Last week was a real roller coaster of economic news. It started with MAGA taking an undeserved victory lap over second quarter economic data and ended with the president intemperately firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics over some bad jobs numbers.
The irony of it, to the extent that one can find amusement in the torching of American institutions, is that just as the gross domestic product numbers weren’t particularly good, the jobs numbers weren’t particularly bad. By the same token, while the various trade “deals” the administration has been trumpeting aren’t nearly as good as they’re saying, it is true that they have successfully averted the worst-case scenarios that seemed possible in the immediate wake of Liberation Day.
The upshot of all of this is that Trump is obsessed with superficial indicators of success.
He’s avoided stock market backlash to…
