Addicts Always Have A Reason
The Wall Street Journal is making itself into headline news (the ultimate goal of all modern news media) with a headline labelling Donald Trump’s imposition of tariffs on Canada and Mexico as “The Dumbest Trade War in History,” followed by the teaser, “Trump will impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico for no good reason.”
I call disinfomation on that “no good reason” canard. The “good reason” the WSJ claims is lacking is actually quite clear: It is the fact that Trump — who is, and always has been, an extreme protectionist and economic isolationist who views tariffs as a normal and valuable tool, who openly declares, as often as he can (including in his social media response to this WSJ criticism) that American businesses trading freely with other nations is wrong and that Americans (meaning ordinary people who cannot afford the premium prices billionaires like Trump will happily pay for all the imported luxuries they want) should only be allowed to buy overpriced goods made in America, and who is in love with the idea of exerting arbitrary presidential power merely to prove how tough he is — was comfortably elected president again, in spite of everyone knowing that he is a tariff-loving isolationist who believes that America is the default loser in all international trade, and in spite of everyone possessing more than ample evidence that he is both the dumbest and the most profoundly anti-American president in U.S. history.
You voted for him, America. You wanted this. You bought the anti-world, aka anti-American, rhetoric (I had originally typed another word there, but decided to be polite to the point of self-abasement by designating Trump’s all-caps, literacy-challenged blather with a word commonly associated with Cicero and Churchill) from this monumental moron and mentally miniature megalomaniac. “You break it, you bought it,” as the old retail slogan goes. Be it on your heads, America. You broke your country. Live with what you bought and stop whining about the results. The first step is admitting you have a problem, which is to say admitting that you are the problem. It isn’t him. It’s you. Fix yourself and save whatever is left of your immortal soul.
You won’t. With the next pseudo-tough rant Trump spews that happens to sound agreeably rah-rah to you, you will forgive everything and run back to the fold. You’ve done it so many times now that it is easy to predict and impossible to doubt.
Note:
As for how Trump has imposed these tariffs, which ought to fall under congressional authority according to that worthless old document Trump has never read and hates with every fibre of his being, National Review, another guilty party in the sell-your-soul-to-populist-tyranny faction — even guiltier than WSJ in truth — dares to wax all moral and constitutional about the abomination they at least passively endorsed:
The International Emergency Economic Powers Act was passed in 1977 and gives the president extraordinary leeway “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat” from a foreign country, after a national emergency declaration. That is likely why the president has raised illegal drugs and immigration as justification for these tariffs. His national emergency declarations on those two subjects essentially help to unlock the powers of this law, which are sweeping.
In other words, Trump is lying about his motives and exaggerating real concerns into a fake emergency in order to justify exerting extraordinary authority that a U.S. President is never supposed to have under non-crisis conditions. He did promise, very openly, to be a dictator on day one, as I recall. And I also recall that more than seventy million Americans, including members of the NR and WSJ editorial boards, replied to that promise with a collective, “Great!” (Whispering it to yourself doesn’t count as not saying it.)
We are watching a country succumbing, wholesale, to the religion of the State, worshipping the idol of collective power in the hands of a one man — and barely even a man at that, according to any rational definition of the term.
