The Truth About Trump’s First 100 Days
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All right, we’re going to do a Trump first 100 days mailbag. I know, been hammering them, been hammering them over the past month. And I think I’ve made my points very clear. you know, just in case, just in case some people are maybe not hearing me correctly, or I’m not articulating myself properly, we’re going to go through this again. I was actually surprised. I haven’t gotten the
Never gonna listen to you again, Chris, emails, which I get from time to time when I go after someone’s favorite politician, whether it be left, right, middle doesn’t make any difference. But I did get some and I’m actually happy people were quite respectful in their comments. And what I’ve garnered from their emails is maybe I’m not making making myself perfectly clear.
I’m going to I’m going to point out one email and again, there’s kind of the tone across the ones that I did get from people that were concerned about what I had to say. Basically saying that my. What I teach on my show is not paying attention to the markets and trying to predict the markets is an exercise in futility, yet I’ve been spending a great deal of time.
Going after Trump’s tariffs in relation and how they are affecting the markets But basically saying I can’t have it both ways and that Trump is trying something different than what the they’re saying a lot of people say what Globus Elise elites have dished out for decades and Saying that we don’t change this trade. We’re we’re gonna be essentially screwed as a country Couple points made
you know, one of my catchphrases isn’t it’s true, you are what your record says. It is it’s Bill Parcell’s not me. And they checked off some things here. And this is important. You know, the border doge tariffs. Again, I’ll get into that in a second. No new wars. That’s that’s good. Dealing with Iran, hopefully permanent tax cuts, inflation, easing and saying that these are all
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These are all good things. I’m gonna break this down. We’ll go through point by point by point. First and foremost, let’s go, let’s take a look at Trump’s polls right now. And I know I’m gonna get them all. You can’t trust the mainstream media. You can’t trust this. You can’t trust that. Series of polls out there has Trump at a lowest 100 day approval rating in 80 years. And this is again, that one that
Trump ripped into that poll and some of the other ones who are lengthy, lengthy, lengthy truth social post ripping the media and the various different pollsters out there. And he was across the board. went after New York Times, went after the ABC Washington News poll, went after the Fox News poll. Again, he’s saying that he’s got the best numbers ever. Okay. Yeah, I’ll give it to him. Let’s pretend he’s right in that one.
Here’s a poll of just Republicans saying that Trump, Trump’s not focusing on the right priorities. His approval among independents are down. View of Trump’s handling of inflation tariffs and economy, basically 35%, which is not good. Now, again, I’m not spiking the football. I’m not going after him because the reality of the situation has been paying attention to this program. I want the president to do well.
I do again, you heard this program, I, you know, early stages of his presence. It was like Christmas every day with what was taking place. And I made that perfectly clear. I want to take you back in time, actually. never forget this. Never forget this. I wasn’t like George W. Bush to talk like this, but after he won, the second time around against John Kerry, and I actually remember this correctly.
know, Carrie, I don’t know, they were trying to do some vote manufacturing at night. Remember Carrie wouldn’t concede until the next day. But anyway, Bush gave a speech. Remember him giving the speech and he, remember he said, know, gave credit to the architect, Karl Rove. And he kind of was puffing his chest out a little bit saying, I have, said this and I’m paraphrasing, but very close. And I remember it.
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I have political capital and I am going to spend it.
Now, that political capital went away quickly. was, again, I was very encouraged with what was gonna take place in W’s second term, first and foremost, basically reforming social security. And we would be in a much different place right now if he was able to get that accomplished, but.
because of all of the problems in Iraq, he spent all of his political capital there. Again, when faced, Republicans came in and basically told W, no, now we can’t do social security. You don’t have the political capital anymore. This is true.
It’s true. What happened? What happened two years into his second term? Pelosi happened. Remember that? Pelosi got the gavel. And I remember even in that, I was embarrassing. know, George W. Bush went up and kissed her ass. I mean, absolutely kissed her ass when she, guess, when she was the first woman speaker.
of the house and he had this lengthy story about Nancy Pelosi and her political family out of Baltimore. I’ll never forget that. was like, huh? But anyway, anyway, neither here nor there. Maybe he was trying to bring in goodwill, but then we all know how that worked out. When you lose political capital, you can’t get anything done.
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When you lose political capital, you cannot get anything done. most of the people out there are freaking out because of the, this activist judge and that activist judge and this judge shouldn’t be doing this and this judge shouldn’t be doing that. You wanna take the judges out of the equation? It’s simple. You legislate. Rather than running the country by executive order, and again, this country,
is not supposed to be run by executive order. We are a republic. You run it through Congress. All of these checks that this individual sent and things that he was happy about, border close, deporting illegals, that’s all well and good. But you have to make these rules laws. Or it’s just gonna, next administration coming, somebody you don’t like, they’re gonna just
Change it. Doge? Doge is finding lots of things, my friends. They are, and we’re cheering these things on. But guess what? Nothing’s been caught.
You think stuff has been cut? it’s been pointed out. But I’d like to remind you that Republicans just signed off. Just signed off on that continuing resolution that funded all of these things. So unless these things are written out of any sort of budget bill moving forward, everything that DOJ has done basically amounts to naught.
outside of trimming the government workforce, but again, that capital is still there too. tariffs starting to bring some investment back to the United States. The announcements that you’re seeing today, you had an announcement by IBM, it was $150 billion here in the United States. I know you may not want to believe this, but these companies were planning on doing much of this anyway.
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Do understand? You attract investment back to the United States, it’s not because of tariffs. It’s not because of tariffs, it’s because it’s a better place to do business. Case in point, case in point, Spain today, Spain, Portugal, part of France, different parts of Europe, massive blackout. Massive blackout, you know what Spain did? Actually, I’m not making this up.
I think it was two days ago. They were just said, hey, we are the first, this is the first time in Spain’s history, they’re all of their, all their entire country is running on renewables. Solar, wind, hydro, whatever it may be. Yep. No joke. A couple of days after complete and total blackout. If you’re a manufacturing company, do you want to deal with that? Probably not. Probably not. We have a lot of things going for us that make us a very attractive place.
to set up shop in certain things.
Certain, there’s certain thing, absolutely. But other types of manufacturing, not so much. Again, no new wars, cross, know, blessing myself. I hope that that stays that way. Hopefully we can get an agreement with Iran. These are good things. Permanent tax cuts. This is part of the problem, okay? It’s part of the problem what I’m talking about. That to me was, you know,
Obviously the budget and cutting spending was priority number one. He just made his job that much more difficult. That much more difficult because of what’s taking place with the tariffs. You’re losing political capital for what?
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For what? Now, I’m gonna address the points we made talking about the markets. Yeah, I’m very clear when it comes to the markets. And I also said time and time again over the course of this month, when these tariffs first hit, said business will find a way. Markets will eventually recover. They will. But again, again, having markets drop like they have and as volatile they have, it’s not good.
It’s not good for your popularity by any stretch of the imagination. We all know that. And again, it’s not a good look for the United States. Put that aside. This is again, I may be, again, I’ve only said it a hundred times, but obviously I didn’t say it the right way. Take the market and put it aside. My biggest concern is for small businesses here in this country.
I said it this weekend, I said it last week, I’ve said it time and time again. And I made this point clear. know, Walmart, Target, Home Depot had an Oval Office meeting with the President last week. Big companies can do that. Small businesses can’t.
They can’t and they’re feeling it for crying out loud. These numbers don’t lie. mean, let’s take a look. I mean, story after story out there, small business after small business, items, certain items right now, you can’t even source here in the United States. Yeah, certain companies like Iron Ore, certain things that are very, it’s not a high margin business by any stretch of imagination.
you to build a an actual foundry to do that hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. Nobody’s going to do it here because it’s a low margin business. So people’s costs are going up when they have to source this from other places around the globe, making it difficult. Farmers right now are flipping out. They just there’s it’s a basically they’re saying it’s a full blown crisis right now.
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There’s the amount of food that we send to China is crushing farmers. And this is what we’re getting from the administration. President Trump is ready to bail out American farmers if commodity exports continue to fall, particularly involving pork and soybean sales to China. This is from the agricultural secretary. So what you’re saying is, okay, you’re collecting these tariffs.
You’re crushing farmers here in the United States. Then you’re gonna take those tariffs and you’re just gonna pay the farmers?
That doesn’t make any sense at all. At all. a lot of stories out there talking with the American manufacturers and American products and these many of these American companies, they can source 90, 95 % of what they do here in the United States. But it’s sometimes that 10, that five, 10 % which can basically wreck their business when it comes to margins. They don’t have.
They don’t have a line into the Oval Office. Who is sticking up for them right now? The trucking industry. America’s mom and pup truckers in dire straits right now. again, again, like I said before, this tariff stuff, Trump loses the lawsuits that are being filed or there’s an injunction filed making them
quite frankly unconstitutional and I believe them to be unconstitutional because it’s a tax. It’s a tax. Pick up your, I’ll grab it, got it handy all the time. Pick up your constitution, okay? It’s not the president that can tax, it’s Congress that has the power to do this and stop with this emergency nonsense, okay? It’s not gonna hold up in court. It’s not.
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You know, again, what did I say before? Save Trump. Save Trump. This is what Republicans have to do, that save his presidency. He’s got many things going on that I happen to agree with. Hurting small business is, frankly, it’s not one of them. I’m gonna go through a lot of numbers right now. know numbers are difficult when it comes here. I want you to pay close attention.
put together. First, I’m going to share with you some anecdotes from the past week. At Southwest Airlines, say, I don’t care if you call it a recession or not, in this industry, that’s a recession. Chipotle, saving money because of concerns around the economy was the overwhelming reason consumers were reducing the frequency of restaurant visits. Pepsi, relative to where we were three months ago.
We probably aren’t feeling as good about the consumer now. Again, again, three months ago, we’re in a different place. Follow some of these numbers, okay? Again, they don’t lie. First and foremost, okay, from a container ship, container ship from China to the United States takes anywhere between 20 to 40.
days, 20 to 40 days. Right now, what we’re seeing, what we’re seeing is, well, we’re seeing empty ships or ships that are not sailing. We’ll go over some of the numbers. Prior to the tariffs, inventories were built up by many companies. This is across everything, every single federal
Reserve Bank and their studies out there put out that inventories went up before the tariffs went into place. We right now have the sharpest decline in earnings outlook since 2020. New orders right now, manufacturing are collapsing. You have a sharp reversal in corporate capital expenditures, CapEx spending plans. Companies are
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not doing anything right now. This is what happens when I’ve talked about this before. The minefield that can be created by government that scares businesses. Nobody wants to step on a landmine. Cost pressures are increasing. New orders are in contraction territory. This is where we’re at right now. Truck sales are down significantly. Significantly. CEO confidence.
declining, logistic managers index declining, China to US trade coming to a stop. And here it is, container ship count has fallen off a cliff. Tonnage fallen off a cliff and container freight rates are dropping as well.
How are consumers responding right now? Consumer confidence at record low levels. lot of front loading of purchases before tariffs began. Tourism is plummeting here in the United States from Europe and Canada. None of this is good, okay? None of this is going to help the president moving forward with his agenda.
None of it. Again, take the markets and put this aside. How would you feel?
How would you feel? Again, I’ve got clients all over the country, small business owners. They’re to care about the portfolio. They’re going to be fine with that. But what about their business?
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Whether or not that’s even, is it even worth it to stay in business anymore? Not knowing what to do, not knowing whether or not planning on hiring, planning on doing things, but you know what, I don’t know if I can. How is this right? How is this right? How is this a shot at the globalist’s elite?
You think Walmart, Target, those companies, they’ll be fine.
They’ll be fine. It’s the small companies that are going to be hurt. And again, some of the things that he’s floating right now, quite frankly, and again, this this bothers me, okay? He has to be a little bit more intelligent with his comments. He has to stop making stuff up. Again, I don’t know if it’s part of the plan and I don’t get it, but you know,
this idea that tariffs are going to eliminate income taxes. Have you actually, play with a calculator people. Just because it sounds good, doesn’t make it realistic. I, again, I’m gonna tell you another quick short story. Back when I was in sixth grade, I’ve told this story before. Everything I needed to know about politics I learned in sixth grade, we had class elections every single semester, every 10 weeks.
And I lost the election for president to a young lady that promised the entire class that we were going to go on a spring break in Disney World. going to be a class trip. I grew up in upstate New York and went to a public school. There was no way in hell we were going on a trip. It didn’t matter. It sounded good. It sounded good. Some of the things that Donald Trump is floating out there.
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sound good, but are not possible. Okay, first and foremost, the idea that you’re gonna replace the income tax with tariffs. All right, let’s just, I’m gonna, again, it’s so ridiculous and I know people get upset when I point out how ridiculous it is, because you love the guy, but come on. We import $3.5 trillion worth of products.
to cover, to cover the income tax, we would have to tariff at 50 % across the board. Okay? 50 % across the board to cover income taxes from people who make $200,000 or less, because he said, yep, nobody under $200,000 is gonna pay any taxes. Now.
Think about how the cost of everything, if you’re gonna put tariffs at 50 % and then be saying, well, know what? Great, gonna bring jobs back to America, bring things back to America. Okay, then they bring them back to America. Then where are your tariffs?
You see the logic in this? It doesn’t make any sense. You want to replace taxes with tariffs. And at the same time you want to bring all of these factories and businesses back to the United States, then there’s no more tariffs.
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It’s like Donald Trump’s catch-22. It’s not going to work.
We, and again, I’ve talked about the problems with education here in this country and how we have been doing things. This is not something that can be done with tariffs. It can’t be done over the short term. You want to onshore more here in the United States, it’s real simple. It’s the same reason why states like Texas and Florida,
and Tennessee and these low tax, low regulation states are attracting so many businesses. You become attractive, become more attractive than the rest of the globe. That’s all you need to do. And you know what? We have to change the way we are educating people in this country. We have to break big education.
Mike Rall, again, he do an interview. I don’t know who he was doing or what podcast was on. yeah, it was with some guy by the name of Theo Vaughn. I was listening to this, a bit of it. And basically echoing what we’ve been saying here on the program. We got $1.7 trillion in student debt on the books. 1.7 trillion. Again, see, I told you so. I knew this was gonna happen.
when Obama took it over. You know, you got 7.6 million job openings in the United States right now. Most of these jobs do not require a four year degree.
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They don’t. It’s a problem. Mike Rowe making the point that I made last week, the week before, we got almost seven million able-bodied men that are not in the workforce. They just quit. Because you can here in the United States. You can. We have a, you know, know how to play the safety nets and
What not a myriad of different things they don’t work
We need tradesmen. And this is what he said. He said, we took shop class out of high school. We robbed kids of the opportunity to see what that kind of work even looks like. We told a whole generation of kids that they were blanking screwed if they didn’t get a four year degree. He makes the same point that I make. Nothing in this country, nothing.
has gotten more expensive. Nothing. Healthcare, homes, it doesn’t matter. Over the past 40 years, nothing has become more expensive than a four year degree. Keep telling kids that they’re screwed if they don’t spend all of this money and get a college degree. And then we lend them the money to go and do this.
Again, it’s not tariffs people. We got to convince people that you know what again it starts I said it starts in eighth grade It’s the you could start thinking about this you could start getting kids excited
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Certain kids, we need people that can build ships and you get them on a program at an age where you see whether or not they like it, they can learn this trade, then they can finish high school and have a job paying six figures.
This is what needs to be done. This is the intelligent way of changing it. Do we need to, we want to, you again, change our workforce, rejigger our workforce? Do we want to attract more manufacturing here to the United States? Yes, but there’s a right way and a wrong way of doing it.
And this is obviously the wrong way.
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It’s not working.
I’m not worried about Wall Street. Wall Street is fine. It’ll take care of itself. I’m worried about mom and pop. Mom and pop small businesses, my clients, all across the country. Watchdog on wallstreet.com.
