Wallstreet Window:
The stock market has barely been moving day by day this year at the same time that things are getting weirder in America.
Now tonight is Donald Trump's first address to Congress and the American people.
I'm going to be watching it closely, because this address and the next 30 days is going to determine whether he himself is fake or real.
Is he someone who is truly looking to fix the problems of government or someone simply looking to create more division and chaos in the country in order to increase his own personal power?
I actually voted for Trump in the hopes that he would take action to move away from the failed economic policies, including Fed money printing, that have generated stock market gains over the years, but have failed to create real economic growth.
But I am starting to think I made a mistake and if I could go back again I would vote for someone else.
Last week Donald Trump made the statement that "news is fake."
It seems the Trump administration wants people to only listen to Trump and believe in him and not read newspapers anymore.
Trump himself has declared that the American news media is "the enemy of the American people."
These are the comments you see in authoritarian dictatorships and the type of phrase a Stalin or Hitler used.
Trump is not Hitler or Stalin, but it is very creepy.
It is the talk of someone who is frightened by reporters and either has something to hide now or seeks to assert control over society in the future.
This is not Ronald Reagan talking about freedom, liberty, and the ideals of the American constitution.
Instead all Trump ever does is talk about how great he is and he says he will make the nation great and he is great and try to conflate the two together as if they are the same thing.
It's about creating a one man cult of personality.
And now Trump and his political string man Steve Bannon are testing ways to make it so that only newspapers and media outlets that talk to him are ones that are totally loyal to him.
He targeted even BBC as a "fake news" outlet that had to be cut off.
The Trump administration did a briefing on Friday that barred access to everyone but a small handful of Trump sycophants to begin this test.
That sends a message to even them that they will have to remain loyal no longer what or they may lose their privileged position one day.
That is not what journalism is about.
I traveled by airplane this Sunday coming back home from a trip and while on the way back I read a copy of the establishment journal Foreign Affairs on the airplane.
There was an article in their by hedge fund manager John Paulson.
He became an economics advisor to Trump and wrote this article on behalf of the administration to explain their economic program to the Foreign Affairs crowd.
I thought to myself this is good to see, because if I read this article I can do what Trump wants me to do and get news from his administration unfiltered.
If I can just spend that time on the plan focused on the Trump article and not read anything else I will prevent myself from committing Trump treason.
Well, I read this article and there was talk about tax cuts in it and deregulation to grow the economy.
But there was not a single world about infrastructure spending, which was a hallmark of Trump's campaign talk and is supposed to be a big cornerstone of his in growing the economy.
Reading that made it look like Trump's campaign talk of infrastructure was just talk and BS.
Maybe tonight he will just say something really vague, but that sounds big about infrastructure so more people won't wonder about it like I did.
During the campaign, Trump said that the stock market is a dangerous bubble. He even said during one of the debates that it was going to pop!
But now Trump is tweeting that the stock market is great and is taking credit for the stock market gains!
So which is it - is the stock market a bubble or is it a good buy?
In the end, it seems like Trump says all kinds of things and wants to take credit for everything and anything, which is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes in which you see dictators take credit for even the flowers blooming in the spring.
I fear that Trump is simply winging it all of the time and has no real plan to do much at all when it comes to the economy.
Maybe he is doing the Bannon game plan of letting things go down the drain so he can then blame others for the chaos, create a panic, and use that to take control.
It is creeping people out!
He has yet to deliver a specific detailed plan to Republicans in Congress for tax cuts and the economy.
He only has talked generalities so far.
I fear that instead of doing real things what he is really doing is trying to create chaos and controversy as ways to energize his own voting base into a frenzy and cover up the reality that he actually is doing very little at all that is of real substance.
By declaring that anything but what he says is "fake" he is behaving like a weird cult leader.
So I'm curious to see if tonight if he will actually finally deliver real specifics about what he wants to do or if he will speak in mere generalities and go on more weird rants.
If he does the latter I'll be convinced that he is indeed a charlatan, which is what all strongmen are in the end.
I know the rants play well with a segment of people, but here is why a rant at this point would be a sign of weakness.
If Trump has a good specific detailed plan that he can pass then he will present it with full confidence knowing that he is about to make a good deal for the country.
He would then seek to bring Congress on his side with him.
If instead if this is a case of the dog eating his homework he will seek to hide the fact that he has nothing real by attacking Congress itself and then later placing the blame on them for his own lack of progress.
He would then eventually scapegoat Congress - just as we have seen him attack judges and then the press.
Now that wouldn't stop the Republican Congress from eventually passing tax cuts and doing some things, but it will mean that we are headed for times of chaos and political instability due to having put a charlatan in the White House.
Maybe Trump will turn out to be the real deal and tonight we will see dealmaker Trump.
If so I think we'll see him get real legislation going soon.
But these type of attacks on the media are a giant warning flag of someone up to no good.
I voted in the hopes we could get a President who could "make deals" and do things.
I assumed that after the campaign ended and Trump got in office that is what we would see.
But so far that has not been the case.
Instead, so far we are getting a man who is attacking the institutions of this country in a bad way.
Yesterday former President George Bush denounced Trump's attacks on a free press saying that "I think power can be very addictive, and it can be corrosive, and it's important for the media to call to account people who abuse their power, whether it be here or elsewhere."
"One of the things I spent a lot of time doing was trying to convince a person like Vladimir Putin, for example, to accept the notion of an independent press and it's kinda hard to, you know, tell others to have an independent, free press when we're not willing to have one yourself," Bush said.
President Bush has been gone for 8 years doing paintings.
He never came out to denounce Obama, but here is is saying bad things about Trump.
Yes the American news media is not perfect.
How many times have I attacked CNBC?
But if the choice is between having a diverse news media and living in a country like China or Russia were you really only have a few state controlled papers that have access to the leaders I would choose what we got now over authoritarian rule.
On tweets and in public Donald Trump has disparaged the CIA for past mistakes and the US military for "not winning" wars.
He claimed that the CIA was wrong about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
He is right about that.
But then last week when he asked for the intelligence community to give him information on which countries are terrorist threats and which are not the White House said that this is not the report they wanted!
It's like he only wants people to tell them what he wants to hear and if they try to tell the truth he goes crazy and throws a fit.
The news had a ripple effect that caused the inside the beltway publication Defense One to denounce Trump's talk in an article titled The High Costs of Politicizing Intelligence.
Trump says Bush was wrong to do that and then does it himself!
According to a Newsmax.com article, 36 Percent of the American people now fear that Trump will create a major war.
They are not the only ones that are worried that Trump might do something stupid.
Reports are that Secretary of Defense James Mattis and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are too.
Read this:
"Chairman Dunford has said little so far, but his role was brought to the fore by the president’s executive order reorganizing the National Security Council. The order left him, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer, without a permanent seat on the NSC’s most senior body, while giving one to Bannon. According to reporting from the Associated Press, it was on account of concern with these sorts of half-baked executive orders coming out of the White House that Mattis and Kelly arranged to have one of them in the country at all times during Trump’s initial weeks in office. While the detail is buried deep in the AP’s story, it’s a significant revelation. Essentially, it shows that it is military leaders, albeit retired, who feel the need to guard against the overreach of a civilian executive. It’s a phenomenon familiar to countries like Turkey or Egypt, but not the United States. Until now."
The only other time anything like that happened was in the final days of Richard Nixon.
This comes from a story on Politico.com, which is a must read:
www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/02/the-generals-guarding-american-democracy-214827Trump got real angry at the Wall Street Journal at his press conference the other week.
I am not going to stop my subscription to the Wall Street Journal despite what Donald Trump says about the news media being the "enemy of the people."
If reading the Wall Street Journal or you reading this email is considered Trump treason then so be it.
In order to make money in the markets you have to know what is happening.
As for the stock market right now it's dead.
Nothing is happening in it.
Volatility is totally gone.
Unless you bought months ago it is hard to buy now and make any money.
At this point few people are actually trading the markets anymore.
Everyone that wants to be has bought and is all-in.
And so the volume has vanished.
And the markets are being held up now by buybacks and robots - for now.
A Trump seeking to sow chaos will eventually turn into trouble for the stock market and economy itself.
-Mike
Michael Swanson
PO BOX 11658
DANVILLE VA 24543-5028