Just before the 20th anniversary of the impact of Hurricane Katrina, a group of current and former Federal Emergency Management Agency employees have signed an extraordinary letter warning America that we could be headed for a similar disaster. Not the hurricane itself, but the man-made disaster which followed, as George W. Bush's FEMA proved to be completely incompetent at disaster recovery in a big way. They even called their letter the "Katrina Declaration," to amplify their warning.

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Donald Trump thinks he has a plan. First, get rid of enough members of the Federal Reserve Board and replace them with his own minions, and then they'll do his bidding and drastically lower interest rates. Once he's appointed a majority of them, they'll do precisely what he wants without question. In the meantime, his appointee to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics will be firing high-level bean-counters and replacing them with apparatchiks, so that they can then make the official inflation number anything Trump wants it to be. This way, even if real inflation goes through the roof (as a result of lowering interest rates too fast), nobody will know about it because inflation will "officially" be at some ridiculously-unbelievable low figure. The economy "booms" (as measured by Trump's numbers), interest rates go down, and everyone's happy!

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After Donald Trump held two back-to-back summits, in an effort to get a quick ceasefire and peace agreement in Ukraine, not much of anything has actually changed. Unless you count the rest of the world either laughing at America's president or gingerly trying to not bruise his all-too-fragile ego. Both of those things have increased, sadly.

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The prospects of a ceasefire happening soon in Ukraine were always pretty slim. Now they seem to be receding into oblivion. Without some strong and decisive action by Donald Trump, the situation in Ukraine does not look likely to change in any meaningful way any time soon. The war will continue, people will keep dying, and Vladimir Putin will feel no compunction to bring an end to any of it. That seems to be the emerging reality.

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If they want to win the midterms next year, Democrats should really return in a big way to that old chestnut from the Bill Clinton era: "It's the economy, stupid." Because that is where both Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans are the weakest, and the economy is almost always either at or very near the top of the list of issues voters care the most about.

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Two stories dominated the political headlines this week: Texas Democrats fleeing the state to halt the Republican-dominated legislature's efforts to redraw their U.S. House district lines to hand Republicans five more safe seats, and Donald Trump letting incredibly high tariffs begin against over 90 countries worldwide.

We'll get to them in a moment, but what's more interesting is the dog that didn't bark today. Russia was supposed to have a "10-day deadline" to end its invasion of Ukraine, and steep tariffs were supposed to be slapped on them if Vladimir Putin hadn't manage to do so by today. However, nary a headline is talking about the tariffs that were supposed to appear, because once again Putin played Trump like a violin.

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The world's economy changed today. The United States slapped new tariffs on dozens of countries early this morning, following through on Donald Trump's repeated threats to do so. What this is all going to do to world trade and the American economy is really anyone's guess at this point, but it's definitely going to have some sort of effect. American economic policy has returned to a high-tariff scenario not seen in over 90 years, which adds to the uncertainty about what happens next. Since there is no modern data for where we find ourselves now, nobody really knows what is going to happen. But there are a few things that we can intelligently guess about, the first of which is that prices are going to rise for American consumers on all kinds of goods, some of which will be mild price hikes and some of which will be huge:

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The entire financial world is holding its breath right now, waiting to see whether they can continue their trust in official U.S. government economic figures or not. Will things like the official unemployment rate and inflation rate become just another casualty in Donald Trump's war on the truth and his war on science, or will the professionals who produce these numbers (as opposed to the agency's leader) continue to do a good and honest job -- even with the threat of being fired now hanging over their heads? That is an unanswered question, but we will begin to see fairly quickly which direction the Bureau of Labor Statistics is going to head.

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Today's job numbers are bad. There's no getting around it. So Donald Trump reacted to this bad news by immediately firing the messenger. Which is really bad. "Banana republic" bad, in fact. We should all expect Trump to name the next head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics who will then dutifully report next month that "in August, America added eight million new jobs, thanks to our Dear Leader's brilliance." Because that is obviously what Trump wants to hear, instead of any proof that the fantasy world he inhabits in his head is rosier than the actual reality in which the rest of us live.

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The next few weeks could be fairly pivotal for the U.S. economy, with new monthly economic numbers being released telling us where we are now, while perhaps new tariff numbers will be imposed by the end of the week which may tell us where we are headed with the rest of the world. All of these outcomes hinge mostly on how Donald Trump's big trade war with the rest of the planet continues to play out.

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