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Weather: Mostly sunny, with a high near 83. Tuesday Night: Mostly clear, with a low around 65.
- Daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
- Drought conditions here. (What is the Keetch-Byram drought index?).
- Check today’s tides in Daytona Beach (a few minutes off from Flagler Beach) here.
- Tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
The Palm Coast City Council meets at 9 a.m. at City Hall. For agendas, minutes, and audio access to the meetings, go here. For meeting agendas, audio and video, go here.
Flagler Beach United Methodist Church Food Pantry: Flagler Beach United Methodist Church‘s food pantry is open today from 9:30 a.m. to noon at 1500 S. Daytona Ave, Flagler Beach. The church’s mission is to provide nourishment and support in a welcoming, respectful environment. To find us, please turn at the corner of 15 Street and S. Daytona Ave, pull into the grass parking area and enter the green door.
Food Truck Tuesdays is presented by the City of Palm Coast on the third Tuesday of every month from March to October. Held at Central Park in Town Center, visitors can enjoy gourmet food served out of trucks from 5 to 8 p.m.–mobile kitchens, canteens and catering trucks that offer up appetizers, main dishes, side dishes and desserts. Foods to be featured change monthly but have included lobster rolls, Portuguese cuisine, fish and chips, regional American, Latin food, ice cream, barbecue and much more. Many menus are kid-friendly. Proceeds from each Food Truck Tuesday event benefits a local charity.
The Flagler Beach Library Writers’ Club meets at 5 p.m. at the library, 315 South Seventh Street, Flagler Beach.
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy, 8 p.m. at Cinematique Theater, 242 South Beach Street, Daytona Beach. General admission is $8.50. Every Tuesday and on the first Saturday of every month the Random Acts of Insanity Comedy Improv Troupe specializes in performing fast-paced improvised comedy.
Notably: The reliably revolting Randy Fine, who is playing the role of congressman representing the 6th Congressional District, of which Flagler County is one of six circles of his hell, called Saturday’s No Kings Day “the hate America rally,” said “no kings has ever won three presidential elections” (see what he did there?), blamed the Democrats for the shutdown (he’s technically correct but as always morally bankrupt), and was given obscene, tendentious softball after softball by a pair of moronic interviewers on Fox 35, like one askin him if he was worried those demonstrations “could turn violent” (the demonstrations in Palm Coast and Flagler Beach felt more like controlled and jubilant Disney parades than political rallies, really, which was both very good and a bit bad: you want wanger, you want boil, you want indignation; Democrats at their best are still Democrats too scared to battle for Democracy), giving him the chance to say some of the groups protesting “are in affiliation with some of the worst groups known to humanity.” He vaguely referred to Communists in New York as maybe organizing the one up there. The moronic co-host asked about organizers asking participants to wear inflatable costumes (as we saw in Palm Coast and Flagler Beach) to get away from “the antifa look,” the dumbass actually said, oblivious to the mask-wearers terrorizing the country for the past nine months as paramilitary ICE agents. The other co-host asked him about “allegations” calling National Guard troops invading American cities. “He’s rounding up foreign invaders,” was his answer. He apparently called the protesters morons at one point, but I didn’t wait to see the whole thing, but you’re welcome to watch it all below.
—P.T.
If the embed doesn’t work, follow this link:
https://www.fox35orlando.com/video/1726397
The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
November 2025
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Flagler Schools College and Career Fair
Friday Blue Forum
Flagler Outreach Brings Social Service Providers to Cattleman’s Hall
Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town,’ at Limelight Theatre in St. Augustine
‘Around the World in 80 Days’ at City Rep Theatre
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Democratic Women’s Club
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town,’ at Limelight Theatre in St. Augustine
‘Around the World in 80 Days’ at City Rep Theatre
Random Acts of Insanity’s Roundup of Standups from Around Central Florida
For the full calendar, go here.
“… the merry sport of Red-baiting goes on, and the pack gives tongue more and more shrilly. I really can’t get up much sympathy for the victims, but I own a sense of dismay at the increase in all the symptoms of apparent panic. How far people are getting afraid to speak, who have anything really worth while to say, I don’t know, but I am sure that the public generally is becoming rapidly demoralized in all its sense of proportion and toleration. For men who are not cock-sure about everything and especially for those who are not damned cock-sure about anything, the skies have a rather sinister appearance.
–From a Learned Hand letter to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Nov. 25, 1919.
Pogo says
@Duh USA’s
…epitaph, written by smarmy Goldilocks Americans, who are neither fish nor fowl — they’re independently opportunistic merchants of shibboleths in any size and color that sells.
And so it went. And then nothing did.
Pogo says
@Trump is a carrier
… this is the disease:
As stated
https://www.google.com/search?q=intersection+Republican+Party+erosion+fec+enforcement
Ibid
https://www.google.com/search?q=intersection+Republican+Party+erosion+sec+enforcement
Ibid
https://www.google.com/search?q=intersection+Republican+Party+erosion+irs+enforcement
Ibid
https://www.google.com/search?q=intersection+Republican+Party+erosion+doj+enforcement
Ibid
https://www.google.com/search?q=intersection+Republican+Party+erosion+enforcement+law
Ibid
https://www.google.com/search?q=intersection+Republican+Party+FCC+erosion+privacy
A sample; every link in this comment is a banquet table
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-fcc-privacy-rules-repeal-explained-2017-4
Related; often, things are exactly what they appear to be, e g., the stuff you step in — and smell — afterward…
https://www.google.com/search?q=fact+pattern+definition
Ray W. says
As foundation for this comment, and partially drawn from a New York Times article, in July 2024, President Trump told a Turning Point Action Believers Summit audience:
“I love you. You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”
Several days later, during an interview by Laura Ingraham, he explained his intent:
“I said, vote for me, you’re not going to have to do it again. It’s true. … Because we have to get the vote out. Christians are not known as a big voting group. They don’t vote. And I’m explaining that to them. You never vote. This time, vote. I’ll straighten out the country, you won’t have to vote anymore. I won’t need your vote.”
While the meaning of that lengthy turn of phrase can be argued, and it has been argued, some take the position that Trump was announcing that he did not intend to ever surrender political power, regardless of voting outcomes, should he win the 2024 election.
Others argue that Trump was telling the audience that after he had fixed the ills of the country, Christian votes wouldn’t be needed for Republicans to maintain their hold political power. Some argue that the “No Kings” rallies were founded on opposition to Trump’s statement to those rally goers. Others assert that they are acting in solidarity to protesters who oppose President Trump’s immigration enforcement policies. Who knows what the actual truth was, and is.
Yesterday, a thought struck me about my younger son’s high school years in JROTC and afterwards in the Navy.
While there is much more to this tale, after he graduated from high school, he spent less than one semester in college; he was interested in other things. I told him he needed consider enlisting if he didn’t want to finish college.
Choosing Navy, he spent the last four of his five year enlistment as an air traffic controller. Finishing first among Navy personnel in “A” school (a Marine sergeant who was changing classifications barely beat him), he was given his choice of assignments. He chose a Marine air base in Hawaii, where he spent the next three years. He was then assigned to a carrier task force based in San Diego. Both, he says, were great places to live.
After his honorable discharge, he found out that rail companies commonly prefer air traffic controllers as dispatchers, because air traffic control procedures were adopted from rail dispatching procedures (the language used is the same between the two jobs) He was soon hired as a dispatcher. He set goals, worked hard, and he retired at the age of 37 to return to college under the GI Bill.
When he first went into the Navy, one of his friends told me that he began to curse my name, thinking I had ruined his life by telling him to enlist.
After his friend told me this, my son called me out of the blue to tell me that he and some Navy buddies had been talking on the Marine air base and it suddenly hit him. As an E-4, he was living in Hawaii, he was being paid decent money, he had health and dental care and life insurance. He would never go hungry. The Navy gave him a living supplement so he could afford to live off-base. He said he had called me out of the blue because he needed to thank me for pushing him as I did.
Now, twenty years later, he freely says enlisting in the Navy was the best thing he ever did, at least so far.
I thought that his story might be appropriate for young ears.
So I called him.
As I commonly do, I asked if he was in a place where he could talk. He was. Before I introduced the idea of speaking to area JROTC high school students, we just talked. He mentioned something, using an odd phrase. I asked him if I could pose an idea to him, something I commonly do. He knows that when I ask if I can pose an idea I am asking him to tell me what he thinks upon hearing the idea, step by step.
I asked him if he thought I was capable of loving more than one person at a time. The question puzzled him. I rephrased: Can someone love each of their children, their spouse, their parents, their aunt and uncles, all at the same time, though in different ways. He agreed that was so. I asked him, then, could I love him and love others at the same time, without lessening my love for him. He agreed. I then asked if someone can hate one thing and love another related thing. He thought, then agreed it possible. I asked if American had become a nation divided into tribes. He emphatically agreed. I asked him if he had heard what Trump had said at the rally that I led with at the top of this comment. He had not, so I told him. I asked him if that could explain why this past Saturday’s rallies had been named “No Kings” rallies. He said that might explain it. We talked for a while and I asked for a second time whether a member of one tribe can hate the other tribe, yet still love their country. He said that could be true. I asked if members of the other tribe were saying that the “No Kings” rally attendees hated America, was that necessarily true? He said it wasn’t necessarily true. He agreed that people can oppose a political party’s platform and still love America, and that if leaders of the opposing party said that everyone participating in the “No Kings” were both Antifa and terrorists, could the political leaders be liars. He said that could be the case.
We then talked about him approaching a sergeant-major of a high school JROTC program and offering to speak to the students, including his giving the sergeant-major an outline of what he wanted to tell the students. He agreed to the idea, saying it would be a good way for him to give back for everything the Navy had given him. I suggested to my son that he ask his girlfriend, an elementary school teacher, to help him with preparing a daily class speaking outline before he approached the sergeant-major.
Who knows the outcome? Time will tell.
As an aside, at a “No Kings” rally in Hyannis, in Cape Cod, a rally that drew an estimated 4,000 protesters, according to a Boston.com story, with elements of the story drawn from a police report, a 61-year-old motorist stopped his SUV near some protesters. He and his wife got out. An officer working a detail watched the man walk to the front of the SUV, but the vehicle blocked his view. When he got to the scene, the officer found a 77-year-old protester laying on the ground bleeding from the back of his head, with bruising about the face and a laceration to his nose, plus a black eye. The defendant had repeatedly punched the protester in the face, according to witnesses. The defendant claimed that the protester had hit his SUV with a sign.
The officer wrote in his report:
“(Police) observed Mr. Smith’s sign, and I highly doubt that this poorly constructed cardboard sign could or would have caused damage to a motor vehicle. I searched the ground for anything that (the defendant) could have perceived would cause damage, but I did not see any.”
At Barnstable District Court, the defendant pleaded not guilty to the charge of “assault and battery on a person 60 years or older/disabled person”; he was released without having to post bail.
Two things.
First, the tribalized among us are giving themselves permission to hurt others.
Second, a FlaglerLive commenter recently tried to bastardize the idea of release without having to post bond as some sort of big negative political issue. Why he tried to make a mountain out of a molehill makes little sense, but to some perhaps molehills indeed truly are mountains.
As a senior prosecutor, I used to tell new young prosecutors that they were not here to save the world. Their job was to seek justice. I would add that if society could fall because a prosecutor lost a DUI trial, society would have fallen a long time ago. Our work was important, but keep perspective. Just do your job and when it gets done go on to the next case.
I was taught this in Sarasota by a senior prosecutor when I was a young prosecutor. He told me that I was paid to make decisions in order to resolve cases, and that that was my job. If I couldn’t make the decisions necessary to resolve cases, then my case load would back up on me and my docket would quickly become so big that I would no longer have the time needed to think about how to resolve my cases.
He told me that every prosecutor’s docket has a number of good cases on it, but there are always bad cases, too. No matter where a prosecutor went, there would be bad cases on the new docket. If I wanted to handle my case load, I needed to learn how to categorize each of the bad cases. A “dog” case was one that could be fixed with some hard work. A “barking dog” case could never really be fixed, not matter how hard I worked, so those needed to be pled out as salvaging what I could. A “barking dog case with fleas” was so hopeless that it needed to be dropped. The sooner I learned how to distinguish between the three types of dog cases, he said, the more time I would have to be able to devote to those bad cases that could be fixed.
Here is an example of a “barking dog with fleas” case:
I represented a young man on a possession of cocaine charge. After work, he attended evening classes at then-DBCC. A police officer stopped a car, a rental, driven by my client’s sister, at night. My client was the front seat passenger. The stop took place on a road directly between DBCC and his home. His sister told me that she had picked him up from DBCC and that she had borrowed the rental car from a friend for that purpose.
Earlier that day in another city, a young Black male had successfully evaded a stop by fleeing at high speed. The pursuing officers could only describe the driver as a Black male. That car was the rental car the the sister was driving, and the police had been looking for it ever since the flight.
The stopping officer searched the rental car. He wrote in his report that he searched the floor mat using a flashlight and tweezers. He wrote that he had plucked one at a time enough tiny flakes of a white substance from the carpet on the passenger side floor board to use a presumptive field test kit, but the test consumed all of the flakes, so no much more accurate FDLE test could be performed. Somehow, this was enough for the intake division to file a charge against my client.
The trial prosecutor opened for the first time his new file when I called him. I asked him to read the reports. I waited. I then asked him if he was prepared to go to trial. He immediately told me that he was dropping the case.
Every jury is told two things. Before they can convict, they must find that a crime had occurred and that the defendant was the person who had committed the crime.
The experienced trial prosecutor could see that even if he could prove that tiny flakes of something that a field test has shown positive, but could no longer be tested by far more accurate tools, his evidence established that the rental car had been driven by an unidentified Black male earlier that day. He knew the fact that an unidentified Black male had driven the rental car hours earlier did not prove that my client had ever been in the car before that evening. Absent proof that the defendant had placed on the floorboard those tiny flakes that needed to be plucked with a tweezer, the prosecutor knew that he couldn’t prove that the defendant was the one who had committed either necessary facet of the crime.
Does anyone who seats himself on the front passenger seat of a car driven by a family member at night search the passenger side floorboards with a flashlight before entering to ensure that no cocaine flakes are among the detritus that accumulates on the carpeting between vacuuming?
Barking dog with fleas, indeed! But he still had a record of being arrested.
This is for the most gullibly stupid who wander among us, a community right now that commonly savages undocumented immigrants.
If an undocumented immigrant comes into the country in 1980 at the age of two, therefore lacking the capacity to display the intent necessary to prove the minor misdemeanor offense of crossing the border, and if that undocumented immigrant is arrested for a minor misdemeanor in 2000 that is almost immediately dropped, is the arrest a good arrest? Was it a dog case? Was it a barking dog case? Was it a barking dog case with fleas. She was not ever convicted of the crime alleged in the complaint affidavit!
In 2025, that undocumented immigrant who has never been convicted of a crime would now be 47 years old.
If the announced goal of the current administration is to deport the worst of the worst of the undocumented who live among us all, where does this undocumented immigrant fall into that spectrum? If she has graduated from high school and earned a college degree and married and cared for a family and built a business that employs Americans and cared for her community and developed her own church family, why should she ever be deported? Why should we ever deport undocumented immigrants who are better people than the many FlaglerLive commenters who want to see her harmed?
Yes, deport the violent undocumented immigrants among us. That is important. I remain curious, though. Just how many of the over 300 convicted murderers that the Cato Institute says the first Trump administration released from detention into the American countryside have been picked up so far this year? Why isn’t today’s administration bragging about picking up those released murderers that President Trump had released during his first administration?
This is from the Cato Institute report, a think tank that cannot ever plausibly be considered a liberal organization.
From January 2017 to February 2020 (when the pandemic erupted into the world), the Trump administration released more than 58,000 convicted criminals who were not U.S. citizens. That total included 8,620 violent criminals and 306 murderers. According to the Cato Institute report, President Trump had signed an executive order that deprioritized the detention of the worst of the criminal immigrants in order to focus on putting into crowded detention centers “asylum seekers.”
Again, the Cato Institute is known as a center right leaning think tank. One of its long-term focuses has been immigration policies. President Obama had long before signed an executive order that emphasized keeping the most violent immigrants in overcrowded detention facilities. That’s right. President Trump revoked President Obama’s order of prioritization so that his administration could prioritize the detaining of asylum seekers. 306 murderers who would have been prioritized for deportation under the Obama administration were released during Trump’s first term, according to the Cato Institute.
From the report many of the criminal immigrants had already served their prison terms.
Also, according to the Cato Institute report, Biden administration policies then reversed what Trump did during his first term, so that a “significant reduction” in the numbers of violent convicted immigrants released took place during Biden’s years in office, compared to how many violent convicted immigrants that were released during the first Trump administration.
Ray W. says
Reuters reports that a large off-shore crude oil reserve has been found off the coats of Suriname, a tiny island populated by about 650,000 people.
Suriname expects in time the export of as much as 220,000 barrels of crude oil per day. Compared to the world’s daily demand for crude oil, 220,000 barrels per day isn’t much, but with only 650,000 residents, whatever oil revenue Suriname keeps will be a significant boost to the South American nation’s economy.
During an interview of Suriname’s new president, Jennifer Geerlings-Simons, a former family physician, the Newsweek interviewer learned that her goal is to spread the wealth evenly.
Said the president:
“Surinamese people and Surinamese companies need to participate in everything that the oil will bring. … Otherwise, some people will get rich and my people will stay poor — and that’s not what we want.”
According to the reporter, the Surinamese government has been watching and learning from its neighbor, Guyana, a nation that has been undergoing growth pains from its own rising oil revenue.
Asked how she would “diagnose” Suriname, its president said:
“The patient is definitely not too well at the moment economically, it needs some medicine. … The medicine you give to a patient, to improve the patient, must be given in the way it needs to be given.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
With improved drilling equipment rated for use at greater depths, crude oil deposits are being found all over the world. Egypt just found minor deposits, but they exist nonetheless. Significant reserves of natural gas deposits exist off the coast of Gaza, but Israel doesn’t want Gazans to profit from them. A huge reserved was recently found off the coast of Argentina. Brazil is expanding its offshore fields. Guyana’s production is not done ramping up. Crude oil extraction continues to rise in the Caspian Sea. Ukrainian crude oil reserves need investment to expand. Cypress is home to a newly identified large natural gas field.
Crude oil from American shale rock formations is being depleted at a significant rate. The lowest hanging fruit in the Permian Basin will be depleted in a few years. What oil remains, and there is a lot of it left, will be harder to access and more expensive to exploit. Issues with international supply and demand will determine whether American oil exploitation will grow, remain the same, or lessen. If the break-even point for American shale crude is $60 per barrel and if the break-even point for Surinamese deep-water pooled crude turns out to be $45 per barrel and if energy extraction companies seek profit before politics, guess which fields will be exploited?
Pogo says
@Mr. Ray W
Sincerely, thank you; IMO, 2707 words well deserving the style of a guest column.
I wonder what you, and others, make of my comment.
Regards
Ray W. says
Hello Pogo.
Thank you.
I agree with you that a 2707 word submission can seem overly long for a comment, however well received and however the appropriate the reference to a guest column. But you are commenting to a person for whom a 50-page document was called a “brief.”
Mr. Tristam has turned other of my comments into guest columns. Whenever he did, I was glad for his editorial oversight and grammatical cleanup. My writing style has always been to just type what I am thinking, as scattershot as that may be. I then try to go back to restructure the effort, but flying fingers often lead to stylistic errors, and worse.
Ray W. says
It has now been nine months since President Trump took office.
As I have been doing for years, time to update FlaglerLive readers on just how the Dow has performed during each of the last eight presidents after nine months in office.
President Obama: up 21.4%.
President Biden: up 19.5%.
President Trump (first administration): up 17.7%.
President GHW Bush: up 12.9%.
President Clinton: up 11.2%.
President Trump (second administration): up 4.9%.
President Reagan: down 10.0%.
President GW Bush: down 16.6%.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
I long ago realized that one of the issues about which the professional lying class that sits atop one of our two parties was likely to lie was the stock market. For example, earlier this year, a significant sell-off in the markets occurred after the announcement of a tariff “Liberation Day.” When Trump backed off, the markets came roaring back. Trump then said that the gain was “the largest gain in the stock market in history.”
So I began posting comments about the Dow each month. Every time a pestilential partisan member of faction posts a comment to the FlaglerLive site about President Biden having destroyed America, here is one possible response.
I take the position that people who invest their money do not really care who is in the presidency; they care whether the American economy is stable and whether their money can be safely parked somewhere, anywhere, where thought best at the moment.
Yes, there are real flaws in this type of comment, as values can change in a heartbeat and each new administration faces its own unique problems, self-inflicted or not. For example, the Iran-Iraq War began in September 1980, but the oil shock occurred much later. This could explain why Reagan’s Dow was down by 10% after his first nine months in office.
But the Dow has been around for a century; it is, perhaps, a bulwark or a safe harbor, as much as anything can be, with bulwark being defined, in one part, as: “a person, institution, or principle that acts as a defense.”
Ray W. says
According to a BBC story, the Bank of England’s governor, Andrew Bailey, told a House of Lord’s financial services regulation committee that it was “important” to take “very seriously” two recent collapses by American companies, First Brands (a car parts supplier) and Tricolor (a subprime car lender).
The issue, as he saw it, was whether loans issued in the “private credit market” were of sufficient quality. The private credit market is a place from which companies can obtain loans from non-bank lenders.
Governor Bailey said that he was conflicted. Were the failures “idiosyncratic” or were they “the canary in the coal mine?” “Are they telling us something more fundamental abut the private finance and private assets sector? … I think that’s still a very open question in the U.S. I think it’s a question we have to take very seriously.”
He reminded the committee:
During the 2008 financial crisis, there had been a belief that sub-prime mortgages were “too small to be systemic.” It turned out that this attitude had been the “wrong call.”
A Bank of England deputy governor, Sarah Breeden, told the same committee:
“We can see the vulnerabilities here. … We can see parallels with the global financial crisis [of 2007-09].”
Governor Bailey also told the committee that the Bank of England was about to undergo a “stress test” of private equity and credit firms.
On this issue of the two company failures, J.P. Dimon, of JPMorgan fame, said to analysts:
“My antenna goes up when things like this happen. … I probably shouldn’t say this, but when you see one cockroach, there are probably more.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Red flags.
I still accept the idea that Trump’s tariff policies have been so massive compared to what existed before that no one has a working algorithm that offers any sense of reliability of what is happening, just as no economist had a working model from which to infer the outcome of throwing trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars into the American economy after the onset of the pandemic. We didn’t know then and we still do not truly know now why things happened as they did after the pandemic.
For the second time in five years, for completely different reasons, the world is in uncharted economic waters.
Sherry says
Dear Pogo,
Your comments are always well attended by me! Although often many of our comments are overshadowed. Therefore, there are times I do not bother to post. I really appreciate your brevity.
Ed P says
Ray W,
Things to keep in mind when comparing stock market performance.DJIA.
-these are nominal percentage changes in the index, not adjusted for inflation, dividends, or even when a Dow company is switched out and replaced. 59 companies have been changed to date.
-there isn’t any reliable first 9 months data available according to multiple Ai platforms
– market performance is indeed influenced by many factors beyond the president’s policies, hence it is not a direct measure of the president.
– an incoming administration “inherits” an economy and market.
Never the less, it’s interesting.
Ray W. says
Thank you, Ed P.
I openly admit there are weaknesses to presenting a monthly update of the Dow, by president, not least of which comes from the fact that there are at least three other stock indices that merit consideration.
I wrote of Reagan’s Dow performance being affected by the Iran-Iraq War to give weight to the point that you raised.
I only present these monthly updates to offer some perspective, however slight, to counter the political lies and lie laundering that are used to purposely cloud current economic issues.
Your point about incoming presidents inheriting an economy is a very valid point. Reagan inherited “stagflation” of more than a decade in the making; it lasted until about 1983, when years of high lending rates set by the Fed finally drove down inflation. Clinton inherited a GHW Bush recession, but the tax increases signed into law by Bush triggered growth of a type not seen in a long time before Clinton took office and not seen at all since he left office. Obama inherited the aftereffects of the Great Recession, but policies implemented by Bush and Obama repaired most of the structural damage so that Trump fortuitously inherited a nearly healthy economy when he took office in 2017. Biden inherited a pandemic-damaged economy, but the policies implemented by both Trump and Biden again repaired most of the structural damage caused by the pandemic. In 2025, Trump inherited from the Biden administration an economy that both The Economist and the Wall Street Journal called the “envy of the world.”
In 2021, after trillions of dollars of unfunded stimulus money was forcefully injected into an economy crashing into recession, nearly every economist thought that the economy would soon overheat and then crash back down into recession. They were wrong, but it can be argued that they were wrong because no government had ever injected anywhere close to the many trillions of dollars into such a structurally damaged economy. There simply was no backwards looking economic model that could predict what was about to happen. Soon, economists were saying a soft landing without recession. In time economists began to talk about no landing at all and a smooth flight into a healthy economy. None of this was predicted in 2021.
Now, we are in a tariff-impacted economy of a type that hasn’t happened since the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930. No economist has a backward looking algorithm that works, because the tariffs are simply too big. It will take years to develop working economic models and we will have to struggle through whatever is to come. No economist can assess a possible future under these economic conditions.
You are right. It will take years to know the true effects of the Trump tariff and immigration policies. No enough time has passed from any true assessment. We have yet to sign a comprehensive trade act with any of the countries on which tariffs were placed. We have trade deals on specific items, such as cars with Great Britain and Japan. Dribs and drabs of trade solutions have been agreed to with many countries, but no comprehensive trade deals. India is said to be next. Who knows? Maybe by the end of this week, we will have the first true comprehensive trade agreement since tariffs were implemented, covering thousands and thousands of goods and services, with India.
But make no mistake. Whatever the impact of his inheriting the comparatively healthy Biden economy, Trump and Trump alone owns the effect of the tariff policies he has implemented and Trump and Trump alone owns the effect of the immigration policies he has forced onto the economy, come what may. Any attempt by the professional liars and the amateur lie launderers to divert blame away from Trump will be Trump simply refusing to take personal responsibility for his actions.
Sherry says
Regarding the Fox video on this article. . . randy fine, what a complete core Maga politician! At least Fox admitted there were protests and their talking heads did push back against fine’s complete BS! Compare fine’s BS talking points to the Maga comments posted here, ad nauseam :
1. (7 MILLION) Protestors are “Idiots/Morons/Stupid”
2. Protestors are “Paid”
3. trump should be President for an “unconstitutional” 3rd term. . . etc. etc. etc.
How is it that horrific randy fine remains in office?
Vote for the person, not the party! Wake Up Florida voters!