Distraction Summer
The Fed held interest rates steady this week. Do you think they were influenced by Sydney Sweeney's jeans?
Very busy week in the news.
As the week began, there was still a heavy focus on just how badly Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi screwed up the release of the Epstein files. It’s a big enough deal that Trump appears to have lost podcaster Joe Rogan over the issue. Trump himself is fumbling the messaging, saying that Epstein victims were “poached” from Mar-a-Largo. (The horror that these Epstein victims, and their families, are having to endure is incomprehensible.) Things are going poorly for House Speaker Mike Johnson on the Epstein front, while Senate Democrats are trying to force a vote on the issue.
Looking way under the hood on inside-the-beltway stuff, Trump has chosen to pick a fight with 91 year-old Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) over something called blue slips (they are used to solicit input from home-state senators on judicial nominees). Why Trump is choosing to bully a man who’s been a supporter of his, and who is revered at least in the Republican conference is beyond me. The president is going to need Republican Senators in the future. This is not the way to curry their favor.
Maybe Trump needs those Senators to do horrible things, like further erode the Voting Rights Act, which turns 60 next week.
Speaking of Senators, it turns out that former Senator, former VP, and former presidential nominee Kamala Harris won’t be running for California governor. Of course, she’s left the door open to run for president again in 2028. But in the short term, she’s written a book about her 2024 campaign.
A little further from home, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi worked hard to position himself as a strong ally of President Trump. Turns out that hasn’t gotten him — or the largest democracy in the world — very much:
Donald Trump has described India as a “dead economy” and said the US does “very little business” with the country, ratcheting up his fiery rhetoric against the world’s fifth-largest economy as the two sides hit an impasse over his threat of 25 per cent tariffs on Indian goods.
We need a strategic partner in India. I’m no diplomat, but I am fairly confident this is not how it’s done.
Coming back closer to home, Democrats are still struggling.
I posted a Wall Street Journal graphic on Threads a few days ago. Got a lot of interaction (a lot of it fairly strange, actually). But my statement stands: it can’t really be overstated how bad this is for Democrats.
Democrats have work to do.
And it’s comments like the one we got this week from Pete Buttigieg on trans rights that aren’t exactly on-point:
“Your approach starts with compassion — compassion for transgender people, compassion for families, especially young people who are going through this, and also empathy for people who are not sure what all of this means for them,” Buttigieg, who ran unsuccessfully for the 2020 Democratic nomination, told host Steve Inskeep on Monday.
“And I think when you do that, that does call into question some of the past orthodoxies in my party, for example, around sports, where I think most reasonable people would recognize that there are serious fairness issues if you just treat this as not mattering when a trans athlete wants to compete in women’s sports,” Buttigieg said.
Failing to hit the mark not because that’s not a good or right answer — it probably is — but because it is a part of a larger distraction.1
And in can’t-seem-to-get-out-of-our-own-way news, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got dinged by the House Ethics Committee for not paying enough for the “Tax the Rich” dress she wore to the Met Gala ball:
“The Congresswoman appreciates the Committee finding that she made efforts to ensure her compliance with House Rules and sought to act consistently with her ethical requirements as a Member of the House,” Mike Casca, Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, said in a statement. “She accepts the ruling and will remedy the remaining amounts, as she’s done at each step in this process.”
Good answer, the appropriate remedy. Still: one of our leading populist voices? At the Met Gala? Come on.
And AOC’s dress wasn’t even the biggest fashion scandal of the week. The Sydney Sweeney American Eagle jeans and felt about as far away from the reality of most Americans as you could get.
The big news this week that was overshadowed by everything above was the Federal Reserve Bank holding interest rates steady, a move they made with a split vote (Trump’s appointees voted to cut rates):
The Fed left its key short-term interest rate unchanged for the fifth time this year, at about 4.3%, as was expected. But Powell also signaled that it could take months for the Fed to determine whether Trump’s sweeping tariffs will push up inflation temporarily or lead to a more persistent bout of higher prices. His comments suggest that a rate cut in September, which had been expected by some economists and investors, is now less likely.
The short version of their rationale? We don’t trust the economy given Trump’s tariff implementation. And, sure enough, inflation rose in June. And of course, the jobs report this week was very disappointing. (Trump says he’s going to fire the Labor Statistics chief because he doesn’t like those numbers.)
Maybe you don’t trust the Bureau of Labor Statistics, either. Let’s take a look at the USDA’s food price tracker:
The all-items Consumer Price Index (CPI), a measure of economy-wide inflation, increased 0.3 percent from May 2025 to June 2025 and was up 2.7 percent from June 2024.
…
The food-at-home (grocery store or supermarket food purchases) CPI increased 0.2 percent from May 2025 to June 2025 and was 2.4 percent higher than in June 2024.
The food-away-from-home (restaurant and other foodservice purchases) CPI increased 0.4 percent from May 2025 to June 2025 and was 3.8 percent higher than in June 2024.
Food was 2.4 percent more expensive this year than this time last year, and 3.8 percent higher in restaurants than this time last year.
Over at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they tell me that eggs — to pick a random, fun example — are $3.78 for one dozen Grade A large. June of 2024 they were $2.72. For a pound of ground chuck? It’s $6.10 today. June of last year? $5.36. A pound of chicken was $1.99 in June of 2024. Today the average price of a pound of chicken in America is $2.09.
In a world where the distractions come fast and furious, it’s hard to stay focused on a single message. Still, I’d like to offer up the one thing Democrats should be laser-focused on right now. And it’s not Sydney Sweeney’s fashion.
In fairness to Buttigieg here, and to anyone leaders in the Democratic Party who have tried to address this issue, it is a mess wholly created by culture war Republicans who have successfully scared a very large portion of the American electorate into thinking that somehow an army of men are competing in women’s sports. It is obviously not true. But in the Trump era, facts don’t matter too much, if at all.