CSotD: The Augean Stable Genius
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Trump’s attempt to extort Canada continues to draw mockery, and Telnaes does the rest of the commentators one better by noting that not only are the Canadians not intimidated, but Americans are lining up behind Carney and his crew as they tell Dear Leader where to get off.
A poll taken earlier this month shows that the majority of Americans feel Trump should lighten up on Canada, but that was before the latest confrontation, and it’s hard to believe the Canadians’ bold refusal to knuckle under cost them any support from Yanks.
Amorim says that Dear Leader, here shown as some sort of destructive insect, is harming the Maple Leaf, but that’s one of the few depictions so far that indicates any damage to the Canadians, and, even then, it’s hardly flattering to Trump and his crew.
Most are more along the lines of McKee’s suggestion that Trump is doing more harm to America than he is to Canada, and it’s certainly true that we’ll be spending more on the various Canadian imports — including hockey sticks — that will now carry a 50% tariff. And there will be greater pain once the Canadians announce the moves they’re likely to impose in response, because we import a significant amount of aluminum and construction materials, not to mention potash from which fertilizer is made.
If noone else, pity our poor farmers. First Trump eliminated fertilizer from the Persian Gulf and now he’s going to raise the price of it from Canada. That’s besides the pain he caused by reducing AID, which purchased grain from farmers to send overseas, and we can assume that cuts in SNAP will also result in cuts in fruit and vegetable purchases.
The farmer and the cowman should be friends, and they seem to agree that having ICE snatch away their workers is bad enough without Dear Leader importing beef to compete with homegrown meat, though it is kind of funny that Dear Leader has been lying about who pays import tariffs but now has suddenly announced that dropping tariffs on this imported beef will lower its price.
Trump decided, for some reason, to be cute about where these 300,000 metric tons of imported beef were coming from, and his lack of candor has sparked a rumor that it may be horsemeat and not beef. Alcaraz jokes about that rumor with a general distrust of the source to suggest that lying about the type of meat leads to lying about the source, and why not? They shoot horses, don’t they?
I doubt people would eat horse and mistake it for beef, but the silly story about JD Vance and a couch was almost immediately revealed to be a joke and yet it is still following him around as if it were true. There’s no reason to think common sense will keep the horsemeat rumor from transforming itself from a foolish rumor into a well-known fact.
And, for that matter, if mustangs are being rounded up and sold on the cheap to overseas slaughterhouses, that could conceivably lead to their meat being re-imported without telling anyone where it came from. Trump is making his beef gesture look like a scam by refusing to come clean with the details. This is known in futbol as scoring an own-goal.
Dear Leader declared himself “a very stable genius” eight years ago, and proceeded to overplay his hand by claiming to have been valedictorian of his college class but threatening to sue any school that released his grades. He then topped it off by saying that he inherited his intelligence from his uncle, who was a professor at MIT who knew the Unabomber, except that the Unabomber went to Harvard and John Trump died before the Unabomber was identified, so wouldn’t have spoken about knowing him.
However, the trick to being the smartest person in the room is to have the power to decide who else is in that room. Anderson offers a reasonable metaphor to explain Trump’s sponsorship of having Lindsey Graham’s sister first fill in the remainder of his Senate term and now run for election to succeed him.
In a campaign debate, Darline Graham revealed herself to know nothing about the most basic foreign politics, which in a functioning democracy would get her laughed off the stage. And it’s true that an attempt to put Hershel Walker in office failed miserably, Walker’s main qualification being that Trump had hired him to play football when the stable genius was singlehandedly tanking a viable sports league.
We’ll see how Darline Graham does in November, but meanwhile we’ve got a Secretary of Education who mistook artificial intelligence for a brand of steak sauce and continues to believe that school nurses were secretly performing major surgery on small children.
Trump’s bold willingness to peddle nonsense has become GOP policy and the party has adopted the old-fashioned strategy of screaming “Commies!” in lieu of addressing genuine issues in society. Necessary does well to outfit the gullible voter in a MAGA hat, because it’s not yet clear whether anyone but the dedicated loyalists will fall for the distraction.
Polls indicate a growing discontent, much of it directed at Trump but spilling over into distrust of his fellow Republicans, which is the natural result of there having been no lively debate and discussion within the party. Lyndon Johnson credited Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn with teaching him that if you want to get along, you’ve to to go along, but there’s a substantial difference between a little log-rolling and back-scratching and turning belly up in submission.
The basic question to be answered in November is whether the same fury over the price of eggs will repeat itself in the form of fury over the price of gasoline, and whether that fury will be directed at one party or at all incumbents or just certain specific candidates.
But first, people need a chance to express their preferences at all. Dear Leader is doing his best to gain control of the coming elections, despite representing a party that has always preached the gospel of States Rights. He has won a temporary advantage, but those chickens have not yet hatched.
Stay tuned. And keep the faith.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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