Buyer’s Remorse…. And a Postscript to a Royal Scandal

Before Ruination Day, as The Economist called Trump’s volcanic tariff effusion, everyone I met in public life was adopting the crouch position. Corporate leaders, who formerly loved to heavy around at Davos and DealBook, told me their goal has been to avoid getting in Trump’s sights. As one comms advisor put it, “quiet shrinking” has replaced “quiet quitting” in the corporate workplace. CEOs were - and are – especially terrified of a Trump-controlled IRS that could make them sweat like The White Lotus’s Timothy Ratliff, reduced to popping handfuls of his wife’s lorazepam.

But since the stock market’s multi-trillion-dollar melt-down, have we crossed the Rubicon and come out of the Big Fear? Are some of those petrified by the Trump terror starting to unfreeze? Cory Booker’s 25-hour jam on the Senate floor was a curtain raiser, as was the win by Democratic Judge Susan Crawford in Wisconsin. But more relevantly, Wall Street titans, drunk on the animal spirits of the first weeks of Trump’s term, when all they foresaw was a romping ride of deregulation and lower taxes, are now realizing their cherished proximity to Trump brings no real influence after all.

Hedge fund loudmouths and Trump cheerleaders like Bill Ackman are, when it gets serious, disruptors, not demolitionists. Ackman proclaimed on X Sunday night that Trump’s tariff rampage would lead to “a self-induced, economic nuclear winter.” Too late, Bill. You were all in on Trump, and didn’t listen to how much he belabored his tariff twaddle on the campaign trail. In January, at the World Economic Forum, JPMorgan CEO and oracle Jamie Dimon said, if tariffs are “a little inflationary, but it’s good for national security, so be it. I mean, get over it.” But on Monday, Dimon threw some doom into his annual letter, predicting that Trump’s policy will raise prices and slow economic growth. “I see this as one large additional straw on the camel’s back.”

Trump’s tariff guru Peter Navarro

Elon Musk, a free-trader, is now trashing Trump’s tariff champion Peter Navarro. “He ain’t built shit,” the Tesla chief tweeted on X. Musk should have read Bob Woodward's first Trump book Fear, in which the second-term tariff tornado was all clearly seeded. Woodward reported on then-Treasury Secretary and former Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn's heroic efforts to keep Navarro the hell out of the Oval Office. The Cohn faction regarded Navarro - now ascendant in Trump’s guardrail-free cabinet - as a “flat-earther” on trade and macroeconomics. Cohn tried on multiple occasions to explain to Trump that the president’s antiquated vision of roaring industrial chimneys and clanking steelworks busy with grateful blue-collar workers was no longer applicable, or indeed desirable, to an America reinventing itself in service industries and high-tech products. “People don’t want to stand in front of a 2,000-degree blast furnace,” Cohn pressed Trump. “People don’t want to go into coal mines and get black lung. For the same dollars or equal dollars, they’re going to choose something else.” Exasperated, he asked Trump why he held these stubborn views. “I just do,” Trump replied. “I've had these views for 30 years.”

“I Just Do” is now crashing the global economy.

Ego Tripped

In the seven years since Woodward’s book came out, the high-decibel sycophancy around Trump has increased exponentially. There is a sense that we are in full-on Caligula madness, that Emperor Trump’s next step could be to appoint his horse as proconsul of Florida. There has always been a parade of brownnosing flotsam and jetsam around his presidency, but now they have an all-access pass.

It was loony Laura Loomer, a random conspiracy theorist in Trump’s inner circle, who handed him a “disloyalty” list last week of more than six experienced hands at the National Security Council and got them promptly fired. The list included the esteemed General Timothy Haugh, commander of U.S. Cyber Command. Loomer posted on X, “Haugh had no place serving in the Trump admin” as he was “HAND PICKED by (former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman) Gen. Mark Milley who was accused of committing treason by President Trump.” Another lethal backstage influence is 34-year-old winsome blonde Natalie Harp, aka the human printer, notorious for toting a portable printer and a battery pack to charge it so that she can feed Trump, as Michael Wolff put it in All or Nothing, “‘uppers’ in the form of right-wing hagiography (stoking his sense of omnipotence) and ‘downers’ in the form of any signs of disloyalty (stoking his rage).”

Trump’s fragile ego will always demand limitless reinforcement. All his life, he has longed to be considered a kingpin, afforded the kind of prestige enjoyed by the Wall Street and real estate titans who looked down on the Queens crassness of Fred Trump’s boy.

He used to be a social pariah in Silicon Valley. Now he's not only all-powerful in the Oval Office, but has captured the obeisance of the tech super race whose fortunes far exceed those of the Wall Street and real estate old guard. But, in his blind opportunism, Trump doesn’t realize that his troglodyte economics and Silicon Valley’s iconoclastic futurism are ultimately at odds. Musk and most of his ilk are happy to pretend that manufacturing will return to America because they know, by the time they are built, the factories will be manned by robots.

Royal Scandal Revisited

Assignment desk. I want to read a big fat story drilling down on the weird new developments in the Virginia Giuffre saga. For those not marinated in British royal scandals, Virginia was Prince Andrew’s nemesis in the Jeffrey Epstein imbroglio. Thanks to a damning March 2001 photo of her, aged 17, nestling beside an affable Andrew at the London home of Epstein madame Ghislaine Maxwell, she had the visual evidence to back up her story that she was trafficked to Andrew by Epstein. In the photo, the 41-year-old duke looks like a horny dad about to hit on the teenage babysitter.

Last week, from Australia, where Giuffre has lived for the past two decades, she posted on Instagram a picture of herself apparently covered in bruises and stated she had been hit by a bus and told she has four days to live. "I'm ready to go, just not until I see my babies one last time," she said, referring to her three children with her husband of 22 years. (She alleges he has long physically abused her. The matter is now in court).

It’s all very bizarre. Western Australia police and ambulance services say they only have a report about a minor bus accident with no reported injuries. Is Giuffre a fantasist? And if so, is it remotely possible that one of the most notorious royal snaps is a fake after all? Could Andrew’s blabbing to the BBC’s Emily Maitlis during his ill-fated Newsnight appearance have been his clammy, bumbling efforts at the truth? Ever since the nuclear fallout from the interview, Andrew has been a ghost royal, stripped of his duties by the late queen and left to lurk around the 30-room Royal Lodge, communing with his horse, despite the king’s best efforts to turf him out.

Unfortunately for Andrew, it now doesn’t matter either way. If the infamous picture with Giuffre turns out to have been a fraud, it won’t excuse his other multiple horndog antics with the convicted pedophile Epstein, or his disastrous fraternizing with dubious oligarchs and other business incorrigibles. Just last weekend, there were reports about his latest lapse of judgment, investing, despite warnings by MI5, in a “Eurasia Fund” with an alleged Chinese spy.

But, in light of his many years of apoplectic insistence that the picture with Giuffre was doctored and that he had never met, let alone had sex with her, perhaps the most reviled member of the royal family deserves a new inspection of the whole narrative . Memo to Vanity Fair’s respected departing editor Radhika Jones. Blow your last issue’s budget sending a super sleuth to Perth to report out what the perplexing Virginia Giuffre story is all about.