Splinter: Trump Said He 'Wants to Be a Good Boy' in Extremely Normal and Not at All Unhinged Tariff Press Conference
President Trump’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day began with two major economic reports falling flat, and while meeting with the governors of America, this country’s premier pissbaby learned that the Supreme Court struck down his manifestly unconstitutional tariffs. It’s a remarkable demonstration of how SCOTUS believes that Trump can trample democracy and even the courts themselves, but the oligarchic neoliberal order that the Court has always served as its ultimate master still lies beyond his reach. The people who really run this world depend far too much on global trade and the Fed to let Trump’s destruction reach their shores, and the big boy is big mad about it.
Not long after SCOTUS handed down their 6-3 decision, Trump called for a press conference at 12:45 EST. In true Trump fashion, he didn’t show up until around 1:15, and he came out fuming–‘do not put in the paper that I am mad’-level mad. Trump unleashed a barrage of unhinged grievances that could only emanate from the demented worldview trapped inside his sundowning brain. Here are the highlights of Trump at his most Brandon.
Trump: “I want to be a good boy”
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 20, 2026 at 11:28 AM
He was looking down when he said this quote I instantly knew had to be in the title, and I really really really want to know if that was something Trump improvised, or if Stephen Miller actually wrote that down in one of his deranged Nazi screeds. This press conference was all so unhinged, and yet again I am tapping the sign with the bloody stump that is my finger now, pleading with America’s Very Serious mainstream press to consider that maybe there’s a reason why this is all so crazy.
Trump: “I can do anything I want to do to them … I’m allowed to destroy the country.”
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 20, 2026 at 11:37 AM
Trump: “‘President, I’d love to kiss you’ — this is a very powerful man. I don’t want to be kissed my that man. But a very powerful, strong man … he said, ‘Sir, I want to kiss you so badly.’ And I said, ‘No thank you.'”
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 20, 2026 at 11:58 AM
If Joe Biden had all that nonsense tumble out of his mouth in 2024, CNN’s Jake Tapper would have faked a stroke live on air, Axios‘ Alex Thompson already would have published another two books about it with a third on the way, and it would have been the only thing on the front page of the New York Times for a week.
Trump on tariffs: “You’re gonna start to see the results a year from now”
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 20, 2026 at 11:57 AM
I would pay good money to see the look on every Republican up for reelection’s face when Trump said this. There is so much pain in this world, and we have to savor the little moments of joy like this, where this speech made it clear that the only season every Republican up for reelection will experience the rest of the year is stove-touching season. They totally own an economy their cult leader says is suboptimal and won’t start to improve until after their election this year. Today is a great day for schadenfreude.
The administration spent all last year promising that 2026 was when you were going to see their debunked 19th century economic program start to work for every day Americans, and Trump’s favored Epstein associates like Howard Lutnick got particularly loud at the end of 2025 about this supposed boom was right around the corner because of some strong GDP figures. But now Q4 GDP fell sharply and they’re silent, so apparently 2027 is when Trump’s Smoot-Hawley tribute tax is definitely going to start working. I wonder if the immense hiring slowdown in America where job growth was basically flat in the second half of 2025 had anything to do with this pivot to 2027 becoming the new golden age of America!
It’s hard to say how much substance came out of this press conference. Trump said “embargo” a lot as far as what powers he thinks he can exercise, but that can take many forms and sounds like classic Trump over-promising and under-delivering nonsense. He also said he won’t even talk about refunding the tariff money, which Costco, Revlon and many other companies have already sued him for, so that is another test of American democratic institutions creating more uncertainty down the road. Trump is hard to cover because he is the ultimate Oops all lies! politician, which is why I shared the most insane tidbits from the press conference because I think the president going full Brandon in front of our eyes yet again is the firm headline out of this.
Trump did say the global trade war is back on, as he is going to impose a new 10% universal tariff–but like all Trump promises, that changes a bit once you dig into the details. It’s going to be imposed under Section 122, which gives him a 150-day window to impose up to a 15% tariff rate, and when reporters asked Trump what happens after 150 days, he said it doesn’t matter and they can do this anyway. It’s clear that one big SCOTUS decision today has unlocked a future filled with multiple future tariff decisions in front of multiple courts. This is still one big mess and if anything, it’s getting messier.
Despite the ground shifting under his feet this morning, president deals hasn’t really changed his tune on tariffs at all. He is expressing this rebuke of him as an introduction of “certainty,” which he is right to a degree. Full disclosure: I made some stock purchases recently in tariff-affected industries fully expecting this repeal to happen, because you could see it in the arguments back in November. Trump has been whining on and off about this ever since, and so in a sense, today was just the worst kept secret in America finally spilling out into the open, and SCOTUS took a downside surprise off the table for markets slowly floating up today.
But Trump is introducing more uncertainty to a situation that SCOTUS had clearly hoped to resolve. He has some powers to impose certain tariffs, and he has promised that he will pursue these avenues as far as he can while trying to tell everyone that nothing has fundamentally changed. You never want to make too much of one day of market action, especially in bond markets, but the response to the tariff news today is pretty much as expected, and markets are shrugging off a bad GDP print in part due to the longest government shutdown ever dragging the government component of GDP down 1.1% (not 2% like Trump says in his pinned post on TruthSocial). The expectations are for first quarter GDP to bounce back and for the economy to keep chugging along better than our peers’ economies have, and this tariff repeal should help give us a boost. Unfortunately for the economic doomers who are tapping into their inner Dalio and predicting 2008 2.0 around every corner, the US economy has proven to be pretty resilient in the face of Trump’s madness.
But this is still madness, and what the 2008 2.0 believers need to understand is that the threat with Trump’s tariffs is not necessarily economic collapse, but sticky and rising inflation. If something imported usually costs $10, but Trump slaps a 10% tariff on it, it now costs you at least $11 to buy it. The firmest tariff news today isn’t necessarily the Supreme Court’s decision, it’s the CPI print that told us for certain that Trump’s tariffs are impacting inflation, something Fed Chair Jerome Powell has expressed fears about for the past year. “It is going to be very hard for the Fed to cut interest rates this year,” said Torsten Sløk, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, to the Financial Times. It’s not out of bounds at all to connect today’s CPI print to SCOTUS’s decision. If anything, it explains why John Roberts all of a sudden doesn’t think Trump should be King in every realm.
Trump has been doing everything he can to try to undermine the hallowed independence of the Fed and replace it with his Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) fever dream and threaten what is a pretty stable economy. He and other noobs like him were tricked by the era of ZIRP that produced immense balance sheet wealth, conning themselves into believing that there is a “grow economy fast” button at the Fed that is just lowering interest rates. The 1970s taught us that if you lower interest rates before inflation has abated, that can send inflation roaring back and the “growth” created in the economy by doing that is illusory and mostly inflationary.
It was once thought impossible by economists to have rising inflation, slowing growth, and rising unemployment all happening at the same time, but the 1970s taught us that stagflation is very real. One way to describe today’s bad GDP and CPI prints is of a dynamic trending towards stagflation, all while unemployment slowly ticks up and job growth stalls. Trump is dying to speedrun the worst decisions of the 1970s using a plan overflowing with debunked 19th century economics that are too revanchist for a Supreme Court trying to drag society back to the 19th century. He is so far gone at this point that the only justification he can come up for these delusions being good for the economy is that he “wants to be a good boy,” and even the bottomless pit of cynicism that is John Roberts can’t stand to debase himself that much.