Well, here we go. Donald Trump signed the bill compelling him to make most of the government’s Epstein files public last night—a remarkable development, given how hard he was working just days ago to prevent the bill from ever getting a vote in either chamber. It’s all coming out now; or rather, it’s all coming out except the stuff Pam Bondi thinks she can get away with holding back.

One quick piece of bookkeeping: Yesterday, in a fit of unkindness, Andrew made a crack about the “crayon-drawn world” of Donald Trump’s psyche. Upon further reflection he would like to apologize for this injudicious remark. Everyone knows Donald Trump is a Sharpie guy. Happy Thursday.

The Economy of His Dreams

by Andrew Egger

As thunderheads gather over the U.S. economy, Donald Trump has fallen back on a familiar claim: Trillions of dollars in foreign investment are pouring into the U.S. thanks to his dealsmanship. And they’re adding rocket fuel to our HOT new Golden Age.

This week, we got to watch the sausage-making on that foreign investment happen in real time.

It went down Tuesday, during Trump’s goopy bilat with Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman. Trump was waxing lyrical about all the foreign money pouring in: “We expect to be around $20 trillion, $21 trillion in one year, and that’s many times bigger than—in history the highest number was $3 trillion, and we’re going to be at $21 trillion.”

He then turned to MBS: “And I want to thank you, because you’ve agreed to invest $600 billion into the United States. And because he’s my friend, he might make [it] $1 trillion, but I’m going to have to work on him. But it’s 600—we can count on $600 billion, but that number could go up a little bit higher yet.”

Now, MBS didn’t get where he is today—the personal best friend of the president of the United States—with just a few bonesaws. No. He recognizes that you have to tell Donald Trump what he knows he wants to hear. “We believe in what you’re doing, Mr. President,” he replied, “and tomorrow we’re going to announce that we are going to increase that $600 billion to almost $1 trillion of investment.”

“So you are doing that now?” Trump said, in apparent surprise. “You’re saying to me now that the $600 billion will be $1 trillion? Good, I like that very much.”

Donny Deals does it again, folks! An extra $400 billion. And all he had to do was ask.

The important thing to understand here is that both these numbers—the $600 billion and the cool $1 trillion—are fake. They’re monopoly-money promises. Saudi Arabia is a staggeringly wealthy country, but its entire GDP is something like $1.2 trillion. The country’s sovereign wealth fund contains an estimated $925 billion. The idea that MBS plans to sink the entirety of his nation’s accumulated petro-lucre into building factories in the United States is laughable on its face.

And yet the White House’s messaging apparatus treated MBS’s fanciful promise as though it were a check they’d already cashed. “This massive $1 TRILLION investment will drive business in the United States, maintain American national security, create jobs and support American needs,” the official White House account tweeted. “The Dealmaker-in-Chief is at it again.”

The faithful right-wing infotainment apparatus was happy to play along too. “America is the hottest country in the world,” exulted former Trump adviser Larry Kudlow in his show on Fox Business. “MBS comes here and he’s going to pony up another trillion dollars. . . . That doesn’t happen during the Biden years. What does that tell you that money is pouring in here and that Trump has such an easy time persuading people to invest in America?”

It’s all like this, of course. In the months since his Liberation Day tariffs, Donald Trump and his allies have gone around the world shaking a hat, and world leaders—either eager to curry favor or just to find a way to get Trump’s tariff boot off their neck—have been happy to throw large numbers around for his enjoyment.

India, for example, was said to have pledged a $500 billion investment. But it turned out that was a goal for a bilateral trade agreement between the countries. And as for the $21 trillion aggregate figure, that was actually $17 trillion according to Trump himself just a month and a half ago. As CNN’s Daniel Dale noted, the White House website, at the time, had the figure at $8.8 trillion—though it appears that page has been removed.

Now of course there is nothing wrong with foreign investment! In general, increased investment is a sign of strength for the American economy—that we’re growing, and the world’s wealthy want a piece of the action. Maybe some of this promised investment will even materialize.

But you’d be hard-pressed to find a more speculative, less reliable indicator of actual future economic prosperity than these sorts of vague promises, as anyone who remembers the Foxconn boondoggle of Trump’s first term could tell you. Meanwhile, the investment promises Trump is extracting from other world leaders are about as abstract, gauzy, and speculative as it’s possible for a handshake agreement to be. This summer, when Trump struck a tentative trade agreement with Japan, the White House printed off documents for the announcement event boasting of $400 billion in promised Japanese investments in America. Then, before the event started, someone—Trump himself?—crossed out “400” with a Sharpie and wrote “500” down instead. When Trump took to Truth Social to spike the football, the number became $550 billion. The rules are made up and the points don’t matter; when the point of the exercise is just to get Trump in a good mood, you’ll let him say any number he likes. This behavior is not limited to foreign leaders: Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg made up a $600 billion Meta investment on the spot to please a nearby Trump, and then got caught on a hot mic admitting it.

All this would be more ridiculous than alarming if it weren’t for a simple fact: This most contingent and ephemeral of all economic indicators is the only economic indicator Trump seems to trust is real. In recent weeks, Trump has repeatedly scoffed at the idea that the economy is worsening, suggesting that polls showing American economic anxiety is on the rise are fakes cooked up by his adversaries. Every time he does, he makes the same pivot—would a bad economy have all this investment coming in?

“I don’t know that they are saying [they’re anxious about the economy],” Trump told Laura Ingraham this month. “I think polls are fake. We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had—we will have over $20 trillion coming into our economy.”

By all appearances, Trump has cut himself off from every source of information that could theoretically undermine this total certainty. He is, of course, in no position to feel any worsening of the economy personally. He has enclosed himself in a hermetically sealed information chamber in which aides try hard only to tell him information that they know he’ll find flattering. He has sealed his own mind off from macroeconomic indicators, which he believes are cooked. And, of course, his personal family businesses (real estate and crypto) are going gangbusters as the same people and countries touting fake investments in the U.S. are making real investments into his ventures.

But eventually, reality has to set in. September’s jobs report dropped this morning after a brief blackout due to the shutdown. The headline nu