Something has been bothering me about Pete Hegseth for some time. It isn’t just that although he talks about physical strength being a key attribute of military leaders, he doesn’t know how the army does pullups. It isn’t that although his army career has been in the “Follow Me” branch, he appears to have no motivational skills. Or that he seems not to have been savvy enough to know how bad a thing it is to run out of ammunition in a war. This morning I realized that what I find most off-putting is that, intentionally or not, he dresses like a villain in a Batman movie, which makes a hard job even more difficult.
If newspaper reports are correct, the Trump administration has summoned the Vatican representative in order to threaten the pope, a US citizen born in Chicago, with dire consequences if he does not stop criticizing the US attack on Iran. Unclear whether he will be arrested and imprisoned if he set foot in the US or that Trump is planning to sever the US church from Rome, Henry VIII style. …this even though US Catholics are by and large Trump supporters. Although fake news is always an issue in today’s world, Trump also appears to have subsequently represented himself online as being the reincarnation of Jesus.
J D Vance went to Hungary to show Trump administration support for Viktor Orban just in advance of Orban’s epic defeat/rejection by Hungarian voters. Why get involved on the wrong side of this mess? Didn’t they know this was a lost cause? …just to show dictator-to-dictator support? …orders from Moscow?
Now the US is going to blockade the Straits of Hormuz, which in investment terms would seem to be throwing good money after bad.
What’s interesting about all this is that there have been fewer recent negative effects on Wall Street from the administration’s dysfunction. The currency is flattening out, and the S&P has recently been more or less keeping pace with the EAFE index of major non-US markets.