Important Saturday Message from Meidas Founder MeidasTouch Network and Ben Meiselas Apr 19 By Ben Meiselas We reached the weekend. Together. I am so proud of this community. We rallied together this week and didn’t let Trump take us out of the fight. He escalated his authoritarian tactics this week as he got more desperate. We stayed strong. We supported each other. We got out the truth. Did you notice that we barely heard a peep from Republicans this week outside of those in the administration? Sure, an occasional MAGA Congress member went on a right-wing network and said something ridiculous. But overall, it was relative silence from the MAGA GOP and Republican leadership. We did hear a lot of leaks this week. We heard leaks that Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent supposedly convinced Trump to pause the fake reciprocal tariffs by sneaking to speak with Trump when Trump’s other advisor, Peter Navarro, was outside. This leak likely came from Bessent, who knows he’s lost all credibility with his former Wall Street buddies. There was the leak that the Trump regime “accidentally” sent that letter to Harvard where they threatened to destroy the university unless it let the regime control its admissions process, hiring process, and political views of students and faculty. Harvard hired some of the top lawyers in the country to fight the regime and rallied other universities to do the same. Schools have been forming “common defense pacts” to join forces to fight the regime. On Friday, the regime claimed this was all a big misunderstanding and folded. Also notably, the regime cracked and revealed it has lost patience in trying to negotiate peace in Ukraine unless Ukraine agrees to give up all the land Russia stole, recognize Crimea as part of Russia, and essentially give in to all of Putin’s demands. Both Trump and his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, said that if a deal wasn’t reached in the next few days, the United States would stop trying to help. This is basically a verbatim quote from Trump and Rubio. Of course, we also saw signs of life from Abrego Garcia in El Salvador, who met with Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen after massive pressure was applied on Nayib Bukele. After the meeting between Van Hollen and Abrego, Trump and Bukele tried to act like it was part of some master “checkmate strategy.” Trump’s White House started posting trolling messages on the official White House accounts about Abrego “never coming back.” The posts show signs of real desperation. It may have seemed like the markets were quieter this week. That’s true to some extent. But the lack of catastrophic volatility in the major market indexes is masking the fact that the fundamentals of the economy have fallen off a cliff. It hasn’t yet splattered on the floor. But it’s in free fall—and sadly, the damage is done. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who Trump first appointed in 2017, gave a speech in Chicago this week where he said the Trump tariffs have caused real damage to the economy. This led to Trump publicly attacking Powell and saying he wants to fire him. Going back to the points I made earlier, two notable things happened. First, no major Republican joined Trump in attacking Powell. Instead, all Fox could book was Kevin McCarthy to trash Powell as McCarthy tries to get back into Trump’s crew. Second, multiple leaks came out that Trump is afraid to fire Powell because Trump knows he’s close to causing a “1929 event,” which is what Trump calls the Great Depression. Trump was not able to cut a single tariff deal this week. How hard could it be to cut deals with allies where there were already deals in place and Trump could do what he always did in the past—which is rename the deal and take credit for someone else’s work? The silence here suggests what I think we all know: other countries are fighting back behind the scenes, and they are tired of being bullied by Trump. In addition to being tired of being bullied by Trump, I think it’s abundantly clear almost all people know—and certainly all world leaders know—that Trump is a paper tiger. Actually, he is something worse than a paper tiger. He’s like a new species of paper tiger blobfish crossbred with a poisonous leech. He’s a grotesque, toxic mutant who is best to be avoided like the plague or swatted down. Trump huffs and he puffs, but this foolish blowhard folds like one of his cheap, ill-fitted suits and runs back to Mar-a-Lago to golf the moment things get tough. He then returns to DC and repeats this perverse, insane cycle each week. Trump’s polls are plummeting. He’s significantly underwater in every area. He and the Republicans are viewed very unfavorably on the economy now—which was an issue they previously successfully defrauded Americans into believing they are good at. They are flailing, and it’s going to get worse for them. Much worse. The opposition gets stronger. The resistance grows. There are more protests today. We will cover them all. Democrats are fighting. Federal judges from both parties are largely holding the line on key issues. The MeidasTouch Network continues to grow rapidly as we cover it all. We’ve replaced corporate news to become the most-watched news network in the world precisely because we cover what they wanted to suppress. You helped build this network. The subscribers to this Substack helped us get more views than Fox News and any other cable news on digital platforms. The cable networks out-funded us by billions of dollars. Who cares if we have a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of their budget—we’ve got you and this community, and that’s helped us stay number one. Fox and cable news have no clue how we pulled this off with our subscribers here. I do. It’s because of you, the Meidas Mighty. We will continue to amplify the real news. We will continue to support and amplify other independent media voices as we feature them on this platform each week. We will continue to meet the moment and fight for you. Please consider subscribing to this Substack now if you haven’t subscribed. You help this network grow and help us stay number one. You help us get 500 million views and downloads a month to get the message out to the people. We appreciate your help to keep growing this network by subscribing now. If you already subscribed, you can gift subscriptions to others. Thanks, Meidas Mighty! You have made this network the fastest-growing Substack in the world. Let’s keep this pro-democracy momentum going. 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