Shitty: The Quest to Make Everything Terrible.

The dog days of summer are upon us. The skies overhead are filled with smoke from fires raging in Northwestern Ontario. There’s flooding in Texas. Further escalations with Iran prompted the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to reduce its growth forecast for the year. The President of the United States took to the airwaves to push false election claims and let us know how he intends to destroy the last vestiges of our democracy.

His claims make perfect sense if we live in the Upside Down. Under his administration with his appointments and oversight, the 2020 election was rife with fraud and interference from foreign actors that did not exist when he won in 2016 (despite claims of interference), but it was all cleared up when Biden was in power and the election ran smoothly with no interference or fraud, because Trump won. Under that logic, I suppose he’s tacitly advocating for Biden to be in charge of the midterms.

But the news item most apropos of the moment is the giant poop virus spreading throughout the country. And who, I ask you, is most prepared to meet this moment more than our diaper sporting Commander in Chief?Actually, I lied. The perfect person to speak on this is the real leader of the United States, Russell Vought. There are two pertinent excerpts from speeches given by Vought that encapsulate first, the opportunity the right wing saw in another Trump presidency and, second, how they planned to exploit it. We’ll get to the second part a bit later. For now, here’s the first excerpt from a speech given to the Center for Renewing America obtained by ProPublica:

“A new Trump Administration must move quickly and decisively to turn the tables on the left by using the powers that have been delegated to the American state, American government. This is the dragon Smaug’s underbelly that lacks the scales that protect the belly. It is their Achilles heel. Because they never passed a constitutional amendment they have to rely on the precedents and the paradigms. Their entire apparatus is exposed to our strategy. They are exposed to a president who, if he’s a radical constitutionalist, who chooses to think and act like Thomas Jefferson or James Madison. And guess what? We have in Donald Trump a man who is so uniquely positioned to serve this role, a man whose own interests perfectly align with the interests of the country. He has seen what it has done to him, and he has seen what they are trying to do to the country. That is nothing more than a gift of god.”

We’ve covered Russ Vought, or Russputin as we call him, pretty extensively yet he’s still not widely known. He’s the occasional subject of a mainstream piece, or you might catch a glimpse of him in Capitol Hill hearings. Some have put two and two together that Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), is the principal name on Project 2025. But for the most part, he remains in the background pulling the strings and whispering in the ear of power.

His “Smaug” reference is a nod to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings universe, fables that have been co-opted by several prominent right wing figures from Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Steve Bannon to Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. To Vought and other devotees of right wing fantasies, the dragon Smaug—the antagonist in The Hobbit—represents all things liberal. And the perfect weapon to attack the soft underbelly of liberalism is apparently a president who is a radical constitutionalist. Makes perfect sense.

Russell Vought has all the contempt for Brown people and immigrants as Stephen Miller. He shares the desire for oligarchic rule with ruthless tech executives like Thiel and Musk. He’s as fanatical a far right Christian zealot as Jerry Falwell. When Steve Bannon talks about dismantling the administrative state, it’s Vought’s playbook he’s referring to.

Shitty Economics

Pundits are cheering inflation numbers that still outpace wages because they’re not as bad as they were last month. And that’s only because energy prices dipped on the false optimism of an end to our relentless campaign against Iran. In fact, both the consumer price index (CPI) and producer price index (PPI) show that energy was the primary factor holding prices in place, but removing energy reveals the false positive.

Is there price gouging in the monopolized food and beverage market? Yup. To what extent, it’s now hard to tell. But the PPI numbers are higher because of tariffs—a Trump invention—and CPI numbers are higher because of oil and gas increases—a Trump intervention.

One of the areas of the economy that we don’t talk about related to prices is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The CFPB was beginning to find its footing under Joe Biden before the courts intervened to curtail its efforts and Trump essentially killed it by putting it under, you guessed it, Russ Vought. It’s estimated that the cuts to the agency and lack of enforcement measures will cost consumers around $20 billion in bullshit costs and extractive fees.

Or how about healthcare? On top of the staggering premium increases in 2026, ACA marketplace insurers are proposing a median increase of 14% next year as more and more Americans are losing coverage or going into debt to cover basic costs. Or housing? Pending home sales took another massive hit in June. These factors and more have led to a staggering 11.9% increase in bankruptcies for the twelve months ending in March of 2026. It’s hard to imagine these figures have improved as we wait for the next round of data.

Another bad news diary entry in Max’s American journal?

Yeah, seems like I’ve been doing a lot of that for the past, I don’t know, six years. The podcast that started it all is called Unf*cking the Republic, so the base case here is that we’re fucked. But Trump is fucking us in special ways that don’t all reveal themselves at once.

Trump’s latent poop effect is perfectly encapsulated by the cyclospora outbreak that doubled in a matter of days this week, and is likely five to ten times larger than what’s being reported. There’s a chance it subsides and becomes a nothing story in a couple of weeks. But there’s also a chance it keeps spreading, because funding cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are making it more difficult to track and contain.

That’s the thing about implementing bad policy measures combined with dismantling the so-called administrative state. Things don’t collapse all at once, they fall apart over time and in an uneven manner.

Tariffs don’t automatically increase inflation. Neither does war. It takes time for pressure to build up in the system. At first producers, manufacturers and importers of raw materials hold the line and absorb price increases. On the other end, businesses tend to increase prices in anticipation, but the overall blend of pricing moves slowly through the system like a cancer. Eventually, those on the front end of the goods and services industry increase their rates (PPI) and pass them along the chain until it shows up in nearly everything.

One of the most obvious and heartbreaking examples of the latent poop effect of Trump’s policies is the manner in which the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was summarily dismantled. Efforts to eradicate HIV, tuberculosis and hunger in the poorest regions of the Global South in particular were halted on a dime, and we’re only now starting to come to grips with what this will mean.

The Lancet and Boston University projected that somewhere around 700,000 people have died as a result of eliminating USAID funding. Elon Musk was apoplectic on X over the claim, but The New Yorker dug into the claims in an interview with Atul Gawande, a former USAID administrator to speak to the methodology. And he made two pertinent observations to address the speculation around current and prospective deaths, which could reach into the millions over the next few years assuming the international community doesn’t find a way to step in and fill the gap.

The first is that these figures are median projections based on objective data from prior years, and the second part is the data collecting itself, which was a function of USAID. Similar to the discussion we are having around inflation—i.e., if you don’t like the numbers just change the calculations—if you dismantle data collection efforts, it makes it easier to ignore the trends. The other thing that Gawande points out is that USAID was also a disaster relief coordinator.

The reason bureaucracies are created is oftentimes to deal with the unknown. Instead of being caught flatfooted in an emergency, we build systems based on experience so we’re prepared for such eventualities; eventualities that are increasing exponentially as the effects of climate change disproportionately impact the very areas that USAID was designed to serve. Several Democrats and Republicans even said during the time of DOGE that they welcomed inspection of USAID—and all federal agencies for that matter—because sometimes bureaucracies tend toward bloat. One of the first things the Mamdani administration did was cut away actual bloat in the NYC budget, which is how he was able to maintain services and payroll without cutting into programming.

So we know it can be done. No government is immune to bloat. But taking a howitzer to the entire agency meant that all of the institutional knowledge and disaster response scaffolding was eliminated in the blink of an eye. Putting those pieces back together will be difficult. This is a life and death example of the latent poop effect of this administration. And it’s one that has more cover than the others because it’s not here. It’s in faraway places.

Governments like ours that claim to have some intangible moral authority in the world demonstrate it in practical terms by supporting human beings in ways that don’t benefit us domestically. And for all the isolationist rhetoric of America first, the claim rings hollow when you threaten to invade Greenland, kidnap a sitting world leader, and start foreign wars that have nothing to do with protecting the homeland. You cannot simultaneously claim to be isolationist while being an interventionist. That’s not how it works.

If we go back to the example of healthcare in the United States, we know people are losing or downgrading coverage. But the reality is that people don’t get sick all at once. When economic factors deteriorate and real wages decline, healthcare consumers make cost-based choices rather than health-based choices. Younger healthcare consumers will drop coverage in periods of unemployment or low wages first. Middle income families will adjust their coverage by downgrading from premium care plans to lower coverage or catastrophic coverage.

The changes to Medicaid’s work requirements bleed the base of insured slowly at first, but this too accelerates as the months wear on and it becomes more and more difficult to file paperwork and demonstrate material job hunting activities. Those without options can simply visit the emergency room because that’s the way we used to do it in the good old days before Obamacare.

Figuring out whether emergency room visits are ballooning is next to impossible, as the CDC under Trump has derailed many of its reporting features, leaving us with an outdated look at the figures. This is standard operating procedure for an authoritarian administration. So much easier to fire the statisticians than worry about what the statistics say. Soon the same will go for tracking inflation as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is changing its formulation. Economists believe it will reduce inflation numbers by 0.1% to 0.2%.

I mean, think about housing. The administration made two very bold claims in the campaign against Harris. Mortgage rates would plummet because they were going to get the Federal Funds rate down, and housing prices were going to fall because they would kick out all of those illegal immigrants living in illegal apartments and housing. Neither happened because neither makes economic sense. These were always lies. After a slight decline, mortgage rates are back up again to 6.5%, back to where it was before the start of the Iran war. There are three reasons for this.

• First is because the Federal Funds rate has very little to do with mortgages. Mortgage rates follow the 10-year Treasury, which also remains elevated because of how the market views the long-term prospects of the U.S. economy.
• The second reason is because we have a lack of affordable housing in the states for the populations most in need of it. We actually have enough housing, technically, it’s just not the areas that also have jobs. So the demand for houses in prime populated markets is still high.
• And lastly, the creditworthiness of the consumer base is declining, because the job market is soft, wages aren’t expanding with inflation and consumers are more indebted than ever before.

Now, on the immigration front, you have the answer right in front of you. The administration likes to brag that we’ve cut undocumented immigration to zero and are kicking people out of the country left and right. And yet the housing crisis persists. This was always a lie, and everyone with a functioning brain knew it.

Trauma Response

Now for the second excerpt from a Russell Vought lecture explaining how he plans to attack the soft underbelly of the dragon.

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. We want—when they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”

“We want to put them in trauma.” Do you see how fucking evil this is? This isn’t about the workers or even the corporations that are protected under a defanged Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It’s about causing a crisis of confidence in government services among the American public. If suddenly the shit you rely on stops working as well as it once does, you might partially blame the people in charge. But you’re more likely to blame the person in front of you who is incapable of living up to the promise of their job. The Social Security administrator. The Medicaid case worker. When people lose faith in an institution they look for solutions. And whomever speaks the loudest with the most sensible solution typically wins the day.

Take Milton Friedman for example, the nemesis of our enterprise. Understanding how neoliberals like Friedman from the University of Chicago won the battle over Keynesianism is central to Vought’s approach. Take advantage of the system when it stops working and don’t look back.

The stagflation crisis of the 1970s was the opening neoliberals needed to begin their pressure campaign against liberal institutions and Keynesian fiscal responses to crises. All of a sudden the things people were used to functioning just sort of…stopped working. It was for a variety of factors, none of which were truly Jimmy Carter’s fault initially—though his austerity mindset made things worse—but the damage was done to the economic theories of Keynes and to the Democratic Party that took all the blame.

The neoliberals didn’t just walk through that opening, they ran a freight train through it on the coattails of Ronald Reagan. It’s not that he had the right message, it’s that he had a message. And in retrospect, think about how absurd it was.

The best way to help the poor and working class is by giving tax cuts to the wealthy and eliminating poverty programs.

Objectively it makes no fucking sense. But that’s the signal the Democratic Party keeps missing the deeper we get into the neoliberal experiment. Things keep getting worse at the bottom, and both parties keep tripping over themselves to do more for those at the top.

So the way people like Russputin intend to finish the job is by making things even worse, because they have an answer. Prepackaged and ready to go. And it’s pretty fucking elegant.

You’re mad. I get it. The government has failed you and you’re not doing as well as you used to or as your parents did. And you’re pissed because corporate America keeps winning and getting ahead. I think the answer is clear. We should just give everything over to the corporations because they’re clearly better at everything. Don’t ya think?

Here’s how this shows up in black and white, because they’re fully in control of the country’s bank account and they’re setting the agenda at every turn.

In the last “On The Record” I went through the June federal budget to show how the top and bottom line numbers haven’t changed all that much. It’s what’s in the middle that matters to us.

Corporations enjoyed a 17% decrease in taxes through the first three quarters of 2026 compared to the prior period. Education was cut by 55% and outside of Medicaid and Medicare Health and Human Services (HHS) was cut by 109%*.

*There were several comments regarding the HHS funding. The June budget summary shows that $24 billion was allocated to HHSA through the first three quarters of fiscal year 2025. For the same period in fiscal year 2026, the figure is negative two billion. This is likely the result of shifting allocations to intrabudgetary transactions. The upshot is that dedicated mandatory spending on Medicare and Medicaid have increased as a result of an aging and impoverished enrollment respectively, but discretionary services and agencies are being slashed.

Interest costs on our debt increased by 10%, which looks pretty bad on the surface, but it’s even worse than it looks because of the sheer size of our interest relative to other expenses. Interest on our debt increased by $120 billion dollars.

They kept their hands in the cookie jar because the top line number stayed the same. They just prioritized their shit to enrich themselves, build up the narrative that corporate America is beyond reproach and the answer to all that ails us, and to ensure that the government services you’ve come to rely on continue to falter a bit more each and every day.

When you reduce education funding it makes us dumber over time. And that’s a good thing, because we won’t realize how fucked we’re getting everywhere else I suppose.

When you give tax breaks to corporations, it means funding our debt has to come from other parts of the budget or more deficit financing.

Cuts to the CDC is how you get widespread outbreaks of diarrhea and no ability to figure out where it came from.

This is all, dare I say, a proper shit show.