Trump readies to hit US allies with steel, aluminum tariffs

Floridatexan wrote: the fact that MMT, either in the short or long term, would create inflation,

The President of the United States just fucking sits there and watches television all day long, in large part because he is on television a lot now. He is either pleased or displeased by what he sees, and he shapes his actions—and, more or less by accident, the scope and tenor of our broader national politics—in response to what he sees. Some unlucky but mostly invisible people suffer greatly as a result. Some even unluckier people might even die. They may be dying now. They may in fact be dying right outside, right now, but the program is in commercial break at the moment. William Devane is telling the people at home about gold. An octogenarian former game-show host the color of a walnut is explaining how a reverse mortgage works, kind of.


None of this troubles the loop. Trump watches and emotes; he excretes and consumes. That a great and greatly conflicted experiment in self-government has come to this—a whole nation trying to talk a shitfaced trust-fund lout into a cab so that he won’t mow down everyone on the sidewalk, and then talking about what a fantastic job he did barfing in the ashtray—is one thing. It’s many things. But none of those things are complicated.

Everything, everything, about Donald Trump’s two-year war against the NFL, which took its latest oafish turn when the president disinvited the Super Bowl-winning Philadelphia Eagles from a White House visit that the team seemed less than eager to accept in the first place, has been predictable. The only people who could not have seen it coming are the very people who did not see it coming—the plump defective oligarchs who run the NFL, many of whom gave millions of their own dollars to Trump’s rancid failed prank of a campaign. They believed that Trump was their peer or their friend or anything but what he is and has always so blaringly been, so they tried to make some sort of deal with him on the player protests against police violence and impunity that Trump identified as something that could be weaponized in his favor.

Because NFL owners are quite stupid even by the water-brained standards of the ultra-rich, they devised a strange sort of tiered non-compromise compromise on the protests in the hopes that Trump would stop ranting about their league and the ungrateful, un-American, subhuman thugs who are both its labor and its product. They did this without the consent or even the input of the players, which displeased the players. And Trump, because he is Trump, did not accept the deal. He’s a man who only knows how to do a couple of things, but one of those things is to find a bruise and then push and push on it. He does that very well.

Trump told the owners this, directly, but they didn’t believe him. “You can’t win this one,” Trump reportedly told Jerry Jones in a phone call. “This one lifts me.” The owners thought, despite that, there was a solution that could lift everyone—a nice deal that lets everyone continue to do their respective looting in happy parallel. In that, they fundamentally misread the situation and misunderstood their counterparty. They haven’t listened to the people mounting the protests, of course, but they somehow misjudged Trump, too.

The people mounting the protests have made the same simple and humane points for years and have been answered only with the laziest umbrage and bad faith, which is more or less the response that such protests elicit in America. But Trump also hasn’t changed his broader position; he is not listening or learning or changing, because those are not things he does. He is pushing and pushing and pushing at this issue because that is what he does, and because he is nothing without something to push against. There is no compromise to make. Trump wants to become the world, to erase and expunge everything from it that is not him or about him. A generation of the worst and most hard-hearted people that this country has ever produced are lined up outside the church he has opened, and they are willing to leave everything outside in order to gain entry. It’s the only way in. It’s the only way there will be enough room.

Trump doesn’t honor anything on Earth more than himself. The republic for which all this stands is an abstraction in which he transparently has no interest, or anyway nothing that he’d put above even his pettiest personal or business interest. He is not sincerely offended by black or brown players performing an act of protest during a song so much as he is offended—affronted, sure, but more deeply threatened—by their disobedience in doing so after having been very clearly told that it bothered their betters. He is not alone in this, but here as elsewhere Trump has backed into being a perfect avatar. He is not the only person who believes that people protesting against unrelenting, unjust, unaccountable state violence are doing so primarily to be annoying, but he is the only one who can get those other disordered people to pile into a convention center to listen to him interrupt himself and complain about it for a couple hours.

It is a worldview that allows for unimaginable suffering and injustice precisely because it refuses even to imagine that suffering and injustice or the people broken under it. It greets every inconvenience or perceived slight against the individual with a foot-stamping demand to speak to a manager, and everything else with a shrug, or at most with some half-reasoned hand-waving in the direction of justification before changing the subject back to what really matters, the only person in this universe who is actually real—the man in the armchair, feeling it all.

This is the thing that comes after politics, a tangy slurry that fills the vacuum with ancient and inchoate and unreasoning grievance. Trump and his people believe themselves to be, separately but not in any meaningful way together, synonymous with America. Everything and everyone outside their understanding—which is, respectively, a lot and basically everyone—is something else, something smaller and other. An abstraction, but also a distraction from What Really Matters—not you, but me, me, me. There is no deal to make with people like this, because there is no limit to what they want.

Deus X wrote:

Floridatexan wrote: the fact that MMT, either in the short or long term, would create inflation,

This is mind-bogglingly stupid, you must be suffering from some age-related intellectual problems.

Let me run it down for you--and I'll type real slow so you can keep up:

M M T      s t a n d s        f o r       M o d e r n        M o n e t a r y        T H E O R Y.


A       T H E O R Y        c a n ' t         c r e a t e        a n y t h i n g !!


T h a t       w o u l d       b e       l i k e      s a y i n g        D a r w i n ' s     T H E O R Y         c r e a t e d                    e v o l u t i o n.



GOT IT?