Thursday, November 12th, 2026
Bill Bonner, from Paris, France
What’s wrong with peace and prosperity?
The press is reporting that the administration is ‘doubling down’ on the very policies that voters seemed to reject last week. CNN:
An outsider might have expected more reflection from Trump and his team after his red wall crumbled and they lost the House and the Senate to Democrats. Surely, the party needs to appeal to a wider audience if it is to reverse its losses and have a chance of winning back Congress and retaining the White House in 2028?
But revolutions rarely get more moderate. And having lost the political middle, Trump may now be down to his truest believers.
Picking up our theme from the last few days, it would have been so easy for Team Trump to throw the swing voters a bone. Not a trumped-up $5,000 bribe...but a real bone, with some meat on it...something they could gnaw on.
A war on inflation, for example. Cut spending. Call off the bombers. At least, Republicans could have pretended to be headed in the right direction. They might even have pretended to rediscover that ol’ Eisenhower-era religion — money in the bank and soldiers in their barracks. Pretending is something they’re good at.
But no! And now they are faced with a Democrat-controlled Congress, and — mirabile dictu! — even more anti-voter policies. In a larger sense, anti-voter policies are almost always what politicians offer. They take money from the taxpayers and use it on themselves and their crony projects. Washington Post:
Funding negotiations stalled over the summer because Democrats refused to support an increase in defense spending without a comparable rise in spending on domestic programs. With Democrats set to regain control of Congress, there is little incentive for them to take a deal weighted toward GOP priorities.
En gros, Republicans favor more for the military. Democrats favor more for domestic giveaways. They compromise...by agreeing to spend more on both of them! The balance shifts...like passengers moving from one side of the ship to the other...but the course continues unchanged. And as we saw last week, they’d rather lose an election than give up on the ‘spend and bomb’ agenda. An election loss is a temporary setback. Money not taken and spent may be lost forever.
And they’re doing this in the face of $40 trillion in debt...$2 trillion deficits...and handwriting on the wall so large that even a blind person can read it with his eyes closed:
Credit Crisis Dead Ahead
When it comes — and it shouldn’t be a long wait — it will almost certainly boost the deficit beyond the $3 trillion mark. If there are any fingers still with a grip on the ledge, that should crush them.
And yet, there is zero interest among politicians in avoiding the inevitable fall.
How to explain it?
We call the gods to the witness stand.
‘Isn’t it true that you amuse yourselves by making fools of mortals?’
‘Yes, of course it is.’
‘And don’t you tantalize us with dreams of wealth beyond our imagination?’
‘Yes, again.’
‘And then, it’s the old rug pull, isn’t it...and we fall on our faces?’
‘Uh huh.’
Pity the poor hapless speculators who bought the Trump family meme coins. The idea was simple enough. The dollar is not real. It is just a marker that entitles its holder to trade it for real wealth. That is the general idea behind all currencies, cryptos...and memes. They have no value in themselves. But if people are willing to buy them...well...smarter people are willing to sell!
Our general theory of Trump is that he is a failure at everything — except at being a success. His enterprises fail. His declarations are untrue, mistaken, or unreliable. His policies are mostly counterproductive. Still, by some magic not yet bottled, he became the most powerful man in the history of the world.
And so, he turned his remarkable ingenuity to finding ways to cash in. One way was to be a seller of a meme coin...counting on people to want to have and hold it...bid up its price...and make profits for themselves and, more to the point, for the Trump family.
The coin was released on January 17th, 2025 and sold for $75.34. Today it fetches barely one dollar.
Only three days after the Donald’s coin was launched, it was followed by the Melania coin. Surely Trump fans would want both of them...king and queen of the MAGA movement. The Melania coin was never as appealing as Donald’s coin. It sold for only $13.73 when it came out. But now it’s back in the cereal box. Today, the going rate is about 6 cents...a 99.5% loss.
Meanwhile, the US dollar is looking more and more like a ‘meme coin.’ The US is running a $2 trillion deficit in what is advertised as a ‘golden’ year for the US economy. In round numbers, the interest on the federal debt is increasing at twice the rate of inflation…and three times the rate of GDP growth. And the two parties — custodians of the nation’s treasure — are ‘horse-trading’ to spend more money and make inflation worse.
Rug pull, still ahead.
Regards,
Bill Bonner
