Under Water

If you live anywhere there is weather, you should probably have a weather radio. This is a bespoke device that renders the weather forecast, if that interests you, at the push of a button. But its real purpose is to make alarming noise when bad weather approaches, so that you might spend your final minutes lamenting that you have no basement. We had four days of, first, terrible storms then endless rain beginning a week ago tonight.

The rain stopped, but the weather radio’s flood warnings didn’t. They would give an update even if little or nothing had changed, then would launch into a standard lecture on why you should not drive in floods, how people who drive in floods sometimes get killed, all building up to the biggest government cliché since “Only you can prevent forest fires”: “Turn around, don’t drown.” I hope whoever wrote that receives royalties; if so, he will leave very rich survivors after I find and strangle him. His unfortunately immortal words are unwelcome at 3 a.m.

But the flooding around here isn’t the only important current use of the phrase “under water,” and we might want to discuss those other ones, which are increasingly ominous.

Ten days ago, the U.S. economy, like the economies of most of the rest of the world, was in pretty good shape. Then Donald John Trump decided to destroy it. He sent all those economies into the vasty deep almost instantly. Again, unless he has some side scam going — always more than possible with him — this is attributable to his total economic illiteracy.

As Jeffrey Blehar so eloquently put it yesterday, “[I]t takes a certain kind of genius to supervise the complete dismantling of the country’s economic, political, and moral position in the world in less than three months. And yet here we are — Donald Trump is promising to get the hard work done in less than a week. And all it took was setting our economy on course to jump off the cliff.”

This is, and I’m not kidding, how Trump’s “economic” theory works: There’s a seafood restaurant you like. You eat there frequently. You have your meal, pay for it and go home. This works out well, because you’re in the middle of the country and cannot catch your own seafood and anyway you don’t know how to cook. You give the restaurant money. They do not give you money because you are not in the restaurant supply business. This means that you have a “trade deficit” with the restaurant. That’s how it’s supposed to work. But by Trump’s angry dim lights the restaurant is cheating you because it doesn’t buy the rebuilt Holley carburetors you sell. So it must be punished.

It makes no sense by any known measure of anything. The formula for the action Trump is taking would get an F in third-grade arithmetic. It is hard for me to believe that it makes sense to Trump.

Also, he lied — his tariffs are not “reciprocal,” as he claims. They are simply whatever popped into his head last Wednesday, when he exposed them to a shocked world, and we learned again today that his tariffs are what pops into his head any old time.

Trump was famous in New York for cheating those who provided him goods and services as well as his investors. “Dozens of lawsuits accuse Trump of not paying his bills, reports claim,” was the story run by Fox News Channel (motto: “We report, you decide”) in 2016, before it became Fox Trump Channel (motto: “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people”).

Perhaps he assumes that everyone else is as reprehensible as he is. The presumption by the angry orange man is that everyone is your enemy. It must be awful to be him, what with his view that every transaction has a winner and loser. To him, there is not and cannot be any sale, trade, or other agreement in which both parties walk away happy and better for it. One side must always, in Trump’s terrible tormented thinking, have cheated the other.

He is an extortionist, only now he is doing it in the name of our country, though we must note that Trump believes that the United States and Donald Trump are the same thing, and not in a good way: He has not tied himself to the country’s fortunes, he has tied the country’s fortunes to himself. That joke he made about him becoming king? — he believes it. He is willing to destroy the country’s economy and that of the world in order to extort a bended knee from everyone.

Hence his ridiculous announcement today that those countries that didn’t object to his tariff mania will receive a 90-day reprieve. For now. Maybe. But lest anyone suppose that he had obtained sanity, he raised the tariff on Chinese products to 125 percent. A business here that ordered and paid for $100,000 in goods from China weeks ago now must pay an additional $125,000 in duty when the container ship carrying those goods docks at a U.S. port. One of Trump’s lies — there are too many to count — is that the overseas vendor will pick up the cost of the tariff. It is paid when the product reaches the U.S., and it is passed along to the customer.

The current policy of the Orangutan Throne — what we used to call the executive branch of the federal government — is to hurt anyone who will not bow and scrape to Trump. That’s it. That’s all of it.

He announced absurd tariffs on goods from other countries — pretty much all of them, except for Russia, Belarus, North Korea, and Cuba, his new buddies — that raise the price of everything and reduce the amount of money available to pay for it. He has effectively devalued the dollar. Some thinkers believe there’s a strong possibility of a recession. I disagree. I think a recession is all but certain. The Atlanta Fed reported today that the first quarter GDP is down 2.4 percent. And those data were gathered before the tariffs went into effect.

“These tariffs will reduce manufacturing employment,” writes the respected conservative economist Michael R. Strain. “They will reduce the competitiveness of manufacturing firms. They will raise prices. They will increase unemployment. They will likely cause a recession. They are an assault on the Constitution.”

His suckups have been online and on television saying “the stock market is not the economy.” No, it isn’t. It is a leading indicator of the economy. What happens to the stock market this week happens to you later. Example: if you have a 401(k) plan or an employee stock ownership plan, your contributions for the last several years have gotten erased, totally eliminated, since the tariffs got announced.

If you were hoping to get (or keep) a job, you may be surprised to learn that with the lack of parts or equipment as a result of tariffs on other nations, or the lack of a market for the company’s goods and services, also as a result of tariffs on other nations, the job you have or to which you aspire no longer exists. That’s because companies have no money to invest now, and no set of rules they can trust to make the gamble worthwhile even if they had money. “Uncertainty” is the code word used to describe the situation. It means “the unpredictable whims of an insane megalomaniac through the cowardice and failure of those Constitutionally charged with keeping him under control.”

He is, to use the technical term, an attention whore. He’s delighted by the power to make the securities markets, indeed the world’s economies, rise and fall at his whim. Hence today’s announcement of a tariff reprieve, sort of, to some extent. Now he gets to be the focus of attention for three more months. There will be no reins on Trump unless and until the representatives in Congress come to fear their constituents more than they fear Trump.

I’m not exaggerating. In a report to its customers yeserday, Fundstat Strategy and Sector Research said, “In the last few days we have had many conversations with macro fund managers. And their concern is that the White House is not acting rationally, but rather on ideology. And some even fear that this may not even be ideology. A few have quietly wondered if the President might be insane.”

The threat to your livelihood is real even if you work for a strictly local company in, say, construction, where projects are being cut back or canceled entirely. The only growth industries now are junkyards, because new replacement parts will be unavailable, and possibly print shops making bumper stickers that say “I’m beginning to miss the Carter administration.” On Monday, Microsoft announced it is canceling a $1 billion plan to build data centers in Ohio. People would have worked there. Now they won’t.

The president’s irrationality has left the markets so puzzled that on Monday a false, unattributed, one-line rumor posted to TwitteX by some anonymous monkey caused an increase of more than a thousand points in the stock indices, costing investors more than a trillion dollars. The rumor was that Trump might postpone the tariffs. (It was quickly denied by the White House and the market went back to crashing.) The market jumped at it, as it swings upward from time to time and as it did today, on the theory that Trump cannot be as insane as he seems.

He is as insane as he seems.

Donald of Orange thinks that this doesn’t matter, because the entire world will come to him on bended knee and kiss his wrinkled backside. And, anyway, NASCAR fans don’t own stocks. But it’s not working out that way, and won’t.

Other countries are responding, and the response is taking three forms. First, they’re enacting their own tariffs, making American products less salable there. Second, they are discovering that they can do without us — free markets are like that. So they’ll deal with each other and leave us out. The influence of China stepping in to replace us in global trade, will have enormous continuing effect. Other economies will recover and grow while ours will collapse. There is a real possibility that the reserve currency will become something other than the U.S. dollar. We’re influential now, but Trump is making short work of that.

It gets worse. Financial institutions are dumping U.S. Treasury securities — normally the “flight to quality” safe haven, which means that the interest the government must pay on its debt has risen, already by more than $50 billion annually. Will Trump compound his felonies by simply defaulting on Treasury debts, in the way he has habitually filed for bankruptcy for his failed projects elsewhere? Remember, this is a man who can bankrupt a casino. Only this time the house money he’s playing with is also known as the full faith and credit of the United States. The crashing Treasury securities are likely what caused him to somewhat, sort of, issue the stay of execution, to the extent that it does, today. And the tariffs are still in place against those countries that did respond. Those who got the reprieve are only those who admired the emperor’s new clothes.

There will be less money to invest in the factories that in Trump’s cloud-cuckoo-land will be springing up like mushrooms all over the U.S. The fellow who thinks of himself as a great deal maker will need to learn that people, given the choice of something at a low price and the same thing at a high price will choose the former, even at the cost of Trump no longer thinking of you as a friend (as if there were any value in Trump’s friendship, which a long line of former Trump friends and people who went to jail for him will tell you there isn’t). Trump’s supposed friendship, domestic or foreign, counts for nothing. He is treating our closest allies as enemies. He is holding Russia in far higher regard than he is Canada or Europe, Japan or Australia. He appears to be aiming for the kind of economy that did so much to make Albania what it was in about 1985.

Those hit especially hard will be those who most ardently supported Trump. Agriculture, for instance. We’re already seeing weeping American farmers being interviewed about their upcoming bankruptcies because during the trade war Trump declared for no reason, they will have no place to sell their crops. Trump has a knack for making friends into enemies on every level.

Hope you like soybeans. There’s gonna be a big sale on them. A very big sale.

Trump supporters often do business with places like Walmart. If you’d like to have your eyes opened, visit your local Walmart and look at the “made in” stickers on the products there. How much more do you think Walmart shoppers will be eager to pay for the satisfaction of knowing they are striking a blow against those countries that do not pay Donald Trump the respect that he says he deserves? What will those shoppers give up — they tend not to be rich people — in order to make that point? What are they willing to do without, in service of the greater glory of Trump? Think they’ll be happy when bananas are $2 per pound?

The commerce secretary, a clown named Howard Lutnick, offered this cheerful prediction on CBS’s “Face the Nation” over the weekend: “The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones — that kind of thing is going to come to America.” First, those people would be quickly unionized, so the iPhones would cost many thousands of dollars and as a result no one would buy them so those people would soon be unemployed. Second, who aspires to such a career? Third, practically everything he said was a lie.

The truest believer in tariffs is Peter Navarro, a longtime Trumpswab who was called a “moron” and “as dumb as a sack of bricks” by Elon Musk early this week. Musk was wrong in one regard: a sack of bricks is good for something. Coming as a foreign trade advisor to Trump fresh out of federal prison, Navarro may have a skewed view: Most people would hold that knowing how to make whiskey in a toilet is not a useful skill.

And even if Trump were to speak from the Oval Office tonight, subject: “April fool!”, the damage has largely been done. The world has learned that the United States is run by a megalomanical narcissist lunatic and not to be trusted.

Trump has flung down and danced upon all of our country’s trade agreements — including the one with Mexico and Canada that he negotiated himself. (“This is a colossal victory for our farmers, ranchers, energy workers, factory workers, and American workers in all 50 states,” he said when he signed it five years ago.) Trump’s legacy will be the lingering recognition that there is no one the U.S. won’t betray and our treaties are worth nothing. He will be remembered, and hated. And he has earned it. Those who have been loyal to him will gurgle into the briny deep along with him. In the meantime, he has made enemies of every other country in the world.

The new Nintendo Switch 2 will be released the first week in June. It is highly anticipated by young people. Its price will be in the neighborhood of $450. Except here, where it will be more like $1100.

The hilarity is that Trump has been violating federal law, passed by Congress and approved by the Supreme Court, that would have shut down China’s TikTok spy application, popular with those same young people. He says that TikTok made him popular with young people and helped get him elected. So when young people in the U.S watch the TikTok videos of kids with their new Nintendo 2 machines that the young people here can’t afford, in all respects because of Trump, they are likely to be miffed. TikTok giveth and TikTok taketh away.

The Europeans sell us products, physical goods, while we sell them services. European countries are, in response to Trump’s tariffs on goods, considering similarly taxing American services. Just wait until Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and others are effectively shut out of the world’s markets.

Things are going to be very, very ugly. And it is all entirely unnecessary.

“There will be blood,” said J.P. Morgan over the weekend in a memo to its investors that said there’s now a 60 percent likelihood of a Trump-induced recession this year. If you liked the great depression, you’ll love the rest of the Trump administration. And, who-ee! enjoy the inflation that will make Biden look like a pinch-penny. This presumes that his sycophantic Congressional majorities remain unable to find their spines. (To the credit of those who are opposing the Trumpian insanity, this may be starting to change, but probably not enough to do any good.)

Trump was under water in the polls before he flung the tariffs on the country and world like so much manure as if the world were his personal compost pile. The reliable Real Clear Politics average of polls has those who approve of his job performance a few points below the people who disapprove, and those polls were taken before the tariffs went into effect today. More than half the country opposed his tariffs before most of them were announced. On Monday, Forbes reported his net approval rating was -6 points. This is the direction things are heading. He’ll blast past Joe Biden’s negative popularity before long. (Though we must remember that Democrats in Congress continued to do Biden’s bidding even at its depths.)

Donald Trump is deliberately sabotaging the American and world economies. His only requirement for advisors is not that they are competent but that they are utterly loyal to Donald Trump, and he is suspicious of them even then. History is replete with similar rulers, and it has not typically worked out well. Some have paid with their lives.

But never before by drowning. All this is for absolutely nothing except Trump’s demand to be treated as royalty.

And those who dive into the water will swim right past him, in an effort to rescue and revive the economy.

The only advice that could save him is this: Turn around, don’t drown.