him the March 2025 number of $163 billion and the October $59 billion number and said: See here, POTUS, you got the mother down by 62%!
Monthly US Trade Deficit, 2012 to 2025
Well, no, the Donald’s whirling dervish approach to trade policy has caused unprecedented volatility in the monthly numbers, as is evident in the graph above. But when you net out all the resulting pull-forwards and pay-backs in the monthly figures the YTD figure through October tells you all you need to know.
