When I was a judge on "The Apprentice," I always got a kick out of it because I would be offering my advice to Mr. Trump — he was always Mr. Trump, never Donald — and he always would seem to want to go my way. I took my judging chores with maximum sincerity and generosity. I wanted everyone I witnessed to win, even Gene Simmons from Kiss, who wanted off in the worst way and then chose it, walking out with no reason and no notice. I don't think he will be invited into this White House any time soon, although if you can have The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg on speed dial and stay in the inner circle, I guess anything is possible.
When would-be apprentices asked for my help, I wasn't going to deny them my meager insights even as some of the tasks were well beyond my ken.
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No matter, a contestant could put together Erector Set of an idea, and another contestant could draw up something Oppenheimer would be stumped by in its simple elegance and originality. I could make an impassioned case for the latter and think that it was such a lay-up that I was ready for the wrath of the Erector Set creator to throw his invention in my direction. I was always thinking that, if push came to shove, I could cower under the six-inch thick office desk for protection.
That was until I realized that my input meant nothing if I was buttressing the wrong pick, the candidate that didn't matter in the grand scheme of things because they were going anywhere but downstairs at Mr. Trump's direction. The jurisprudence was sorely lacking — Oliver Wendell Holmes would been horrified, Louis Brandeis grave rolling. My justice was blind, deaf, and dumb to the Chief of Justice.
My entreaties certainly seemed compelling, I had to fool some viewers at home, but they didn't realize they were being fooled as badly as I was.
Yep, it was that kind of show. My input was meant to be nothing of the musings of a foil. Tin had the edge on me.
Oh, and you may think like so many others that it was just the opening part of some discussion or transaction or negotiation, that's a canard. Mr. Trump does what he wants especially if the ratings, Neilson, or polling website 538, get thrown off by a maximum margin. That's all part of the drama that made his show No. 1 then and seems to be giving his White House numbers a similar edge now.
He likes drama. Even if it is phony.
So, here we are on the eve of "Liberation Day," and there are people frantically trying to get short Sunday evening — anticipating that Wednesday will be the day when we will be liberated from even more of our money than we were last week.
"Liberation Day" — President Donald Trump calls his reciprocal tariffs day — will certainly teach the Germans how wrong they were to build plants like the one that pumps out 400,000 VWs per year in Puebla, Mexico — not far from my wife's palanque where she makes Fosforo mezcal, pretty good stuff if I do say myself.
The Volkswagen plant, the largest auto factory in the Western Hemisphere, happens to be 1,056 miles too far from the Texas border. Seemed like a good idea at the time — 60 years ago and still going strong. Oh, and don't laugh at the BMW factory erected six years ago in the gritty town of San Luis Potosi or the Mercedes-Benz plant built in Aguascalientes, which opened seven years ago to take advantage of the goodwill of then-first-term President Trump and his USCMA "treaty" — the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement that replaced in 2020 the North American Free Trade Agreement, which into effect in 1994. They had him figured, too.
Everyone looks to be on the wrong side of history including our mezcal — but at least we have an excuse, they don't grow Tobala trees in Milwaukee. What's the excuse of the Germans? That they believed in the rule of law?
Good luck with that.
So what happens?
I think the president wants to throw off everyone except the bears, who are probably laughing at their good fortune.
They get still one more week to smack down the techs that are now so weak and pathetic that we are all in disbelief. Can anyone imagine anything good coming out Wednesday that will make tech look better? I can't think of anything.
Which brings me to something rather staggering — for all of Trump's iconoclasm, we know that going short anything save, say, copper, has been a huge win. It's an incredible moment because I can sit here Sunday night and write that we are going to get clobbered and then we get clobbered and then people say, "Boy, we were clobbered" because we keep thinking that this can't keep going on, can it?
I mean doesn't Trump have to give the bulls something?
I think people are beginning to wonder what they did so wrong believing this would be a good time for making money on the long side. Maybe they didn't do anything wrong. Maybe we are all hapless judges like I was thinking somehow that the merits mattered.
Did we all have it coming? Were we not listening when he made it clear that he disliked our trading partners, and we were going to do everything from annex Canada to rob Denmark of Greenland to prop up Russian President Vladimir Putin and backslap the shoulder — not the head — of Turkey for jailing the opposition.
The market isn't even that oversold.
It was such a remarkably bad week for everything that had been good for so long that it was almost comic that Morgan Stanley had to price the CoreWeave deal where Club name Nvidia was willing to backstop it. Talk about averaging up. What was the original basis for their slug of stock? The best thing that can be said: Nvidia has a nice average on its CoreWeave deal.
I know what you are thinking: It can't be this bad. Trump can't want to exact revenge on our trading partners that bad, can he? Even if it costs everyone who owns stock to get hurt? Does he really have the same attitude on this one issue that Joe Biden had when he was president — that only rich people own stock and they can take some pain, because, heck, they are rich aren't they?
I think Trump may take this view until so many people think he will do it and he switches and gets bullish. Right now, the prevailing winds seem to make it too easy to short. But it's like people forgot how to do it. As it's been too long or something.
So, we brace ourselves, still in disbelief that this man in the White House, whom everyone in business just said they had great meetings with, is telling them the same things I heard when I was a judge on "The Apprentice," namely everything I wanted to hear.
None of it came to pass.
(Jim Cramer's Charitable Trust is long NVDA. See here for a full list of the stocks.)
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