Enjoying the view from Limbo
Donald Trump is parading around another “greatest deal ever made,” this one with the European Union. And once again, like his deal of the century with Japan, the trumpeted victory is a permanent (until Trump changes his whim of the month) fifteen percent tariff on most goods from Europe, as though fifteen percent were a great accomplishment because it is only half as...
The absurdity of the Trump administration accusing Barack Obama of staging a “years-long coup” to “overthrow” Trump’s first presidential term, when Trump himself is of course the only president in U.S. history to actually, publicly, incite a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol in a violent attempt to overturn an election result. Opposing a rival politician by semi-nefarious means, as Trump and Tulsi...
America Descending / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published April 10, 2025 · Last modified April 18, 2025
Surprisingly, Donald Trump’s latest sociopathic fantasy lunge at becoming the most influential and beloved human who ever lived — namely his utterly illegal, immoral, and anti-American attempt to assume single-handed control over the entire world’s economy by way of a near-universal and whimsical imposition of wealth-killing tariffs — has had one, and only one, unequivocally positive effect. It has blessed us all with...
America Descending / Liberty's Labors Lost / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 17, 2025
Canada, my home country, disappoints me no end. It has, over the course of my life — the correspondence is so clear that I sometimes believe I may be responsible for it — turned decisively toward the soft despotism of democratic socialism, the relativistic nihilism of multiculturalism, the personality cult normalization of the multi-generational Trudeau dynasty, the most laughable excesses of progressive identity...
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”...
Or this: Donald Trump, a 1930s-style progressive protectionist who believes that U.S. consumers having more money to spend on foreign products than the consumers of other nations have to spend on American products is a bad thing for America, spent several days threatening to impose a big new tax on Americans — he called it a tariff on imported Mexican goods — unless...
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, back when progressives were still allowed to talk about moral and political matters without complete deference to the current neo-Marxist orthodoxy, wrote of the decaying moral substance of modern America with the now-famous phrase, “defining deviancy down.” That useful expression is easily adaptable to other, analogous contexts, and today I would like to apply it to Trumpology, in which we...
Donald Trump lives for his ego. He may be the purest living instantiation of Hobbes’ depiction of man in the state of nature, ruled entirely by fear of violent death and vainglory. As he respects no law — let alone the rule of law — he is effectively, subjectively, trapped in Hobbes’ hypothesized condition of raw nature: the war of all against all,...
Donald Trump believes deeply and unwaveringly that he can personally produce economic prosperity by coercively micromanaging markets to create his preferred outcomes. In other words, he is a thoroughgoing statist. He is proving this yet again with regard to his tariff obsession. China has responded to Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods by reducing its purchases of American crops. Trump is now promising to...
Just yesterday, an idiot of world-historical proportions boasted about his “strong and personal relationship” with a bloodless tyrant, and how they were in the midst of working out a mutually advantageous trade deal. Today, however, the idiot is out there tweeting warnings about how he might have to impose new tariffs if the tyrant doesn’t play fair. Donald Trump, labelling himself “a Tariff...
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