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The Supreme Court basically walked up to Trump’s global tariff machine, pulled the plug, and said, “You can’t just invent tax powers because you feel like it.”

In a 6–3 ruling, the Court said his sweeping “emergency” tariffs weren’t authorized by the statute he used (IEEPA), i.e., Congress never gave him a blank check to slap tariffs on everything that moves.

Markets loved it; stocks jumped as businesses saw years of chaos tariffs suddenly vanish.

But Trump? He called the justices “fools and lapdogs,” “disgraceful,” and implied they were basically foreign agents in robes.

If this were a movie, this is the part where the villain gets knocked off the roof…and then you hear a second pair of footsteps.

Within hours, Trump did what Trump always does: change venue, not behavior. Here’s how he’s already gaming the system and how he could keep doing it:

 He pivoted to a different law – the Trade Act – and slapped a new “global” tariff, first at 10%, then pushed it up to 15%, the max allowed under that authority.

The catch: these 15% tariffs are time‑bombs, limited to about 150 days unless Congress extends them, which means we now live on a rolling 5‑month tariff cliff.

 SCOTUS killed his emergency‑power blanket tariffs, but not every existing tariff structure.

So he can:

• Lean harder on other trade tools (antidumping, countervailing duties, “national security” angles).

• Constantly relabel the same tariffs under different statutory sections like a kid renaming the same homework “Version 2.0” after the teacher rejects it.

Section 122 gives him short‑run power and then dares Congress to vote “no” on “protecting American workers” if he asks to extend it.

Politicians hate being in front of a camera explaining why they voted against “American manufacturing,” so he’s weaponizing optics against process.

Every new tariff structure means: new lawsuits, new standing questions, new procedural hurdles. Legal chaos creates practical delay – even when he loses in the end, firms and consumers eat the uncertainty in the meantime.

The net effect: the Court shut one door; he’s now crawling through the vents.

While the legal fireworks go off, the macro backdrop is quietly turning into a horror score.Real GDP in Q4 2025 grew at just 1.4% annualized, down from 4.4% in Q3 – a brutal downshift. Economists had expected something closer to 2–3%, so the miss isn’t cosmetic; it’s a “the car just lost power on the highway” moment.

For the full year, GDP came in around the low‑2% range, but the trajectory is what matters:

• One quarter of outright contraction earlier in 2025.

• A big rebound mid‑year.

• Then a sharp slowdown into year‑end.

That pattern – stall, surge, fade – is what has recession‑spotters suddenly dusting off the “stagflation” vocabulary again: low growth, stubborn prices, political chaos layered on top.

Now add Trump’s fresh 10–15% global tariffs into an already slowing economy: higher import costs, tighter margins, and more incentive to cut investment right as growth is losing momentum.

The labor market isn’t collapsing. It’s doing something more insidious: fading.

Total nonfarm payrolls increased by 584,000 in all of 2025, roughly 49,000 per month.

In 2024, that number was about 2.0 million – more than triple the 2025 gain.

That’s the kind of slowdown economists notice:

• It’s still positive, so no headlines screaming “mass layoffs.”

• But it’s a massive deceleration in job creation, which tends to precede recessions by quarters, not days.

Now overlay immigration policy: research shows that aggressive deportations and enforcement – the sort of strategy Trump is pushing – remove millions of workers from the labor force and drag down employment for both immigrants and U.S.-born workers.

One detailed analysis suggests millions of potential job losses over several years and a net reduction in total employment versus what baseline projections expected.

So you’re shrinking the workforce with deportations, slowing job growth, and then layering tariffs that jam supply chains and raise costs.

That’s not how you build a booming labor market; that’s how you slowly starve it of oxygen. Put this together and you get a central bank that has a migraine.

• Growth is sliding: 1.4% instead of a healthier 2–3%.

• Job growth is way down from the prior year.

• Tariffs are inflationary on the margin, pushing up import and consumer prices.

Economists who spent the last few years saying “soft landing” now have to recalibrate:

• If they focus on growth and jobs, this starts to look like pre‑recession territory.

• If they focus on tariffs and price pressures, it looks like slow growth plus sticky inflation – the stagflation combo nobody wants.

For the Fed, that’s the nightmare: cut rates and you risk turbo‑charging tariff‑driven inflation; hold rates high and you risk choking an economy that’s already losing speed.

Either way, the odds of “we glide gently into 2027” just dropped.

Economically, deportations are not just a “border” story; they’re a GDP story.

Studies of past enforcement waves show that aggressive deportation campaigns reduce immigrant employment by hundreds of thousands and eventually drag down employment for U.S.‑born workers too.

One projection finds that several million deportations could lead to nearly 6 million fewer jobs overall after a few years – immigrant and U.S.-born combined.

Fewer workers means:

• Less production capacity.

• Lower potential GDP.

• Slower growth even if productivity holds steady.

Now place that inside Trump’s tariff‑centric world:

• Tariffs raise costs and disrupt trade flows.

• Deportations squeeze the labor supply.

• GDP is already slowing sharply.

You don’t need a PhD to see where that road tends to lead; you just need a chart with a line that starts high and keeps drifting down.

So where does that leave us?

• A President whose flagship tariff strategy just got gutted, and who immediately found a new legal door to walk through.

• A legal framework that technically restrains him but in practice lets him keep imposing short‑run global tariffs and daring Congress and the courts to keep up.

• An economy that just printed 1.4% growth instead of the healthier pace many expected, with job gains that look more like a cough than a roar.

• A labor force eroded by deportations that research suggests will cut employment by millions over time and weigh on GDP.

The cynical takeaway for your readers: the Supreme Court can strike down a statute, but it can’t strike down a personality.  

Trump will keep turning every obscure clause in the trade laws into a lever, every tariff into a headline, and every legal defeat into a fundraising email – while the actual economy quietly absorbs the costs in lower growth, weaker hiring, and a smaller workforce.

If this is a thriller, we’re not at the meteor‑impact scene yet.  

We’re at the part where everyone’s still arguing about whether the bright light in the sky is “transitory.”

Could This Be Another Episode of Wag The Dogs Tail…

If tomorrow’s news alert said “Trump Orders Strike on Iran,” I wouldn’t be shocked — I’d just update my portfolio.

You know things are upside down when geopolitical conflict sounds less like catastrophe and more like a trading signal. But that’s America in 2026: we don’t fear explosions; we price them in.

The pattern’s older than the Fed. When domestic turbulence hits fever pitch — tariffs biting supply chains, the Supreme Court playing political limbo, and God forbid Epstein’s ghost trending again — Washington tends to look outward. Suddenly we hear about rogue states, freedom, national security, or democracy “under threat.” Translation: the news cycle needs a new villain.

You don’t even need to believe in conspiracy. Just pay attention to incentives. Distraction is the oldest currency in politics, and few politicians understood that market better than Trump.

The guy was born for a media-driven battlefield — the kind you can wage over cable news and Twitter without moving a single battalion. Remember 2020? Every crisis was either “the greatest in history” or “fake news.” There was no in-between, only reactions, ratings, and retweets.

So when the headlines look ready to devour him again, I’d bet he reaches for something dramatic — and few things grab attention like explosions in the Strait of Hormuz.

Let’s start with the domestic backdrop. The tariff war — excuse me, the “Economic Re-Alignment Initiative” — hasn’t exactly worked magic. Prices have gone up, supply chains are weirdly delicate, and the market’s starting to notice that maybe, just maybe, taxing trade isn’t a growth hack. Corporate margins are thinning faster than political patience.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is embroiled in its latest “constitutional interpretation” that somehow manages to anger everyone equally, and the Epstein files are dribbling into public view like some cursed sequel nobody asked for. It’s chaos — and chaos can’t be contained with tweets anymore.

When the domestic narrative becomes toxic, the surest way to spin the camera is to stage something globally dramatic. It doesn’t even have to be a real war, just something loud enough to make CNBC switch graphics.

Think of it as the Wag the Dow strategy. Wars and rumors of wars have been bullish for investors since forever. Markets love decisive action, even if it’s reckless. Energy stocks spike, defense contractors sprint, and suddenly volatility traders are salivating.

It’s the ultimate form of economic stimulus — fear-based adrenaline. You can’t pass a spending bill through Congress, but you can always launch “limited strikes” and then hold a press conference in front of a flag.

Boeing gets a bump, Raytheon gets orders, oil futures get frothy, and Twitter gets hysterical. Everybody wins, except common sense.

And the market, God bless it, reacts just as you’d expect. “Geopolitical tensions rise, but investors shrug as earnings remain strong.”

It’s the same script every time. Analysts polish their talking points while the algorithms interpret missile launches as “short-term volatility.” By the next trading day, futures are green again because apparently, war is fine — as long as it doesn’t interrupt earnings season.

We’re living in a time when every geopolitical crisis instantly converts into line-item analysis. Who benefits? Energy, defense, maybe gold miners. Who suffers? Airline margins, emerging markets, sanity. It’s all calculations now — bloodshed turned into basis points.

Distraction isn’t just politics; it’s the economy’s PR strategy. The White House doesn’t need real growth if it can stage competent optics. One strong “rally-round-the-flag” week can bury months of bad headlines. And like any CEO who misses a quarter, Trump knows it’s not about fixing fundamentals — it’s about managing perception long enough to survive the next earnings call.

Nationalism, tariffs, military swagger — it’s all brand management for a presidency that survives on dopamine spikes. The media obliges, because conflict sells. There’s no profit in calm. The entire ecosystem — cable news, markets, Twitter, even your uncle’s Facebook feed — thrives on volatility.

Think about it: traders panic when markets go flat. Media panics when ratings plateau. Politicians panic when headlines cool off. Everyone’s trying to manufacture motion. And when attention starts drifting to unflattering realities — like how many subpoenas are on the docket or how many deleted emails resurfaced — nothing resets the cycle like a “strong national response” overseas.

We like to imagine the market as a rational machine weighing probabilities and earnings, but it’s really a dopamine casino. Price is just the collective mood swings of millions of people pretending they’re objective. And right now, that mood rewards chaos.
When violence looks “contained” and “priced in,” tech rallies. When sanctions hit oil, the Saudis smile. Defense ETFs hit all-time highs while the humanitarian cost gets written off as “collateral volatility.”

It’s grotesque but efficient — a perfect feedback loop where markets react to conflict, then fund the next one. Every crisis becomes a ticker symbol.

That’s why I wouldn’t be surprised if a conveniently timed skirmish emerged right as domestic issues reach a crescendo. It wouldn’t even need to succeed militarily. It just needs to change the conversation.

Because that’s the whole game: attention is the real GDP. If the masses are talking about Tehran, they’re not talking about tariffs, justices, or the Epstein file PDF that won’t stop leaking.

Here’s the cynical reality — political theater and market performance are now codependent. Washington creates noise, Wall Street monetizes it, and Main Street scrolls past it. The transition from democracy to content feed is complete.

So what do you do as an investor? The same thing the insiders do: stay detached, stay tactical. When politics becomes a sideshow, you trade the spectacle, not the story. Gold for fear, defense for conflict, energy for chaos. That’s not patriotism; it’s portfolio management.

And when the inevitable “breaking news” alert hits, just remember — every bomb is also a smoke bomb. It hides something, somewhere, from someone who doesn’t want to be seen.

So, if I wake up to strike footage on Bloomberg, I won’t panic. I’ll check oil futures, skim the S&P’s pre-market gain, and wait for the “presidential approval bump” headline. Because in this country, distraction is a recurring investment theme — and denial keeps outperforming.

WHEN INVESTING BECOMES A LIFESTYLE YOU WEAR IT!

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Kevin Davis Founder of Investment Dojo and Author of The C.R.E.A.M. Report