Trump Rallies the Dupes
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 a somewhat twisted mood, I suppose, I was silly enough to click the link and join the cult meeting in progress.
After referring to the current U.S. trade deals with everybody as “the worst deals in history” and equating those “bad deals” with “giving away our country,” Trump congratulated himself on correcting this disaster with his beloved tariffs. Why do I use such exaggerated language as “beloved tariffs” to describe what is obviously just Trump’s ingenious short-term chess move? Maybe because I just heard him, live at a rally, say this (pardon me if I missed a word, as I took this down from memory):
Because of tariffs — it wasn’t President Obama’s thing…it wasn’t anybody’s thing for the past thirty years. But it’s my thing — I love it, I love it.
He loves it, he loves it. That could be because he truly believes that trade deficits are the biggest problem in the world, and that America is in dire straits as long as Americans are able to trade freely with other nations and buy cheap foreign products at Walmart. Or it could be because he has Mussolini-like fantasies of having the god-like authority to control everything, including the world economy, with a wave of his enormous hand.
You decide for yourself. Either way, he’s an idiot.
Oh, by the way, immediately before pumping up his crowd with progressive protectionism, he urged the importance of electing more Republicans in the midterms in order to ensure the votes — “not just for justices, but for a lot of other things.” Chief among these things, before throwing in The Wall as an afterthought, was “infrastructure.” As I said, Mussolini-like. He will put his personal stamp on every square mile of America before he’s done — after all, what good is a country if it doesn’t have Trump’s neon sign on it? — and grow the deficit that actually matters to unimaginable new heights in the process.
That will be “the worst deal in history,” as it will be the real means to “giving away our country.”