TRUMP GETS BOOED - Trump CHASED OFF STAGE by "FURIOUS REPUBLICANS at Wednesday TOWN HALL!!"

Today, of course, you saw what happened in the markets. The Dow dropped more than 2,000 points today—not a typo—that the Dow has dropped 1,500 points or more on two consecutive days. Dropped 6 percent today alone. Just for context, just—I mean, whether or not you watch the markets, whether or not you have any money in the markets or retirement account or whatever, just to get a sense of

the scale here. I'll give you two metrics here to get a sense of the scale. The first one is the circuit breakers. Did you know about this? The markets have circuit breakers that kick in when things go off a cliff. That's a mixed metaphor, but I think you know what I mean. They call them trading curbs, and they're these shutoffs that kick in automatically

and basically stop the market. They stop people from trading for 15 minutes when things have gone unbelievably wrong. And where those circuit breakers kick in, like the threshold of how bad it has to be before the circuit breakers kick in, is when the S&P drops 7% from the previous day's close. Today, the S&P dropped 6%. Had we got to 7%, we would have hit the circuit breaker.

They would have turned the lights out on the market to try to save us from ourselves. That's one way to understand the severity of what's happened here. And here's another. Look at this. This is the VIX index, V-I-X. Unlike the stock market graphs

where you can tell things are bad when they go down, with the VIX, it's the volatility index, it goes up when things are terrible. It's like the economic crisis meter. And you can see there are just a few big peaks there over time. The first huge peak, that's 2008.

That was the global financial disaster of 2008, the worst financial catastrophe since the Great Depression. That's the first big peak. The next big peak is March 2020. That's the equally huge global disaster, right? When the COVID pandemic overran the world, killed millions of people, and basically shut off economic activity like

there had been a power outage. So those are the first two big peaks there. But now look, new peak. That's now. That's now. That one not caused by the biggest financial catastrophe since the Great Depression or a global pandemic that's killing millions of people. That one caused simply by Donald Trump being president, again, with his great ideas. And the scale of what he's doing, the scale of the destruction that he has wrought, is a little bit hard to get your head around.

I mean, like, you can see the headline writers scrambling to try to find the right words tonight. I mean, here's the Wall Street Journal front page right now. U.S. stocks plunge deeper, capping worst week since 2020, which, again, was the pandemic. Trump's tariffs set off two-day sell-off

as recessionary fears mount. More than $6 trillion erased from market. This has been the lead analysis piece on CNBC.com all day. Trump's tariffs, our biggest policy mistake in 95 years. This is the lead editorial today at the Financial Times.

America's astonishing act of self-harm. I thought the picture of Trump there actually kind of puts a nice punctuation mark on that. Look what we've done to ourselves. Hi. But this is the lead, quote, if it endures Donald Trump's decision on April 2nd, 2025, to enact sweeping tariffs on U.S. trade partners, will go down as one of the greatest acts of self-harm in American economic history. His actions will wreak untold damage on households, businesses, and financial markets across the

world, upending a global economic order that America benefited from and helped to create. Elsewhere in the FT today, they described Trump's actions as, quote, strangely self-sabotaging, quote, economic lunacy that might seem better explained by psychologists than economists. Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary, says, quote, this is to economics what creationism is to biology,

what astrology is to astronomy, what RFK thought is to vaccine science? The Wall Street Journal summarizes tonight, quote, the Dow Jones Industrial Average became the last of the three major financial indices to enter a correction, defined as a decline of 10% or more from a closing peak. After today, the Dow is down 14.9 percent from its most recent

high. The Nasdaq is now a bear market off 22.7 percent from its recent high. Anything more than 20 percent is considered a bear market. The magnificent seven stocks, which include NVIDIA, Apple and Amazon, collectively lost one point five.55 trillion in market capitalization this week. That is a record. Apple alone saw $443.5 billion in market value evaporate. It is hard to get your head around how much damage this one man can cause. I think it's even harder to get your head around simultaneously the fact that he can do damage of this magnitude with such a teeny, tiny, teeny, teeny, tiny amount of thought.

You think it would take like a grand plan and some big brains to figure out how to destroy the economy of the richest nation on earth, but that's not how it's working out. Turns out it doesn't take a big idea or a lot of big brains working together. I know that this may be something that you remember, but just in case it's not, I'm just going to put this back on the front page here just for a second, because do you remember where Trump got the tariff thing from in the first place?

Do you remember, like, when and why and how we started talking about tariffs in the first place? It was in his first campaign for president. Trump didn't really have any formal economic advisors. So he told his son-in-law, Jared, to find him an economic advisor. Trump reportedly gave Jared some vague ideas of what his thoughts were on economic issues,

you know, something, something, make me look tough, China bad, something, something. Jared then decided to find his father-in-law, a financial advisor for his presidential campaign, by going on the Amazon.com website and starting to browse books. Not like reading the books, because you can't do that on the Amazon website. He was just looking at the covers, looking at the titles. And he found a book title that he thought was so cool. The title was Death

by China. Oh my god, that's so cool, that's so awesome. And that apparently was it. Quote from Vanity Fair. Trump gave Jared a summary of his views and then asked him to do some research. Kushner simply went on Amazon where he was struck by the title of one book, Death by China, co-authored by a man named Peter Navarro. Jared then cold-called Navarro, a well-known trade deficit hawk who agreed to join the team as an economic advisor.

Navarro was a major advocate for an aggressive pro-tariff policy. Where did Peter Navarro get his idea that tariffs would be a good policy for America? What was his like backup for that conviction? Well, he did have backup from a real expert, who he cited in at least a half dozen of his books,

including the one that Jared found on Amazon, that fateful day. In all of his books, Peter Navarro has cited an economics expert to justify his views. And the economics expert he cites is somebody named Ron Vera. V-A-R-A. Ron Vera. When Trump won the presidency and entered the White House, this Ron Vera started circulating a memo around Washington in support of Trump using tariffs in trade policy. According to the New York Times, the memo had been quote, sent from an email address

purportedly belonging to Ron Vera. At one point, Ron Vera wrote in the memo that Trump could quote, ride the tariffs to victory. The problem is Ron Vera doesn't exist. He never has. The economics expert that Peter Navarro has long cited to explain why he's so gung-ho on tariffs, this person Ron Vera, is a made-up person. He is a fictional person. Peter Navarro invented Ron Vera as his expert source so he could quote this expert source over and over and over again in his crackpot books.

Who is Ron Vera? Ron Vera is an anagram of Navarro, which is his last name. I mean, my name anagrams to Macho Wadler, but I don't see myself trying to talk you into doing what Macho Wadler wants, right? But that really is how the Trump administration crafted its tariff policy. That's where Trump came up with the tariff idea.

Circulating a fake memo from a fake person with a fake email address in order to make it look like this was a serious issue being debated by real experts. That is the intellectual basis on which Donald Trump, today, wiped $6 trillion of wealth out of existence and crashed America's markets and brought America and the world to the brink of a self-inflicted,

on-purpose, global Great Depression along the lines of what we had in 2008 and what the pandemic inflicted upon us in 2020.

This time, the global disaster is Donald Trump's big brain. of what we had in 2008 and what the pandemic inflicted upon us in 2020.

This time, the global disaster is Donald Trump's big brain. And Donald Trump may think it's all going to work out. The American people are awake and well aware that this is not going to work out. New Reuters Ipsos polling, to which I would like to bring your attention. Do you approve or disapprove of Donald Trump's handling of his job as president? Disapprove by a 10-point margin. Do you approve or disapprove of how Donald Trump is handling the economy, specifically?

Disapprove by a 15-point margin. Do you approve or disapprove of how Donald Trump is handling the issue of international trade? Disapprove by an 18-point margin. Do you approve or disapprove of how Donald Trump is handling the issue of your cost of living? Disapprove by a 27-point margin. Is the Trump administration competent or incompetent at running the federal government? Incompetent by a 20-point margin. Is the Trump administration competent or incompetent at rolling out new economic policies? Incompetent, by a 25-point

margin. Is the Trump administration competent or incompetent at downsizing government without affecting vital services? Incompetent, by a 25 point margin. That's before the markets did what they've done in the last two days. The American people get it. They get it. They are awake. They are not giving up.

They are not giving up. And tomorrow a lot of them are going to show it.