Like an overgrown child who’s never taken responsibility for his innumerable failures when it comes to casinos, steaks, airlines, magazines, marriages, child-rearing, and the website GoTrump.com, Donald Trump was never going to acknowledge his role in harming the U.S. economy via a self-defeating trade war. Instead, he’s selected Fed chairman Jerome Powell as his fall guy, claiming the central banker’s failure to cut rates (until last month) has hampered the economic growth he was hoping to ride to a second term. “Our problem is with the Fed,“ he ranted Wednesday after the bond market flashed a warning that a recession may be on the horizon. “Raised too much & too fast. Now too slow to cut. Spread is way too much as other countries say THANK YOU to clueless Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve.… We should easily be reaping big Rewards & Gains, but the Fed is holding us back.” Yet, according to a new report, the consensus in the White House is that it’s not Powell who’s holding us back but the big orange elephant in the room—the same one whose business acumen resulted in him once losing “more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer,” and who somehow still doesn’t know how tariffs work.

CNBC reports that despite the president’s daily ravings, “the overriding belief in the White House is that the rate hikes”—which haven’t occurred since December 2018—“are not the main source of the problem.” Instead, two senior administration officials say, “it is Trump’s trade war and tariffs against China that began more than a year and a half ago holding back growth.” At this point, the only person who agrees with Trump that the Fed is to blame is Peter Navarro, the economist Jared Kushner ordered on Amazon. That makes sense, given that Navarro penned a book called Death by China; believes military confrontation with some of our biggest trading partners is necessary; and, according to former National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, ratfucked us into a trade war with Beijing by taking advantage of Trump’s very tiny brain. (Cohn famously reached his breaking point with Trump and quit not after Charlottesville, but when the president announced his steel and aluminum tariffs in March 2018, despite Cohn’s attempts to convince him they were a terrible idea that would hurt the U.S.)

Unfortunately, given the authoritarian regime they’re working in, it’s unlikely that any of the White House officials who believe Trump is in the wrong here—of which there are apparently many!—will actually come out and say it. Despite privately weighing concerns, the majority have fallen in line publicly. In March, NEC director Larry Kudlow insisted in multiple interviews that the Fed’s actions had undermined the administration‘s pledge to attain 3% sustained economic growth, while Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross used a rare moment of consciousness in June to criticize the central bank, blasting its staff.

Meanwhile, on Thursday, Trump warned China that he’s done playing Mr. Nice Guy, telling reporters, “Just so you understand, I’ve been very mild about [this]. Very, very mild. There’s a long way I can go,” effectively confirming fears that he’s dumb enough to keep his trade war up through 2020. He also urged that the U.S. “start building [mental] institutions again,” a suggestion a large number of people would likely support if the facilities are designed to house one person in particular.

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