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Senate Rs Cave, No Kings Is Here, The Enormous Costs Of Trump's Ridiculous War Continue To Grow

Good luck this weekend everyone!

Simon Rosenberg

Mar 27

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Happy Friday everyone. Good luck to all of you who will be participating in the No Kings events across the country tomorrow. Learn more about the history and vision of No Kings through my recent uplifting conversation with Indivisible’s Ezra Levin, and if you looking for an event in your area you can find them here. Please send photos from your events to community@Hopiumchronicles.com and we will post some in the coming days. Good luck, enjoy and stay safe all!

Last night Senate Republicans finally yielded and voted to fund DHS minus ICE and CPB. This is what Democrats have been fighting for - separate out ICE/mass deportation funding from the rest of DHS, and work to rein it all in. We will have time to discuss what comes next but the path Republicans choose last night for funding ICE and perhaps priorities - reconciliation - is a perilous one, and not at all what they or Trump wanted. Republicans head home for the recess in an ugly place - ICE/CPB is unfunded; SAVE not passed; $200 billion war funding requested by the White House nowhere near being teed up; the war is failing, the economy slowing, inflation and gas prices spiking, and Trump’s poll numbers falling.

As we like to say here the lesson for Democrats from the Senate Rs yielding is when we fight the ailing, unpopular Trump and his even more unpopular agenda we can and have been winning. It’s why we need to do it more often, across many more fronts.

Yesterday we discussed how Trump the addled and idiotic has stumbled into three concurrent Vietnams (escalation traps, quagmires) - tariffs/a weakening economy, ICE/mass deportations, and the war. Today I want to focus on how the war has made the first of these three - Trump’s weakening economy - far worse.

Yesterday I think the markets began to truly wake up to the disaster Trump has created in the Middle East. Today, Iran is in charge of the Strait of Hormuz, and is now, despite the war, the dominant power in the region. They are holding our economy and the global economy hostage. Removing their control will require either 1) a land-based war, conducted without our traditional allies. The cost in American lives and money will be signficant, and success - as in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq - not guaranteed; or 2) the US and our allies will have to make enormous concessions to Iran that will be humiliating for Trump, and impossible to spin here. It’s why yesterday he bought himself more time, and postponed his attack on civilian Iranian infrastructure, something that will likely bring a devastating counter-attack on the Gulf Arab countries and Israel. For he has no good options in front of him any more.

And so Trump delays, hoping for someone to bail him out, or some kind of miracle. Or to let his military get into a better position for the land war.

And in waiting, the US and global economies - and global stability - continue to deteriorate.

This morning we are waking to:

Brent crude rising to $110 a barrel, a war near high
Gas prices at $3.99 a gallon, up 46% this year
Bond yields and mortgage rates rising
The major stock indices continuing to tumble
The new University of Michigan consumer survey found consumer sentiment plummeting since the war began
New OECD projections of inflation hitting 4.2% this year in the US, and GDP growth slowing further

As we’ve been discussing here Trump entered the war with the US economy already in a very weakened state - inflation was rising again, the economy had essentially stopped producing net new jobs, GDP growth in the fourth quarter was only 0.7%, and our fiscal outlook was deteriorating. We were heading towards the dreaded “stagflation” prior to the enormous economic shocks the war has brought. Now the markets, and perhaps even policy makers here in the US, are waking up the reality of where we are, and how much damage is being done to the US and global economies - and that there is now no easy way of out the mess Trump - and Trump alone - has created.

Let’s look at some new data.

Rising costs due to Trump’s war are starting to be felt by consumers. We saw it this week in Trump’s declining poll numbers, and look at these findings from new University of Michigan data released this morning:

Consumer sentiment fell back 6% this month to its lowest level since December 2025. Declines were seen across age and political party. Consumers with middle and higher incomes and stock wealth, buffeted by both escalating gas prices and volatile financial markets in the wake of the Iran conflict, exhibited particularly large drops in sentiment. Overall, the short-run economic outlook plunged 14%, and year-ahead expected personal finances sank 10%, while declines in long-run expectations were more subdued. These patterns suggest that, at this time, consumers may not expect recent negative developments to persist far into the future. These views are subject to change, however, if the Iran conflict becomes protracted or if higher energy prices pass through to overall inflation. Interviews for this release were collected between February 17 and March 23, with about two-thirds completed after the start of the US military conflict in Iran.

Year-ahead inflation expectations climbed from 3.4% in February to 3.8% this month, the largest one-month increase since April 2025. The current reading exceeds those seen in 2024 and remains well above the 2.3-3.0% range seen in the two years pre-pandemic. Long-run inflation expectations inched down to 3.2%. In 2024, values ranged between 2.8% and 3.2%, while in 2019 and 2020, they were consistently below 2.8%. Note that for both time horizons, interviews completed after February 28th exhibited higher inflation expectations than those completed before that date.

Republicans heading home for recess are not going to like what they are going to hear from their constituents.

Yesterday, the OECD put out revised global economic projections. It has our inflation rate spiking to 4.2% this year - hello Republican 2026 candidates! - and GDP growth in 2026 and 2027 coming in below an already slowed 2025.

Using these projections Trump will have seen the economy grow less under his watch than any American President since Hoover:

Our revised Hopium/Claude projections on the total cost of the war to the world is now up to $17 trillion. This enormous cost is equal to 15-16% of global GDP, or China’s entire annual output, or 70% of America’s annual output. If Trump attacks Iran, which I still think is very likely, these costs will increase dramatically.

So the war is bringing slower growth, higher inflation, higher interest rates, declining stock markets (huge loss of wealth) which together will make our already ballooning deficit much worse. Here is an analysis I just made with the help of Claude:

The difference in 2036 between the pre-Trump deficit projections and these new projections is 2.9% percentage points, a 54% increase, equal to $1.4 trillion annually, which will be more than the entire non-Pentagon portion of the discretionary Federal budget in 2036. The recklessness of all this is just staggering and not being discussed enough.

It is time for Democrats to lay out a broad agenda to counter Trump’s gross mismanagement of the country and the world. We stood firm on DHS/ICE/TSA and won a meaningful victory. We should build on that win and offer something akin to our working Hopium agenda, below. At the core this new agenda should be four things - the ending of the war, the canceling of the tariffs, the rescinding of the Trump tax cuts, and the restoration of the ACA/Medicaid subsidies. For on top of all these economic shocks, and economic deterioration, the enormous cuts to the ACA and Medicaid will soon create a debilitating health care shock that is going to ripple through our economy and the lives of tens of millions of people over the next 18 months.

As we discussed yesterday when I look at all this - dare I say - American carnage - what I take solace in is that the magnitude of Trump’s failures and ugliness will do lasting damage to the global far right and autocracy more broadly with rising generations here and around the world. We are seeing this now in Hungary, where the bloated, corrupt, Trump/Putin ally Orban now trails badly in the polls in the upcoming April 12th election:

Yes, the historic awfulness of Trump and Trumpism could be that spark that ignites a new birth of freedom here and everywhere; and certainly that should be our goal - to use Trumpism to re-invigorate the global democracy movement, starting with No Kings tomorrow!!!!!!