Impeached immediately?
“Surprise! The madman stuff wasn’t an act,” Paul Krugman writes in his Substack.
Behold this CNBC headline from Tuesday: Dow tumbles again, loses more than 1,300 points in two days as Trump ignites trade war.
Until recently, business leaders thought Donald Trump was their kind of guy, Krugman notes, but his childish imposition of tariffs on close trading partners may give the guys in suits pause. Or not. Power and privilege can make one blind to what others can see:
What those of us not cocooned in our corner offices see is that Musk let a bunch of Dunning-Kruger kids — too incompetent to realize that they’re incompetent — loose on federal agencies, where they began firing workers without trying to understand what these workers do or why it might be important. These firings have been followed in several cases by desperate attempts to rehire the lost workers, who turn out to have been doing things like, um, securing the nation’s nuclear weapons.
Swalwell: The stock market is crashing, and prices are rising. This guy has gone to the Super Bowl, the Daytona 500, and a UFC fight. He should go to the fucking supermarket and see what people are spending to feed themselves pic.twitter.com/JOn9ktQ7Fo
— Acyn (@Acyn) March 4, 2025
Musk’s claims to have saved taxpayers tens of billions of dollars have been debunked and debunked again, his “wall of receipts” riddled with errors and still full of errors when “corrected.”
Imagine how a private business would react if it hired a supposed efficiency expert who quickly fired crucial employees while making grandiose claims about the money he’s saving, but kept releasing progress reports that were full of ludicrous errors. You wouldn’t keep him on; you’d have security escort him out of the building and immediately change all the locks.
This is one of the few times we’ve seen Trump not throw a “friend” under the bus when the heat is on. Perhaps Trump finds taking revenge as tasty as his fast food and cannot let it go.
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We’ll see how long Musk lasts once Social Security recipients see their monthly checks interrupted. And since he’s closing Social Security offices and chopping staff, they’ll find it difficult even to lodge a complaint. They can take to the streets in front of their local federal buildings, one supposes, if they haven’t been turned into condos.
Krugman adds:
I don’t know who first came up with this metaphor, but it seems to me that America is now trapped in a burning Tesla. If you don’t know this, the doors on Musk’s cars are designed to open electronically; if they have manual releases at all, they’re difficult to get at and use. As a result, there have been multiple instances of people burning alive inside Teslas when the engines catch fire.
Well, large parts of the U.S. economy and government appear to be on the verge of self-immolation. And given the combination of arrogance and ignorance shared by Musk and Trump, it’s hard to see how we get out.
Krugman chose as his “MUSICAL CODA” today a ballad by Sinead O’Conner. I’m going with something edgier.
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Have you fought the coup today?
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Chop Wood, Carry Water