Trump is so myopic that he is allowing Tik Tok to continue to undermine him and his agenda because someone told him that the young people all voted for him (they didn’t) because of it. I don’t have strong feelings ab out Tik-Tok one way or another but Trump’s incoherent policy is truly something. Talk about clown show fascism…
The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson commented on twitter:
Something v profound here about the whole Trump experience. Trump stepping over Congress to punish Chinese manufacturers (his tariffs) while stepping over Congress to un-punish Chinese social media (his stay of the TikTok ban) is one of the clearer cases where I don’t think it’s possible to really articulate any coherent ex ante strategy for this administration.
The best a Trump explainer or defender can do is watch what he does and explain after the fact that it’s brilliant. So you get a bunch of very (or mildly) clever ex post explanations but nobody can tell you what’s gonna happen next week. How’s this supposed to work for … four years? I don’t get how you run an economy with a bunch of priests standing around a lottery ball machine, explaining why each new number is the perfect expression of an infallible god.
CNN did a 100 Days program last night that was quite good. But it features several Trump apologists weighing in on each subject and they sounded exactly like that. No matter how obviously insane Trump’s comments or policies, they robotically defended him in just that way — as an infallible god. It’s very creepy.