It’s August! You’ve survived 1/8th of this presidential term! Who’s to say which of us will or won’t make it to the end! Certainly not me, but I’m sure there’s a crypto-sponsored betting market that would love to take your wager on it!

How was your July? Bad? Makes sense! Hopefully most of your time was spent on normal July things, like taking your kids swimming, or stretching that one low-key meeting to fill your office’s Summer Friday schedule, or spinning into a panic because summer is fleeting and soon you’ll have to wear sweaters and choose ornamental gourds. But hey… 1/8th isn’t nothin’.

“There is a lot of news” is always true when someone with dementia is leading the free world (a statement that may apply to the last five years). So we’re just gonna knock a few down and see how it goes. Let’s get to it.

The Bad Jobs Report Fallout

First thing to know: there’s a “jobs report” that comes out every month. It shows how many jobs were added and lost in the American economy and in what sectors. It’s based off payroll, so there are obviously some little loopholes, but generally it should show trends if not perfect data.

Second thing: the jobs report for July was very bad.

So July was bad. But more accurate slow moving data meant that everyone learned May and June were horrible. [we’ll skip even more explanation here and say: the tariffs were announced in April.] And that made the last three months a historically bad stretch for the job market — more evidence that the guy who went bankrupt a bunch of times and believes in 1920s fiscal policy is driving our economy into the ground.

Just scan around this chart that probably covers much of the time you’ve been a functioning adult. Hard to find three months in a row this bad! [also look at what covid does to an economy! the RFK virus he rolls out is gonna be epic]

Third, Trumpworld doesn’t like these bad numbers! They were literally stunned on Fox when it came out, then regrouped and blamed Jay Powell. And because Trump is a man with authoritarian tendencies and no one to restrain him, he just… fired the person in charge of sharing jobs numbers. They put out a piece of reality he didn’t like, because it made him look bad, and he fired them so he could put someone in who will tell him things he likes regardless of their basis in fact. Exactly what happened.

This is a lot of words to really get to one plain sentence: Trump fired the jobs numbers head after she did her job and showed how his economy is doing - BAD! Were I talking to young, Rush Limbaugh hearing Greg I would say “I don’t think it’s a good strategy to see bad economic data and just pretend it’s not real!”

But what happens around this story is that it gets laundered from the simple, understandable truth - angry leader shoots messenger — into some kind of political intrigue that might cross a line and result in anyone doing something. Like here:

Republicans “raise concerns.” First of all, Erika McEntarfer (now-former head of BLS, job report person) got confirmed in the senate last year with 86 votes! So lots of Republicans were fine with her last year but— oh.. oh… sorry that’s my Hypocrisy Is Dead alarm going off reminding me I’m an idiot.

But this is where the press and Republicans hold hands in pretend-land:

This is just not true. They’re not going to take issue, they’re not going to push back, they’re not going to do anything. The Republicans know it. The news knows it. But it’s so much more comfortable to live in a fantasy where the President doing things that are wrong generates push back from his party. So why not invent it, knowing that no tangible action will ever be taken or asked about in a followup!

Republicans have already assimilated Trump’s angle on this, the same one your MAGA relative you still have Quixotic hope for will angrily type on your Facebook page this weekend — “We couldn’t trust those partisan numbers! We need real numbers!”

Well, we’re like almost a thousand words into this story, so I feel like a real idiot for saying it was going to be brief. This is why shortcuts are so important — next time we can just say that Bad Guys Are Bad and one thing a bad guy did today was fire someone who showed his economy sucked. So much shorter.

Trump Does A Favor for Jeffrey Epstein’s Mistress Convicted Sexual Criminal Accomplice

Trump is gonna pardon Ghislaine Maxwell in exchange for her saying that everyone except Trump was in the Real Un-Biden-Tampered-With Epstein Files, and it will be a real test of the Republican Fake Concern Meter. Becuase Ghislaine is not like, a buddy of Trump’s who committed fraud (he’s already done those pardons with the Chrisleys). Maxwell is a convicted sexual criminal abuser, who went to trial and was convicted and has named, testifying victims. If the search is out there for the mysterious child-abusing monsters… guys, we caught a monster and she’s in prison! Which is good!

But now… she’s in a different and much more chill prison.

That’s right! This woman who physically sexually assaulted other human beings gets to go to a minimum-security prison in Texas! Who else is there? Elizabeth Holmes! The Theranos lady with the turtlenecks and the fake deep voice. And Jen Shah who is… one of the Housewives. (You probably know more than me, we all have cultural blind spots.) But one thing I’m guessing isn’t popping up in a Real Housewives fight is “I’m mad at you because you ran a pedophile ring for Jeffrey Epstein!”

And moving Ghislaine — you’re not gonna believe this — wasn’t actually allowed without specific and individual signoff for a waiver.

So again boiling it down — the President is doing favors for a convicted sex offender because she can help him out of a jam. WOOF! Imagine saying that pedophilia is bad and supporting this guy who is right now very explicitly taking these actions! You’d have to be insane or (much easier) a total liar!

Paid For By Viewers Like…..

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a name you’ve heard a million times before or after a PBS or NPR show, is fully shutting down after the Republicans stripped all funding in their completely voluntary rescission package earlier this summer. [It passed 51-48 in the Senate. If you live somewhere with a Republican Senator this is the kind of thing you could stop/undo next fall! My senators are already voting, I have to yell at them about other things! You! Go get off your butt and start volunteering for whoever’s running next year!]

If you are the kind of person who enjoys learning/reading and not “spending 3 hours ingesting youtube conspiracies while slowly nodding,” this is bad news! There is a lot of totally justified open sadness / rage out there about it. But I think it’s important to also point out why this is happening, which again is the ugly part people don’t really want to stare at. This kind of Republicanism, this Project 2025 GOP, is antithetical to the kind of stuff PBS and NPR have made for your entire lifetime. Things that say science is good and virtuous. Things that teach you history. Things that show you other parts of your country and world to learn that different people are actually pretty cool. It’s not just some political difference, it’s the ethos of public broadcasting that they cannot stand and are very intentionally trying to erase from the public space. You cannot have an NPR reporting scientific news while having an RFK going on TV to say that “ice cream is healthy now” because it uses a different kind of sugar. [That’s real.]

And I know that the kind of smart guy who mouth tapes when he sleeps is saying, “It’s just a billion dollars, why doesn’t some rich liberal pay for it?” And sure, Steve Ballmer could drop a billy on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that was cut out of federal funding… but then it wouldn’t be the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It’d be the Corporation for Ballmer Broadcasting, and instead of Gergen and Shields facing off it’d be Kawhi Leonard and his assorted surgeons. Might be fun, but not exactly Viewers Like You. And if the plan is “replace pieces of the federal government with temporarily benevolent rich guys…” that story only has one ending and it’s not a fun one.

End of List

So there are a handful of awful things happening for awful reasons. But August will bring all sorts of new bad things! SCOTUS wants to gut voting rights! Josh Hawley is the sleeper pick for the GOP in 2028! Rural jobs ain’t whey used to be! All that next time!