Donald Trump yesterday invited a weird guy into the Oval to wax on about how great his economy is – unless one thing gets in his way
As the old saying goes: While Vance is away, the Donald will heave out a weird guy to point at made-up charts to make him look good.
JD Vance is currently somewhere in Kent, enjoying the hospitality of David Lammy – with whom he spent some of the morning fishing.
Meanwhile, Trump is flitting between holding up big bits of cardboard that say largely meaningless or unproven things about how great the US economy is, and telling the world the US economy faces total collapse if it turns out his tariffs were illegal.
Here’s everything that happened in Trump World that you need to know about. Strap in.
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1. Steve Bannon isn’t running
Turns out Steve Bannon is not running for President. He says.
Yesterday the Mail claimed Trump’s former advisor was secretly planning a run for 2028, claiming sources close to him and Trump had said Bannon had begun “soliciting political advice”
Which…doesn’t sound much like Bannon to me.
Asked if he was running by the National Pulse, Bannon said: “Trump 2028”.
2. JD’s gone fishin’
JD Vance took a shot at David Lammy’s prowess as a fisherman today, as both enjoyed a morning of angling in a lake.
Vance is visiting the UK for a few days of “holiday” – but also seeking movement on Gaza and Ukraine, and we reckon probably meeting a few people who might be interested in his presumptive 2028 run.
During a gaggle ahead of their sit-down meeting, Lammy said: “The one strain on the special relationship is that all of my kids caught a fish, but the Foreign Secretary did not.”
Asked if he too had caught a fish, Vance said: “I caught a few, actually. I don’t want to brag, but I did OK.”
Vance also claimed his boss Donald Trump had “reduced tensions” around the world since becoming President.
“David once said to me, and this is probably a couple of years ago, that there’s this feeling that the world is in a state of incredible tension,” Vance said at the start of a day of meetings at the Foreign Secretary’s official country residence, Chevening.
“I certainly felt that a couple of years ago. I think the President of the United States has done a lot over the last six or seven months to lower that tension.”
That is certainly a take.
3. Trump held a deeply weird Oval Office presentation from a right-wing economist, who said everything’s fine and the bits that aren’t are Biden’s fault
Trump summoned the media to the Oval last night for a “major economic announcement.”
When they arrived, they found Stephen Moore – a conservative writer, TV commentator and, I guess, economist, who has worked for the Heritage Foundation (the hard right think tank which came up with Project 2025) for an exceptionally long time.
Trump tried to put him on the board of the Federal Reserve in his first term, but couldn’t get him approved by the Senate, who found him to be unqualified.
He’s also an “informal” advisor to the President. What I’m saying is that he’s not by any stretch what you would consider an independent or unbiased economic analyst.
But he did bring some charts with him.
In a deeply weird “presentation”, he claimed to have “new data” which nobody had seen before.
He claimed the Bureau of Labour Statistics had “overestimated job creation by 1.5 million jobs” during the last two years of Biden’s term, according to his “data” that “nobody has ever seen before” but which he has access to.
Thing is, even if that number is true – and we have no way of knowing because he won’t share the data – it’s totally normal for BLS figures to be adjusted.
The monthly figures are always, to an extent a projection. See, they’re gathered from a massive survey of American companies. And companies don’t always reply to surveys on time. And sometimes they don’t reply at all…because they go out of business.
The average monthly revision is +/- about 51,000 jobs. And considering most of the revisions during Biden’s term – and Trump’s for that matter – were downward, that figure of 1.5 million isn’t far off what the public BLS numbers showed anyway.
In the last year of Biden, the average monthly revision was -60,000. In the first five months of Trump it’s -65,000. This is totally normal, and the only real way of counting job numbers with any accuracy on a rolling basis.
The reason, by the way, that they only looked at the last two years of Biden’s term is that in the first two years, there was a period of revising them massively up, when the Covid bounceback happened.
Anyway, he then claimed that new data from the Census Bureau, which again nobody else has access to but him, but will be released within “the next six months”, showed average household incomes adjusted for inflation was up £1,174. Which sounds like a lot. But where’s he getting these magic, secret numbers from?
Turns out he and his team at (and I’m not kidding, they’re really called this) the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a right wing advocacy group, had come up with a new model to use monthly survey data from the Census Bureau to predict future releases of national income data, according to The Washington Post. But none of this was explained at the time.
And while the charts have now gone up on his group’s website, the data behind them has not.
Hilariously, at the bottom of most of the charts is a tiny bit of text citing the source as “Author’s Calculations”.
Anyway. If you didn’t see any of this deeply weird event, have a look. It’s so odd.
4. Trump honoured some Purple Hearts, and also accepted some…
Trump held a ceremony at the White House for about 100 Purple Heart recipients last night, which is quite a common thing for a President to do.
What was less common was that he revealed three of those present had mailed their Purple Hearts to him after the assassination attempt in Butler Pennsylvania.
“What a great honor to get those Purple Hearts,” Trump said.
“I guess, in a certain way, it wasn’t that easy for me either, when you think of it. But you went through a lot more than I did, and I appreciate it very much.”
5. Trump warns of a “Great Depression” if his tariffs are ruled illegal
The president says there would be another “GREAT DEPRESSION!” if a U.S. Appeals Court rules he exceeded his authority by declaring an emergency to impose the taxes and mandates repayment of the billions of dollars collected so far.
“If a Radical Left Court ruled against us at this late date, in an attempt to bring down or disturb the largest amount of money, wealth creation and influence the USA has ever seen, it would be impossible to ever recover, or pay back, these massive sums of money and honor,” Trump said. “It would be 1929 all over again.”
The government has collected about $130 billion in tariff revenues so far this year, about $74 billion more than it did last year, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.
6. Pete Hegseth has reinstalled a statues honouring some of America’s most racist traitors
Pete Hegseth has been on the airwaves again, this time crowing that under his leadership, America’s national cemetery would once again give space to a memorial honouring some of America’s most racist traitors.
Yes, the Confederate Memorial, commemorating those who fought for the confederacy in the Civil War, which was removed in 2023 for reasons that to most people are plainly obvious, will soon be put back in Arlington Cemetery and Hegseth is delighted.
The monument has long been criticised for including depictions of slaves as “faithful black servants.”
They were included in the sculpture by the artists, Moses Ezekiel, because he wanted to undermine the “lies” told about slavery and the South, and “correctly” rewrite history to depict black slaves as being supportive of the Confederate cause.
Of course, this is all over the head of Hegseth.
“We recognise our history, we don’t erase it,” he told (who else?) Fox News.
“We don’t follow the woke lemmings off the cliff that want to tear down statues.”
He went on to say the monument was to “recognise the service of Americans of all chapters.”
7. GB News viewers rejoice!
It’s a great day for viewers of GB News, who will soon be able to watch their favourite “news channel” in the same place they get their Trump tweets.
You’ll recall we reported on the launch of Truth+ – a streaming service built into Truth Social, Trump’s own social network.
Well, as of today, GB News is in the channel listings, right alongside Lindell TV, the “news channel” run by the MyPillow guy and Trump’s favourite channel, and the highly popular documentary Lizard People: Rulers of Time And Space.