Sticking with the theme of our president, and not knowing whether to laugh at or be scared by his antics:
Yesterday, he tweeted:
Dow just broke 25,000. Tremendous news!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 30, 2019
And a year ago, in January, 2018, he tweeted:
Dow just crashes through 25,000. Congrats! Big cuts in unnecessary regulations continuing.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2018
So over the last twelve months the DJI was outperformed by my checking account--which did not, however, prevent the president of the United States from celebrating its surge. If he cuts even more regulations, maybe the market will crash through the 25,000 barrier sometime in 2020, too!
I think this is in the category of something everyone should be free to laugh about. The president got confused, forgot, stumbled. It could happen to anyone overdetermined to boast, and, as the topic isn't a grave one, we can enjoy the humor of the president participating in the same ignominy suffered by less elevated narcissists. Possibly funny, but maybe scary, too, is today's contretemps relating to yesterday's congressional testimony in which, on topics ranging from election security to North Korea's nuclear weapons program, the heads of our intelligence agencies--FBI, CIA, DNI--kept contradicting the cheerful and widely reported proclamations of the president. When Trump was asked today whether he had expressed his displeasure with the intelligence chiefs, he said he had, and that they had explained to him that they had been "misquoted" and that any alleged disagreement was "fake news."
Of course that's impossible. The intelligence chiefs gave public testimony to Congress while under oath. The session was broadcast live by news outlets, and extended excerpts were played on evening news shows. The congressional website has a video of the hearing in addition to a link to a 42-page written summary of their testimony. Under these circumstances, it's clearly impossible for the intelligence officials to have been "misquoted." They wouldn't have claimed that something that can't be true was true. The president did, however. Is this funny? More in the sense of "odd" than "haha," but more than either it's kind of disconcerting that someone with so much power is so untethered from reality as to be clueless about what lies might deceive and what lies just make him look immediately ridiculous.
It's been so cold here in Minneapolis that my kids' school has been cancelled every day this week. I guess the "polar vortex," as it's called, has a grip on the entire Midwest, and the other evening, in Chicago, a performance of Hamilton was cancelled on account of the cold, causing some wit to remark, "Brrrr kills Hamilton again!"
Ok, maybe not as good as the stock market bit, but Trump had the advantage of being accidentally funny. It's always harder when you're actually trying.
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