What Was the Point Again?

I’m not a sentimental guy.

But it’s good to look back from time to time, just to see how far you’ve come and how you’ve grown as a person. Even better, it’s good to meet up with your old college roommates, get drunk, and reminisce about the time you stole that guy’s bed and stuffed it in the dorm elevator at midnight.

Did I mention that I’ve grown as a person?

But if it’s fine to look back on one’s life, it’s not such an uplifting experience to look back on our country’s past. 

By this, I mean you shouldn’t look at clips of Obama speaking circa 2010. You are likely to burst out weeping with the realization of how far we have plummeted, while pining away for a president who could speak in full, coherent sentences.

I don’t say this often, but damn, those were the days.

However, when we shorten our gaze at the past, narrowing it down to 2017 or so, we realize that the nation hasn’t moved at all in the past few years. Seriously, it’s like Biden never happened.

Remember that assertion that the cruelty is the point? Yeah, it’s still true.

Witness the fact that even conservatives are stating that the GOP is waging a war on empathy.

The conservative movement has always had a core of right-wing sociopaths who express disdain for any life other than fetuses and abhor the very idea of sympathy. But today, it is at the forefront of the Republican Party’s agenda.

For example, there is no logical reason to deport immigrants, even undocumented ones, en masse. Acres of studies show that immigrants have lower crime rates, contribute more to the economy than they cost, and fuel economic and cultural developments.

This is why any discussion of immigration eventually turns into a conservative bitching about hearing Spanish in the grocery store. It’s an emotional argument. We have prioritized the hypersensitivity of white Americans and said it’s perfectly normal to want to crush people who have done nothing to you.

This has created an America that grabs people off the street and sends them to a gulag in another country. But Trump’s xenophobic agenda — evident in all those “mass deportations now” posters waved around at his rallies — will never really come to fruition. Among other issues, it is impossible to deport 10 million people in any kind of efficient, humane manner, and doing so would destroy the economy.

There are also those pesky legal arguments. All you conservatives out there should note that none other than that famous bleeding-heart liberal Antonin Scalia said, “It is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law in deportation proceedings.”

That’s just in case you don’t know if you have to follow the Constitution.

The whole premise of mass deportation rests on the idea that “some people are better than others” and therefore “some people have special insight based only upon their superiority,” which means they can do pretty much whatever they want, especially to those who oppose them.

People are scared in America today. I’m not just talking about undocumented immigrants, progressive leaders, or ethnic minorities. I’m talking about Republican senators.

Experts are warning that the “fear of government retribution is now spreading through society,” and that Trump's style of governance "involves a desire for total dominance and an increasingly unhinged delusion of omnipotence” that aligns nicely with Mussolini.

But if you think “quietly yielding in small, seemingly temporary ways will mitigate long-term harm,” you are sadly mistaken. The truth is that “acquiescence will probably embolden the administration, encouraging it to intensify and broaden its attacks.”

This is a movement based on an “ideological architecture to excuse violence and suffering on a mass scale.”

It’s not just the cruelty anymore. It’s also the anger, the fear, and the unchecked power — all that is the point.

Undue Process

If you voted for Trump because you wanted egg prices to go down, you are no doubt disappointed (which is just as well, because this was an idiotic reason).

But if you voted for Trump because you wanted to live in a police state where power-drunk government officials can grab somebody off the street at their whim, whisk him out of the country without allowing him to plead his case, throw him into a hellhole to rot, refuse to explain what crime he broke, and refuse to bring him back even after the US Supreme Court tells them to do so, then your wildest dreams have come true.

Also, you are a fascist.

Only an authoritarian could love the following developments (this list comes courtesy of NextDraft’s Dave Pell):

The sending of potentially innocent people to a gulag-like prison in El Salvador. 

The disappearing of people and due process. 

The glad-handing, jubilant Oval Office meeting with a leader who has referred to himself as “the coolest dictator” by an American president who said he'd love to send American “homegrown criminals” to a similar prison abroad. 

The ignoring of a series of court orders and the wanton flouting of a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling. 

The presidential displaying of a clearly doctored photo that makes it seem like a man sent to the CECOT terrorism confinement center by mistake was a member of a dangerous gang. 

The firing of the Justice Department lawyer who made it clear that the man’s fate was due to a clerical error. 

The sadistic photo ops from the US head of Homeland Security posing in front of CECOT prisoners.

The ceding of America's high ground when it comes to due process and the rule of law. 

The refusal to apologize for any mistakes. 

The refusal to rectify any of those mistakes.

The celebration of cruelty.

All of this makes for a disturbingly lengthy list.

In addition, there is also the fact that government agencies are now acting like snitches, federal officials are suggesting rounding up immigrants like Amazon Prime handles packages, scientists working on life-saving breakthroughs are being detained, and people just trying to become patriotic American citizens are being arrested.

Plus, we have a president who falls for painfully obvious internet hoaxes like he’s a damn nine-year-old child.

Until recently, I thought right-wingers were against jackbooted government thugs. Clearly, their principled stance against government oppression was just as strong as their principled beliefs in freedom of speech, the US Constitution, and Jesus Christ, which is to say, all that talk was bullshit, and they believe in nothing except power.

Someone should tell those freedom-loving warriors that “if government officials can say anything, true or not, to justify their actions… what stops them from doing that to an American citizen?” In such a country, the government “can claim anything and act with impunity against anyone.”

Yes, right now, they can do it to anyone.

Shifting, Always Shifting

It would be immediate golden age.

OK now there’s going to be a recession, but that was the plan all along.

The stock market was set to soar to new heights.

OK, now it’s tanking, but don’t worry because Trump is playing 4-D chess with the market.

Inflation was going to drop.

OK now it’s accelerating, but the president couldn’t care less if you pay more for basic goods and services.

If you are a rational person, you might think back to Trump’s promises to make every American instantly wealthier on day one of his administration, and contrast it with the reality of just three months later, when recession signs are flashing, Americans' expectations for the economy are at their lowest level since the end of the Great Recession, and financial experts say our nation’s fiscal strength is “on course for continued decline.”

But if you are a MAGA supporter, you see the best of all possible worlds.

For hardcore Trump fans, it doesn’t matter that “almost everything the administration and congressional Republicans are doing to the economy is making a collapse more likely.” It is irrelevant that Trump’s policies “have shaken a once-solid economic outlook.” And it is an insignificant detail that the GOP wants to fling America back to the Gilded Age of the 1890s, which was a great time for the rich but a horror show for everybody else.

You see, Trump’s followers have a history of not just moving the goalposts, but tearing the goalposts down, leaving the stadium, and passing out drunk in the parking lot while denying anybody was ever trying to kick a field goal in the first place.

Back in November, virtually nobody voted for a complete government overhaul that would be orchestrated by an unelected, unvetted, unaccountable billionaire. Republicans never said this was even remotely part of the plan, much less the whole objective. Many people claimed their vote for Trump was because of fucking egg prices.

But now, a lot of those same voters are cheering on oligarchs who are “effectively gaining control of the U.S. government” and threatening to end Social Security. They have rationalized their horrible decisions.

The economic outlook has gotten so bleak that a brand-new conspiracy theory — we can never get enough of those — has erupted to explain why Trump is screwing over the very people who voted for him. 

It’s a QAnon for tariffs, and it attempts to explain Trump’s “incoherent, inconsistent, self-destructive mess” and transform it into “a carefully orchestrated master plan to revive American manufacturing, reduce the national debt, reconfigure the international-alliance system, and deliver the greatest geopolitical deal of the century.”

In truth, the theory is so preposterous that it is “less a genuine plan than a way for Trump’s backers to put a strategic spin on the president’s inchoate impulses.”

This conspiracy theory has “somewhat implausibly gained adherents, if cautious ones, in respectable quarters” because of “the intense demand for some kind of coherent rationale” that covers Trump’s bizarre, self-destructive actions.

His followers can’t accept the fact that a belligerent man-child has taken over the Oval Office (again) and has no idea what he is doing.

The need to justify Trump’s nonsensical policies is evident in the fact that congressional Republicans recently passed a measure saying, “each day…shall not constitute a calendar day” as a legislative maneuver to help the buffoonish chief executive out of a legal quandary. But the GOP’s insistence that “a day is not a day seems to prove the truth of Burke’s observation that by trying to force reality to fit their ideology, radical ideologues will end up imposing tyranny in the name of liberty.”

Again, there are no goalposts here. And there never were.

Tariffs Are Terrifying… I Mean, Terrific!

Listen, I know you’re feeling nervous about the economy sinking faster than an anvil thrown into a black hole. Hey, even people who mere months ago were saying, “Get over it” are now screeching for salvation from the economic tsunami towering over us. And those people are billionaires — most of whom are apparently not very smart.

In any case, this should make you feel better: the president doesn’t give a fuck about you or the economy.

OK, maybe that’s not very comforting, but it is the truth.

You see, Trump has been “insulated from the consequences of his own actions his entire life and appears to care very littleabout the economic sinkhole he just created.”

In fact, the guy is more defiant than ever. And because there is no master plan, and no real desire to improve the lives of Americans, this bloated and rambling lunatic will continue to lead the nation down a path of chaos and despair until we hit Great Depression levels, at which point he will declare victory.

That’s what he did when he paused his idiotic tariffs for 90 days that will no doubt be filled with apprehension, dread, and confusion. But the damage has already been done.

In the interim, economists and financial experts will debate if the Trump tariffs are “the dumbest economic policy in modern history,” or merely a harbinger of recession. 

One can’t keep up with all the rationales the Trump administration has given for their arbitrary and mathematically challengedpolicy. But what the justifications have in common is that they are, at best, the kind of conservative magical thinking that got us the Iraq War and an imaginary wall on the border that Mexico paid for.

At worst, they are the active mechanization of oligarchs and madmen who want to burn the country down and reduce us all to serfs.

Somewhere in between is the most likely scenario, at least from Trump’s perspective, which is that he said he was going to do this, and now he is doing it, no matter the consequences to anyone else. In 90 days, or less, we will likely go through all this needless suffering again.

The bizarre and random nature of the tariffs have led some politicians to claim the Trump administration “is the most sloppy, unprofessional, arrogant and stupid group of people ever assembled in government.” They are saying Americans “haven’t learned yet how to battle this stupidity, [and] the country and the world is suffering from the whims of a madman.”

By the way, those are the words of Republicans.

It’s that clear to everybody. 

The tariffs are “a torrent of nonsense that threatens to destroy the very thing Trump insists on saving,” which brings up the disturbing realization that “if this is what it looks like when Trump decides he wants to save the economy, God help us if he ever decides to destroy it.”

It’s like they always say — never trust a narcissistic sociopath with 32 felonies and a half-dozen bankruptcies.

Well, maybe they didn’t say it before, but they are most certainly saying it now.

Too bad it’s far too late.

Astronomical Odds

So it appears that we are doomed.

Maybe it won’t be the collapse of civilization (although that is a charming possibility). But at the very least, America is headed for a financial cataclysm.

Is this because Trump insists on pushing through tariffs that are virtually guaranteed to tank the economy, for no discernable reason other than “because I said so”?

Yeah, that’s one factor.

Another issue is that this administration appears to be staffed solely by incompetents, lunatics, dullards, and stooges. 

Also, an egomaniacal oligarch and his fellow billionaires are raping the government so they can add another zero at the end of their net-worth calculations.

All of that is true, and the horrific combination is enough to tilt us toward economic Armageddon.

But there is another reason why America will likely be scrounging for pennies and begging for spare change soon. And that is because Republicans are in charge.

Oh sure, you are saying, once more I’m lambasting the GOP and shrieking that they will lead us into ruin. 

Actually, I’m not saying that. Historians, economists, and scientists are saying that.

You see, a recent Harvard study analyzed decades of America’s economic performance and assessed the odds of financial outcomes being based on random chance or political choices.

For example, it is a fact that the last five recessions all started under a Republican president. The researchers put the odds of getting that outcome by chance at about 3%. 

Let’s keep going. The researchers point out that “a remarkable 9 of the last 10 recessions have started when a Republican was president, [and] odds that this outcome would have occurred just by chance are 0.0098%.”

But wait — it gets crazier. Ten times since World War II, an incumbent from one party handed over the White House to a leader from the other party. In five of the last 10 transitions, a Republican followed a Democrat, and each time the economic growth rate went down. In the other five transitions, a Democrat followed a Republican, and each time the economic growth rate went up. As the researchers point out, this means, “No exceptions. Ten out of ten.” 

So when people talk about a Republican inheriting a good economy, messing it up, and then having a Democrat come in to clean up the disaster? Yeah, that’s a real thing. It has literally happened 10 times in a row over the last 80 years.

Again, what are the odds of this happening by chance? The answer is the same odds of flipping heads on 10 coin tosses in a row, which is one out of 1,024. The researchers say the “difference is statistically significant at the 99.9% level.”

What does it say about a political party that is consistently, overwhelmingly wrong on economic policy? What does it say about Americans who continue to vote for that party, generation after generation?

The answers are both disturbing and illuminating. And they likely explain why our country is the richest in the world by many measures, and yet our citizens are far poorer, stressed, and more miserable than just about any other industrialized nation.

So why does the GOP suck so bad at economic policy?

Well, other researchers have theorized that a main reason for this discrepancy is because Democrats, when faced with a financial crisis, will focus more on objective facts and try different approaches to resolve it. Republicans, on the other hand, have exactly one answer for everything: tax cuts for the rich. This is not an exaggeration. Witness the current GOP, which is desperately trying to figure out how to slash Medicaid or Social Security for the express purpose of extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which benefitted only the wealthy and did not prevent America from sliding into economic chaos. 

Throwing money at billionaires and hoping for the best is the GOP’s only method for boosting the economy, getting out of a recession, and presumably, treating frostbite and losing those last pesky 10 pounds.

This philosophy persists despite mountains of evidence that supply-side economics doesn’t work.

If we think of the economy as an automobile, and the political parties as mechanics, it’s as if the GOP’s fix is to attach square wheels to the car. And they will do this whether the car suffers from a busted engine, a cracked windshield, or an oil leak. It will be square wheels, every time.

The Democratic mechanic, in contrast, will diagnose the issue and try to repair the problem. And they will take the square wheels off the fucking car. And the car will run fine until four years later, when the car’s owner (the American people) will insist that the previous mechanic was better.

We are now entering our latest square-wheel era.