A Good Day in Dumb News
by Andrew Egger
Every day is stupid now, but not all stupid days are created equal. Some days are darkly energizing. You want to shout from the rooftops: Look at all the damage these malevolent, clueless jerks are doing! Other days, when the stupidity feels less evil than pointless, are enervating: You’d rather just log off and take a nap. You have to remind yourself: These are actually the good stupid days. You’d rather these than the others.
Yesterday was of the latter category. Markets had been sagging for days over Donald Trump’s inexplicable trade war with Mexico and Canada, and he had plainly been looking for an off-ramp. Mexico was giving him an easy one: President Claudia Sheinbaum had held off on imposing retaliatory tariffs before this weekend and was taking pains not to say anything that would ruffle Trump’s feathers.
Canada, by contrast, was meeting fire with fire—imposing immediate retaliatory tariffs and threatening worse. And Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was punching back hard against Trump’s rhetoric about making Canada the 51st U.S. state.
So on Thursday, when Trump praised Sheinbaum, denounced Trudeau, and announced he was delaying most tariff hikes on Mexico for another month, the moral seemed clear: Even under the most insane circumstances, flattery works. Until a few hours later—when Trump quietly pushed back tariffs on Canada as well.
What did it all mean? Who was it all for? Who knows! Just a few days of pointless value-destroying market chaos, begun at whim, ended at whim. Tune in April 2 and we’ll do the whole thing over again.
Then there was DOGE. Elon Musk’s arson brigade, as we never tire of telling you, has been stepping on rake after rake recently, and Trump finally seemed to decide yesterday that the time had come to yank the chain. During a cabinet meeting this morning—at which Musk was again present—Trump told his agency heads that they, not Musk, had ultimate authority over staffing. Meanwhile, he again signaled that his favor was shifting: “As the Secretaries learn about, and understand, the people working for the various Departments, they can be very precise as to who will remain, and who will go. We say the ‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet.’” (Or, one assumes, the chainsaw.)
A significant development, it seemed! Until a few hours later—when he undercut it completely in Oval Office remarks to reporters: “Elon and the group are going to be watching them. If they can cut, it’s better. And if they don’t cut, then Elon will do the cutting.”
It’s unlikely, of course, that any of this will hurt Trump with his core constituency: The president is blessed with a deeply credulous base that is perfectly willing to chalk up all flip-flops, swerves, and flailings as the 4D chess moves of a master negotiator.
But the rest of us should take comfort in it, even as we worry that we get actively dumber just reading about it. In some crucial ways, Trump is on a pitch clock: The longer he flounders, the less markets trust him and the less popular he becomes. And the less markets trust him and the less popular he becomes, the more he will stress about how to reverse those trends—which only makes him more indecisive, leading to more whiplash-inducing stories like the ones we saw yesterday. It’s a vicious cycle, the upshot of which is that he gets worse at making America and the world worse in a timely way. It’s a good start.
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