When the snake oil bites….
Trump is counting on you to be one of his rubes. Fans of Trumpism, even its operators, are going to feel its impacts very, very soon. Oh, and all y’all as well.
The snake behind the oil is about to bite.
CNN:
Just about everyone thought it was a bluff. Top analysts from the biggest banks on Wall Street said it was highly unlikely. Stocks were trading like it wouldn’t happen. Some companies built contingency plans, but they weren’t exactly rushing to make changes.
But the tariffs are coming — in full force. President Donald Trump announced Saturday that a massive 25% tariff on all goods from Mexico and most imports from Canada will go into effect Tuesday. An additional 10% tariff on Chinese goods will be enacted the same day.
Trump in a message posted on Truth Social Sunday said, “We don’t need anything they have. We have unlimited Energy, should make our own Cars, and have more Lumber than we can ever use.” But America’s supply chains are reliant on its trading partners, and even for goods that could be grown or produced exclusively in the United States, the complex web of interconnected global trade cannot easily be unwound.
So the additional costs on foreign-made goods will be paid by American importers, who typically pass those costs onto retailers, who pass them onto inflation-weary consumers. That means prices will rise — although, for most items, not immediately. Businesses’ profits will be squeezed as they bear the cost burden of the tariffs or pay to adjust their carefully constructed and at times inflexible supply chains.
That’s why stocks on Monday were set to tumble. Dow futures were more than 600 points, or 1.3% lower. S&P 500 futures sank 1.5% and Nasdaq futures were 1.7% lower.
What a ride, huh?
Brace for it. Trumpism is going to wear thin in 3, 2, 1.
Now then, the first principle of opposing Trump 2.0 is, as Anat Shenker-Osorio might say, “Don’t Buy It.”
The smallness of Trump’s soul
Ezra Klein adds a corollary to Timothy Snyder’s “Do not obey in advance.” To wit, “Don’t believe him.”
In that famous Glengarry Glen Ross scene, Alec Baldwin berates his salesmen with the ABCs: Always Be Closing. That’s Donald Trump. He’s always marketing. Don’t be snowed by the bullshit, Klein suggests. It’s more marketing than reality. What he says he’s doing and what he can actually do are two different things. That is, unless you buy in (gift link):
Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.
Don’t believe him. Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trump’s transition team. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassin’s bullet — as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trump’s soul — but it was an act that was within his power.
Like the wizard in Oz, Trump’s power lies in convincing you with a sound-and-light show that he is all-powerful. It’s an illusion. It obscures the reality that, as with his tariffs declaration, Trump “keeps stepping on rakes.”
But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.
Trump and his accomplices will defy the courts and break the laws only so long as the public lets them. We’ll see how many are cowed into submission once the market opens today at 9:30 a.m.
Meantime, like the prophets of Baal, powerless franchisees like Mike Flynn perform their Trumpy medicine shows on their god’s behalf. They cry aloud and cut themselves until bloody (1 Kings 18) to no effect. It’s a show. Loud and wild-eyed, but only that.
Smells like Team Dispirit.