CSotD: Rebuilding from the Bottom Down
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Lucky timing from RAM: This strip ran the morning after Dear Leader announced the tariffs, before the markets could react — Trump had delayed his announcement until after closing — and so was drawn even earlier than that.
The markets were already shaky, but nowhere approaching the thundering crash we’re still experiencing, thanks to the jaw-dropping illogic and lack of factual basis with which the president is attempting to solve a problem that appears to exist mostly in his mind.
Telnaes picks up on Trump’s bizarre, out-of-touch remark informing America that there is something that was once, long ago, called “groceries” and which is a bag with different things in it, demonstrating that he may have never gone into a grocery store or bought his own food.
She applies that stunning revelation to other evidence of his lack of understanding of how average people live, including the struggle they may have with the rising price of housing.
It’s not a crime for wealthy people to be out of touch.
Bobby Kennedy sought to escape his bubble, and toured the Mississippi Delta, becoming informed about poverty to an extent that surpassed that of most Americans, even those of average income. What he saw and learned from the people there very much informed his approach as a presidential candidate.
By contrast, the education of Ebenezer Scrooge was not a matter of informing a wealthy man of how others lived. Rather, the three spirits reawakened what he already knew, and had set aside and forgotten. Scrooge was, deep down, aware of the world and had, before personal pain estranged him, a kind and friendly person.
He needed to have his empathy and his sense of decency appealed to, but they had always existed.
Elon Musk, who has the partial excuse of being on the autistic scale, has declared empathy a “fundamental weakness” that endangers civilization, but there’s no evidence that Donald Trump has ever thought it through even to that extent. What we know is that his cruel misbehavior as a child caused his parents to send him off to military school while his siblings were permitted to grow up at home.
The result has been the kind of heartless opinions of which Samuel Johnson said
Why, Sir; to be sure when you wish a man to have that belief which you think is of infinite advantage, you wish well to him; but your primary consideration is your own quiet. If a madman were to come into this room with a stick in his hand, no doubt we should pity the state of his mind; but our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves. We should knock him down first, and pity him afterwards.
Knocking down the President of the United States is not easy, particularly when he controls both houses of Congress and ignores the judgments of the judicial branch, and so, by Johnson’s dictum, we have not yet earned the right to pity him.
Davies notes how Trump seems to genuinely believe that he can make difficulties disappear by a simple act of will and with executive orders that contain little if any legal standing.
As a young man, he was able to survive a half-dozen bankruptcies thanks to the generosity of a wealthy and indulgent father. Today, he gets by on the loyalty of a rightwing cadre of ambitious people who see his boldness as a means of pursuing their own interests.
It is not surprising that his speech on tariffs drew significant corrections of fact from CNN, a news source he does not like and that has never bent the knee to him.
It’s more surprising not that the Guardian opposes his policies, but that they do it with such contemptuous language, calling it ” a monstrous and momentous act of folly” and observing that “The announcement ceremony conveyed the thrill Mr. Trump derives from bullying and domination.”
However, the real “tell” in judging the wrong-headedness of his approach to international business is that he has also drawn scorn, not simply disagreement, from the American Enterprise Institute, whose conservative bias borders on libertarianism. The AEI wrote “(O)ur view is that the formula the administration relied on has no foundation in either economic theory or trade law.”
They then present a proposed list of tariffs that they say is more logical, with their numbers alongside Dear Leader’s ill-conceived fantasy figures. There is barely any agreement between the two.
The list of dissenters goes on and includes publications like the Wall Street Journal, hardly a bastion of liberal dogma. Trump is drawing fire from all sides except the most obsequious.
At Press Watch, Dan Froomkin pronounces the tariffs “wildly destabilizing and frankly insane,” but saves his criticism for a mainstream press that he accuses of stenography rather than reporting, of repeating Trump’s policies without analysis.
Much of it may be a case of economic ignorance: Summers shows the red flag of tariffs scaring away the bull, perhaps unaware that a “bull market” is indicative of rising prices and a healthy economy.
He may be correct that Trump has frightened the bull away, but that’s not likely what he intended to say.
Stahler, meanwhile, is one of several cartoonists lamenting a fall in 401ks. That may have happened, but it shouldn’t matter except for the few individuals on the absolute brink of retirement. A well-constructed 401k or IRA should not be volatile except in its earliest years, and, even then, ought to be a sensible mix of growth stocks and solid rocks impervious to most fluctuation.
As you approach retirement, those solid rocks should make up an increasing share of your mix, and if you are close to retirement and your 401k is still vulnerable to market fluctuation, that’s your fault, or possibly your broker’s, but not Trump’s.
And if you’re not close to retirement, take a deep breath and assume that everything will correct itself over time and your retirement funds will recover along with the overall economy.
Or we’ll all be screwed and then we’ll have to figure something out.
What you can’t do is give up and turn away. They want you to do that.
We’ll talk about it this afternoon.
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