"We’re gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning"

So said the ego-addled fourflusher nine years ago. His peculiar casino-brand of winning writ large became tiresome indeed; nonetheless, voters bet eight years later that his doubling down on macroeconomic quackery and trade racketeering would pay off — which they have, for him.

If his diseased leg and swollen ankles can steady his indulgent rotundity, he'll walk away with bundles of boodle but his electoral gamblers will float belly-up — the sure-thing return on all of Trump's swindles.

By now you've seen the statistical harbingers of a national implosion: a miserable 22,000 jobs added in August — 12,000 subtracted in the manufacturing sector, which needlessly inflated tariffs were meant to benefit; another 17,000 jobs lost in the service industry — more than two-thirds shy of the number anticipated by economists preconditioned for demoralization as of January.

Bloomberg had surveyed the professionally downcast. Their response: of jobs created, maybe a lousy 75,000? At Goldman Sachs, whose chief economist Trump demanded be fired for having acknowledged the bloody obvious — that consumers will foot his tariff bill — the jobs prediction was "closer to 60,000," reported the Times' DealBook. Also yesterday, ADP's private payroll release took note of the vastly noticeable: "that economic growth is slowing." To, at best, a battered crawl. Because ...

Well, he sort of walks. On that we must keep an eye. The White House poster is, however, steady as can be in noting America's underwater thrills, presumably for those smitten excitedly by 1930s nostalgia.

The first and somewhat more subdued but no less scary chart presented above is from the decapitated Bureau of Labor Statistics. Its precipitous trajectory is nevertheless reliable, as these things go. Trump's ghoulish replacement for the headless agency's former commissioner of unquestioned excellence, Erika McEntarfer, is one E.J. Antoni. But he's yet to be stamped by the Republican Senate's big rubber Yessum Massa gavel.

So somewhere, E.J. is idling, fondly recollecting his statistical fiction days at the Heritage Foundation, reliving the orgasmic catharsis of his Project 2025 contributing ejaculations, and once again pondering women's flat I.Q.s in unfortunate comparison to men's, whose so often soar to "genius," don't ya know.

The BLS also revised — downward, of course — its June numbers, reporting a net loss of 13,000 jobs. The bureau hadn't seen a plunge like that since Trump first walked among us last, in December 2020. The jobless rate headed the other direction in Aug., but that's been known to happen ever since President Coolidge observed with surgical insight, “When a great many people are unable to find work, unemployment results."

Indeed, a site for job seekers, notes that this year's employment numbers are as wretched as W.'s were in 2010, when "the economy was still firmly in the grips of the Great Recession." (Remember, though, what the Trump Party's fableists insist: It's Democratic administrations that stink at overseeing the economy.)    

In nihilistic celebration America's unavailable jobs and wrecked lives redux, today's editorial by The Collegian, the Hitler Youth publication of Hillsdale College, proclaims that "Trump makes this winning fun." The editorialist? He's a graduate student in the college's School of Statesmanship, which trains other tiresome creatures to quack — and destroy.

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