No one left to hurt
The convicted felon Donald Trump has almost run out of people to hurt. He’s hurt ordinary Americans, the poor, veterans, government workers, Canadians, Danes, Greenlanders, the French, the British and all of Europe, the Chinese, Africans, South and Central Americans and the penguins of the uninhabited Heard and McDonald Islands.
But this is the last straw! On Thursday the 500 richest people in the world lost a combined total of 208 billion dollars as the stock markets plunged. US billionaires — read: Trump allies — were the most affected. Billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and (gasp!) Elon Musk now find themselves less wealthy thanks to their golden boy Trump.
At four o’clock on Thursday, April 3rd, the New York stock exchange closed on its worst day of trading since June 2020. What was June 2020? It was the nadir of the world’s economic outlook. We were in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic.
While that was on Trump’s watch it wasn’t Trump’s fault. This time around the robust economy Trump inherited from President Joe Biden has been trashed by Trump’s stupid tariffs. Plague? Who needs a plague? Donald Trump is his own plague.
Republicans of the likes of Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz criticized Trump’s tariffs. McConnell said “bad policy and trade wars with our partners hurt working people most.” Cruz said he is “not a fan of tariffs” and that he hopes Trump’s are “short-lived.”
Trump’s “liberation day” is looking like a liberation day all right. Everyone is getting liberated from their money. Even an uninhabited island full of penguins got a tariff. (As my wife wrote, “Trump is pissed at penguins because they wear a tuxedo better than he does.”)
No one is safe but the Russians. Funny that, Russia didn’t get any tariffs. I wonder why? James Carville claims it’s because there really is a pee-tape and Putin has it. I don’t believe it. I think it’s because Trump admires Putin more than anyone else on earth.
Putin is Trump’s idea of Hitler, and Trump also admires Hitler. Putin is rich beyond the dreams of avarice, he (ostensibly) holds an entire nation in his iron grip and people who wish to remain un-defenestrated are terrified of saying anything critical of him. That’s what Trump wants to be when he grows up, just like his surrogate dad Vlad.
Meanwhile, I wonder how much longer Trump’s friends will remain his friends. In less than a hundred days Trump has managed to ruin the American economy, turn America’s allies into America’s foes, terrify seniors and people approaching retirement by gutting Social Security and Medicaid, piss off veterans, inspire a nationwide day of protests by millions of people, and so on. All he needs to do is find a way to hurt Russia and this inadequate, damaged, needy asshole will have no one left to hurt.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.