Enjoying the view from Limbo
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...
While reading a news item on the CBS website about how China and Russia are flagrantly violating the sanctions against North Korea, while Kim Jong-un continues to develop his nuclear weapons program and Mike Pompeo retreats on his over-confident rhetoric of two weeks ago, I happened to notice that the site was plugging live coverage of a Trump rally in Ohio. Being in...
The next time anyone, friend or foe, tells me to lighten up on Trump and his cultists, accusing me of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” or of being a “NeverTrumper” — go ahead, I dare you to define either of those terms in real English without making a fool of yourself — I now know the simple, one-word reply with which I will gleefully spare...
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