Getting Trumped

​On Sunday night, the 1973 movie The Paper Chase was on Turner Classic Movies.  I watched the last 20 minutes or so, in large part because there’s one sequence I love.  And the best part of that sequence is when the main character, James Hart, decides that his dorm filled with panicked Harvard law students as finals near is getting too hectic, and so he asks one of his study partners, Ford, to leave with him to find somewhere else to study in quiet.  As they head out of the dorm, they run into the utterly arrogant Willis Bell – also part of their study group, always bragging about his 800-page study outline he had put together from class notes which he claimed were so amazingly brilliant that he was going to get them published.  But Bell wasn’t going to let all the study group see it because, except for Hart, they were all “pimps” – his favorite word for insulting others in the study group, “You’re all pimps.”  So, at this point, Hart and Ford are heading out on their own to cram elsewhere before the final exams...when Bell sees them leaving and panics.  He races up to his room and seeing the two walking away, he leans out of his fourth-floor window with his 800-page magnificent, beautiful outline, calling out to them to wait.  When all of a sudden, he loses his grip on the papers…and they go flying out and fluttering through the air.  And all you hear is the arrogant Bell scream, “Aggggghhhhhhhhhh!!!!”
 
That was how I viewed Trump’s Really Bad Awful No Good Day yesterday.  Only two weeks into the administration, and so much came down on him that it’s already starting to fray and fall apart.  The ball of twine unraveling.  A snowball rolling downhill out of control, and growing bigger as it goes.  Papers flying everywhere.  Screaming in agony.

That was Trump's day on Monday.

​Thanks to the Trump tariffs, the stock market plummeted 600 points within its first hours.  Only after Trump backed off for a month with Mexico and Canada did the Down Jones recover.
 
Worse for Trump, much he tried to contend to the contrary, he got played by both countries – getting them to agree to things (10,000 soldiers to their respective borders and putting money into border security) that they had already agreed to under President Biden without having a trade war.  And Trump made some additional pledges in return.  So, he caved (for a month) and got nothing in return.  Even the Mexican/Canadian pledges to try to stop Fentanyl at the border was ridiculed by experts, saying it not only is smuggled in by car, not drug mules, and is the easiest drug to hide, but it’s also deadly if improperly touched.
 
And Trump made the problem even worse for himself.  When reporters asked Trump if his retreating for a month on tariffs to Mexico and Canada was because of the sudden, massive drop in the stock market, he answered, “No, I don't look at the market. What was it doing?”  This was so egregiously, almost laughably untrue that CNN’s Jeff Zelany (who was among the reporters there) later reported on the air, “We know, obviously, based on watching him for a very long time, that is not true.”  (This is being polite.  Trump is a sociopathological liar.  He can’t not lie.  The only thing Trump probably watches more than the stock market is golf.)
 
And when Trump suggested he would put tariffs on the European Union (yes, you read that right), the blowback from the EU was intense.
 
Moreover, another judge blocked one of Trump’s Executive Orders.
 
And so many of Elon Musk’s actions (or “Leon” Musk as Trump once again called him) were given red-flag alerts by Democrats:
 
Getting access to the high-security Federal payment system, with his group of college student associates in charge of the computer system.
 
Shutting down the free Direct Pay program for people paying their federal taxes to the IRS.  (Never a good look when you’re the world’s richest man – and worse when you really don’t have the authority to do so.)
 
Locking out employees from the USAID office, which oversees international aid.  (Again, see above re: “when you really don’t have the authority to do so.”)

Side Note:  Lest it be forgot who some of the players are here --
​

The push-back response from Democrats, experts, the media, interest groups and more has been aggressive.  Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has threatened shutting down the government to ensure Trump’s most high-security risks are stopped.   Senator Brian Schatz put a hold on all of Trump’s State Department nominees until the USAID fiasco is resolved.  Anderson Cooper on CNN got blunt with a MAGOP strategist dancing around when questioned about how the Trump administration shutting the USAID offices was risking lives by delaying a program of emergency medical assistance for AIDS patients oversees that has saved 25 million lives.  (When Brad Todd said he’s “not arguing against PEPFAR,” and added, “No I’m not, no I’m not,” Cooper finally had enough and pointedly snapped back, “Well, you seem to be because you're avoiding answering any questions.”   You can see the video here.)
 
And there’s more, and most of this was either today or since Friday.  And we’re still only 15 days into Trump’s time in office.
 
But it's worse or even more stupid than this.
​ 
But it's worse or even more stupid than this.  And most news coverage didn’t touch on what was (to me) the most terrible thing about yesterday’s cave-in on Mexico and Canada for Trump.  The focus was largely on how he had to back down and got nothing for it.  And that’s bad enough.
 
But it’s not even really the problem.
 
That’s because, lost in the morass of flying papers and screams, the whole "point" of Trump's tariffs on Canada and Mexico (and China, which shouldn’t be overlooked, and was by most analysts, as if the tariffs on China don’t matter because, gee, we don’t really import or export all that much of anything from them) was something else entirely.
 
From everything Trump has been ranting about for weeks, the whole “point” of his tariffs -- was supposed to be economic imbalance, and these Trump tariffs were supposed to even that out, reclaim the lost billions and put pressure on the countries to change their economic policies.
 
These "deals" Trump got Mexico and Canada – which there were doing anything – have absolutely zero to do with the economy.  They’re only about supposed border security and drug enforcement.  The economy?  The balance of trade?  Nah, nowhere to be found.
 
The problem with that – aside from the obvious and how incompetent and out of control Trump is coming across, more than usual – is that it’s the “tariffs” that Trump pushed to his base that he was going to put on all these countries and get back the money we’re owed.  And that still hasn’t been accomplished.  (As if it ever would be…)  And even his base may start to wonder – er, hey, what about the tariffs?  What about trade?  What about how this was supposed to help the economy and bring down prices???
 
But this was about none of that.  In fact, this was about nothing.