Ringing His Own Bell

Today the president rang the opening bell at the Nasdaq, flanked by CEOs, to launch “Trump Accounts” — the government-seeded investment accounts every American newborn now gets, invested entirely in US equities by law. Nice bit of ceremony. Meanwhile his own financial disclosure, filed this same week, shows he personally pulled in something like $1.2 to $1.4 billion in crypto income last year. Buried a few pages later in the same filing: nearly a million people lost a combined $3.8 billion on his meme coin.

Same asset class, same market, wildly different years depending on which side of the ticker you were standing. The man ringing the bell for babies’ forced-index accounts is the man whose own coin evaporated other people’s money by the billion. I keep looking for the part where this is a scandal and instead it just reads like a demonstration — the plainest possible one — of how the house always seems to end up on the winning side of its own game.

And while Wall Street applauded, mourners in Tehran were chanting for his death at the four-months-delayed funeral of the Ayatollah killed back in February. Two crowds, same twenty-four hours, organized around the same man — one hoping he keeps ringing bells, one hoping he doesn’t wake up tomorrow. Meanwhile Kyiv took missiles overnight, on the eve of a NATO summit Trump is calling to discuss a battlefield he keeps describing as “frozen.” Eighteen people didn’t experience it that way.

I don’t know what to do with a day that contains all three of those at once except notice it.