Donald Trump's stock market crashout

America’s worst president’s erratic behavior has already killed our economy. He just does not know it yet.

Know Your Meme describes a “crashout” as: “a reckless individual who seeks altercations. Crashouts repeatedly jeopardize their body, life and future because they don’t care about the consequences, implying that they’re already broken.” Future economists will make this a cool slang for a market principle and use President Donald Trump as their textbook example.

Mr. Trump pulled the trigger on the American economy today. Amidst rising inflation—the very economic condition he campaigned on ending—he announced he would instantiate heavy tariffs (which raise prices, risking inflation) on our neighbors, Canada and Mexico, “with no room for negotiation,” as well as China. The markets responded to Mr. Trump by crashing. The S&P 500 went down 1.8 percent, the Dow fell about 650 points, and the Nasdaq lost 2.6 percent. I cannot bear to look at my retirement account.

Consumer confidence is bad right now. Mr. Trump’s economic stewardship has already lost the public’s trust. He simply does not know it yet.

Meanwhile, President Elon Musk has decided to destroy the Social Security Administration. After gushing about what sex robots he would like to be fucking with his allegedly surgically-damaged penis, he dubbed our seniors’ most vital safety net as “a Ponzi scheme.” One imagines he is not treating it with much affection. Former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, who served President Joe Biden’s administration as the SSA Commissioner and whose tenure as mayor of Baltimore was parodied by Aidan Gillen on HBO’s The Wire, warned that, as a result of DOGE’s bullshit, the system might “collapse” “within the next 30 to 90 days.”

Seventy-three million Americans rely on these earned benefits. Cutting 7,000 workers from the program’s administration effectively puts the elderly and sick into hold queues from hell whenever some problem interrupts a payment. Ten thousand claimants for Social Security disability already die each year waiting for their claims to be resolved. Further understaffing will certainly increase poverty, uncertainty, and helplessness.

Does this matter to Mr. Musk? I doubt it. He prefers to prance around with his chainsaw and brag about the lives he is destroying for whatever the hell it is that he wants. More wealth? The chance to colonize Mars, once he has finished ruining Earth? Some miserable, cringe technomonarchy?

Some pundits have even warned that coupling inflationary tariffs with potential recession from mass unemployment of federal workers and contractors, and reducing funding to major institutions nationwide could conjure the dread specter “stagflation.” I hate the word. I try not to even look at it, or think about it very long, for fear of it.

I have given up retirement entirely. I intend to fund my golden years with “Trump Is a Bitch” and “Fuck DOGE” t-shirt sales, because these barbarians will not stop robbing the nation’s treasure until they are stopped, and the Republican Congress vested with the power of the purse is too craven or complicit to even put the bag out of the kleptocrats’ reach. Messrs. Trump and Musk are too drunk on chaos to care that most Americans need the money in their retirement accounts and their Social Security benefits. Their sick vision of the future does not account for our comfort.

Wall Street bankers, K Street superheroes, big money donors, America needs you. Lobby, like you have never lobbied before. Show them the looming catastrophes before they drag us too far into an economic nightmare.