Money

Washington Examiner calls economy 'booming' 17 days after calling Trump's approval 'not good'

By LouOne More Question · the breakfast edition, 23 September 2026

The dateline is what I keep looking at. Not the story underneath it — the little string of numbers at the top: September 23rd, 2026. I wrote it down next to another dateline, same publication, seventeen days earlier, because I didn't trust myself to hold both of them in my head at once.

Washington Examiner, September 6th: their own chief political correspondent, Byron York, on the record, calling the president's approval rating "not good," and saying that historically, a number like that drags down the sitting president's party in a midterm. I wrote that down.

Washington Examiner, September 23rd — seventeen days after the piece from the sixth, same masthead — headline reading "Proof Trump's economy is better than they're telling you." The word inside the copy itself is "booming." Seventeen days. One outlet. Two verdicts on the same man's economy, and the arithmetic is easy enough to check without a calculator: the sixth to the twenty-third is seventeen days, about two and a half weeks, not longer.

In between those two dates, on the eighteenth, The Hill had Republican senators on the record, publicly uncomfortable, rebuffing the president's own attacks on the Federal Reserve over interest rates. Two days after that, on the twentieth, NBC News put out a poll: most voters, asked plainly, said the president has hurt the economy, and named him as the reason for high prices. Three days after that poll — the twenty-third — the Examiner ran "booming."

I brought the car in that same week, as it happens — the fan belt again, same corner garage, same guy behind the counter who's had my number since before I had the dog. Two invoices sitting in the glovebox now, a few weeks apart, same noise under the hood both times, two different totals written by the same hand. I'm not saying the man cheated me. I'm saying I have the paper for both visits, and I can hold them side by side, and so can you, and the second total isn't required to agree with the first one just because they came out of the same shop.

That's the question I keep parking the car over. Is a growth rate the shop quotes you the same thing as the bill you actually pay at the register — or are those two different documents, filed seventeen days apart by the same hand? The Examiner says real GDP grew at a 1.5% annualized rate last quarter. NBC's poll, three days before that piece ran, says most voters, asked about that same economy in that same stretch, said it's hurting them. Both are on the record. Neither one is quoting the other.

NPR had a poll out that same day, the twenty-third — most voters saying the midterms are about the president, and that they disapprove of him. Same day as "booming." I wrote that one down too, mostly because I couldn't find a shorter way to say it than what the poll already says.

Oh — before you head back inside. One more invoice, since the glovebox is already open. The receipt for the gas people are filling up on this week — the one the Examiner says is sitting underneath a booming economy — which of the two does it agree with, "booming," or "not good"? Both words came out of the same masthead, seventeen days apart. Only one of them shows up in the poll.

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Trump blames Zelensky's refinery strikes for a diesel record his own war hit first.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the noon edition, 23 September 2026

Diesel hit $5.85 a gallon on September 4th, a record, and the war that set it was the one the president started in Iran without asking Congress. By September 11th the price was $6.06, a 14 percent jump in a month, a 64 percent jump in a year, and petroleum analyst Patrick De Haan told his followers it was "not slowing down." Economist Dean Baker, watching the same tape, wrote sardonically online: "Trump did it! Diesel hits a new record high!" He was being sardonic. He was also being accurate.

By September 13th the price had become a political problem, so the president found something else to point at: he demanded Volodymyr Zelensky stop striking Russian oil refineries, the drone campaign Ukraine has run against Russia's oil infrastructure. The demand ran in the Washington Examiner under a headline that put the diesel spike and the refinery strikes in the same sentence, which is one way to make two facts look like one cause.

On September 17th, Moody's put a number on the eight months since the war began: $121 billion in extra energy spending, $1,760 per household, a bill that went out without a vote in either chamber.

This week the number moved again. Diesel is over $6.50 a gallon, a fresh record, and the Daily Caller is reporting that construction firms are canceling projects because the fuel that runs the trucks now costs what it costs. CBS is asking whether an export ban would help; experts told CBS it would not, not cleanly. Some things do not have clean levers.

Zelensky, asked at the UN whether Washington had pressured him to stop hitting the refineries, said the quiet part in public: "Our lives are more important than the price of energy." That is a defense. It is also, read straight, an admission that the price of energy is now a bargaining chip in someone else's war.

And this week Energy Secretary Chris Wright was on the road selling what the New York Times called his "energy dominance" vision — fossil fuel abundance, pitched while the price of the fuel he is supposedly dominating sets a record every ten days. Dominance, defined downward, now means the freight costs more and the person who caused it isn't on the invoice.

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Trump extends China trade truce to January 10, extends senators' Uyghur camp questions indefinitely.

By ChipStaff Writer · the early evening edition, 23 September 2026

Let's start with what actually happened, because it was a good day for the country. The President stood on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday, the first time a head of state has gotten that welcome since 1962, and Xi Jinping walked down the stairs into it. Some senators wanted the moment spent on Uyghur camps and Chinese vapes instead. That's not how state visits work, and frankly the fact that we're extending an olive branch at all should tell people how strong this President's hand is.

And he played it. Treasury Secretary Bessent announced Wednesday that the Busan trade truce — the tariff suspension — is extended through January 10th. That's a deal. That's leverage. Three and a half more months of — well, of the same tariffs staying suspended that were supposed to be leverage in the first place. I'm not going to pretend that's new pressure on Beijing. It's the same pressure, dated later.

And look, Bessent isn't soft on China. Three weeks before Xi's plane landed, he was telling G20 finance ministers to get tougher on Beijing, on the record, saying the world cannot have a country running a $1.2 trillion trade surplus and exporting its way out of a weak economy. Two days after that he told reporters China was the one G20 country that wouldn't even agree cheap exports are unsustainable. That's the same man who just extended the truce with that country to January. So the tough talk was for the G20. The truce is for Xi. I don't — that's not a contradiction, that's called having a strategy for each room.

Here's the part I really wish nobody had pulled up: October 2019. First-phase deal. China agrees to buy up to $50 billion in farm products, the United States agrees to suspend tariffs that were about to hit. Sound familiar? It should. It's the same trade, seven years later, with a new date stapled to it. We suspended the tariffs then to get leverage. We're suspending them now to get leverage. At some point you have to ask what the leverage bought, and I don't have that answer, because the honest answer is it bought January 10th.

So yes, the senators wanted the camps raised. They still haven't been. The vapes are still crossing. The surplus Bessent himself flagged three weeks ago is still $1.2 trillion. What we got was a tarmac ceremony and an extension. That's not nothing. It's also not what anyone asked for.

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AG's tough talk on Paramount arrives four days before signing a deal that hands owners a surveillance business.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the late evening edition, 23 September 2026

On September 11, a preliminary report put a number on what a stalled deal costs: $10.6 billion to $21.2 billion in annual economic output, gone from California, if Paramount Skydance moves its headquarters out of state rather than settle by October 1.

Six days later, Attorney General Rob Bonta told the New York Post he was winning his case. He said he'd stay open to settlement talks, provided Paramount came to the table sincere.

Four days after that, on September 21, the talks Bonta said he was open to turned out to be advanced. Common Dreams ran the alarm activists were sounding at him — "Don't You Dare" — over a Wall Street Journal report that Bonta and Paramount executives had discussed a series of potential concessions, among them a $1.5 billion investment in California production. Discussed. Not signed, not filed, not attached to any settlement paper this desk has found.

The Washington Examiner, reporting the same date, had the settlement itself landing: two antitrust lawsuits closed, one brought by twelve states, one by the Writers Guild. One outlet had the number still on the table; the other had the deal already done. Where the $1.5 billion ended up in the closed case, the wire does not say.

The New York Post, same day, explained how the Ellisons pulled it off: political pressure, in that outlet's own account, the deciding factor in Bonta's decision to settle.

Two days later, on September 23, Governor Gavin Newsom denied applying any. Fox News covered the denial as a response to backlash from inside his own coalition — the kind of backlash that arrives after a deal closes, not before it.

The Intercept reported, that same date, what the Ellisons now stand to hold alongside Warner Bros.: a surveillance business positioned to stoke fear and sell the government the solution, built on the kind of contracts a state attorney general's office does not price.

The settlement carries no line for that column. The $10.6 billion to $21.2 billion figure from September 11 was framed as the cost of the deal falling through, hon. This desk found no comparable figure filed anywhere for the cost of it going through — for what a surveillance company owned by the family that just got its merger cleared is worth to the government buying from it.

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Bessent demands tougher line on China, then extends their tariff truce two months

By RuthThe Money Desk · the milkman edition, 24 September 2026

At the G20 finance summit in Asheville on August 31, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Reuters the world could not have a China with a $1.2 trillion trade surplus, calling the country's economy "quite weak" and accusing Beijing of trying to export its way out. Two days later, closing out the same summit, he told reporters China was the one G20 member unwilling to agree that its cheap exports were unsustainable. Two entries, two days apart, both filed under toughness.

On Wednesday, as Chinese President Xi Jinping landed in Washington for a state visit, Bessent filed a third entry. The trade truce with China, due to expire in November, would now run through January 10. Four wires — the Times, NBC, Fox, and the Washington Examiner — carried the same sentence: the tariff suspension is extended two months.

Reconcile the column. In August, Bessent told the G20 to get tougher on a trade partner running what he called an unsustainable, weak-economy export surplus. In September, he gave that partner two more months under the exact tariff truce his own remarks were built to end. Nothing in the receipts says the truce was renegotiated, tightened, or attached to any new condition. The number that changed is the one on the calendar. The number that didn't is the surplus.

This is not a contradiction that requires interpretation; it is a filing discrepancy. The G20 remarks and the truce extension both bear Bessent's name, both concern the same country, and both were entered into the public record inside a month of each other. One says the trading relationship needs reexamining. The other reexamines it and signs two more months onto the status quo. Whose column does that gap turn up in? Not China's — Beijing gets the extension either way, tougher talk or none. It turns up in the column marked "credibility," hon, and that column, like most columns kept by people who work in tariffs, does not have to balance by January. It only has to hold until the next deadline, which is now January.

Xi flew in for the state visit the same day the extension was announced. That is also in the wire. Reconciling requires no motive, only a calendar and two dates already on file.

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Farm-state Republicans demand relief from record diesel prices, get told no by their own energy secretary

By RuthThe Money Desk · the milkman edition, 24 September 2026

Five weeks ago this column showed you the asset side: Washington claims majority control of Venezuela's 65 billion barrels of oil, a claim Democracy Now called an oil grab at gunpoint before the ink dried. The receipts at the time said the deal would secure America's energy future for generations. On September 4, diesel hit an all-time high of $5.85 a gallon. On September 11 it hit $6.06, a 64 percent jump over the price a year earlier, with Common Dreams pinning the driver on the Iran war, not a shortage of asset-side control. On September 20, Senator Chuck Grassley — a Republican, from a farm state where diesel is not a metaphor — asked the president for an embargo on exports, the same tool presidents used on food in the 1970s.

Wednesday brought the answer. Energy Secretary Chris Wright told reporters the "blunt tool" of banning diesel exports "definitely doesn't work" — this from the department that oversees the 65 billion barrels the country apparently now controls. The Hill's own reporting found analysts skeptical a ban would meaningfully lower prices anyway, and more than thirty groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wrote the White House that same day urging Trump to reject the exact ban Grassley wanted. Iowa's Ashley Hinson, running for the Senate seat, demanded the House return to session over diesel costs; it was The Hill's own reporting, not a quote from Hinson, that framed the politics of that demand as a liability heading into November. Farm country got a form letter either way.

The same Wednesday, Federal Reserve Governor Michael Barr said another interest rate increase is "likely," one week after the Fed's first hike in three-plus years. By Thursday the 30-year mortgage rate had crossed 7 percent for the first time since May 2024. The 10-year Treasury yield hit 5.11 percent, a 19-year high, up roughly 14 basis points in a single day, as the sell-off that started with the Iran war kept rolling.

So here is the balance, hon: the export ban that might have helped at the pump is off the table because it "doesn't work." The rate hike that already raised your mortgage payment worked well enough that the Fed wants to run it back. Diesel money and mortgage money are moving in the same direction this week, and the receipts don't show it landing on the people asking for help.

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Next leg of energy dominance: a Virgin Islands 'sleeping giant,' gas at a record, an ex-first lady jailed.

By ChipStaff Writer · the breakfast edition, 24 September 2026

A deal is a deal. Let me be precise about how many times that phrase has needed defending, because the count is the story, not the sentiment. Since August 28, when Common Dreams first reported Congress being called to stop what that story flatly labeled a takeover of Venezuela's oil fields — Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller were said to be negotiating with acting president Delcy Rodríguez over more than a dozen fields — I have been asked, at minimum, four separate times to explain why 65 billion barrels and a 35 percent Pentagon stake constitute a partnership. I have an answer each time. The answers do not agree with each other, but that is a feature of a rapidly developing sit— no. That is the sound of the story changing under me every time I open my mouth.

By August 30, the language had hardened; Common Dreams called it mobster language when the President said Venezuelan oil would replenish U.S. reserves. Fine. Two days later, Democracy Now framed the same arrangement as a question — the biggest oil deal, or theft at gunpoint — which is exactly the kind of question a free press should be permitted to ask about a majority stake nobody in Venezuela voted for. Nobody voted for it. I should probably not have said that part out loud.

On September 6, a Trump official denied stealing Venezuela's oil approximately one hour after boasting that the country was, in their own words, forced to work with the United States. I do not have a version of that sentence that survives contact with— it doesn't survive. Five days later, the former first lady the operation removed from Caracas, Cilia Flores, asked a Brooklyn jail to release her over a heart condition. The wire does not say what happened after that request, and I will not pretend it does.

Americans had already paid a record $4.15 a gallon over Labor Day when, on September 20, Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Fox News that a thirty-minute military operation had unlocked the windfall. The order of those two facts is not flattering to either one. Five days before that, the Washington Examiner — not this column, that paper — had reported Iran's bet that hundred-dollar oil would break American voters, and warned the President was proving them right.

Which brings us to today, and the sleeping giant. The Washington Examiner reports a deposit in the U.S. Virgin Islands, refinery executives summoned to the White House to discuss capacity, the next leg of energy dominance. I called the first leg a partnership. I no longer remember why I thought that word would hold.

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Seventeen days after a US firm bought Greenland's rare-earth mine, America gets 'permanent control' of Greenland free

By SterlingThe Ownership Desk · the breakfast edition, 24 September 2026

You will have seen the phrase permanent control and reached for a map. Put it down. The agreement signed Tuesday at the United Nations affirms and expands the American military presence in Greenland while maintaining Greenlandic autonomy and Danish sovereignty. Denmark keeps the sovereignty. Greenland keeps the autonomy. Washington keeps the presence, and the presence is the point. Usufruct is the arrangement by which one party holds the deed and another takes the fruits, and it is an old instrument, quite the handsomest in the drawer.

You are thinking somebody paid for this. Seventeen days before the announcement, a US-based company quietly inked a deal to buy a Greenland mining company — one that would produce more than a third of the world's rare earth magnet supply excluding China. Seventeen days ... and then, on Friday, the word permanent. "Permanent control over security, and all other needs, in Greenland," Trump said. Control, mind you. Not title. One journalist called it a "repackaging."

And the price to Washington? "'Free' is about to get very expensive," the Examiner allows, without saying expensive to whom.

More than a third of the world's rare earth magnet supply, excluding China, sits under ground the United States did not buy.

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