This friggin’ idiot…
Forgive the lack of tact in the title of today’s article, but I’m not entirely sure how else to express what I’m feeling right now. Moreover, I suspect most of you are feeling the exact same way. Donald Trump is many things, all of them negative. But he is also, quite simply, an idiot. How else to describe what we’ve seen play out over the past thirty-six hours?
Trump is obsessively hellbent on enacting as many tariffs as possible, regardless of whom they’re against or what they’re about or what damage they cause. When Trump decided to hold a 3pm event on Wednesday to announce massive tariffs against essentially the entire world (except, tellingly, Russia and North Korea), his babysitters made him move it back an hour in the hope of not screwing up the stock market.
But that got taken care of yesterday, when investors immediately headed for the exits in such a stampede that the NASDAQ nearly had to be temporarily closed. There was a brief attempt at a rally, but by the time the trading day was ending, the DJIA was down 4% and the NASDAQ was down 6%. That’s right, Trump manage to make one-twentieth of the entire wealth of the US stock market disappear just by opening his mouth. That’s a special kind of idiocy.
There are plenty of theories as to why Trump might be doing this. Perhaps Vladimir Putin told (or forced) him to. Perhaps his henchmen are shorting the market. There are plenty of possibilities. But in times like this, it’s usually best to go with the obvious. This is a guy who spends his time talking about sharks and batteries and Hannibal Lecter. His dementia brain rot is off the charts. So it’s entirely logical to conclude that he’s enacting all these idiotic tariffs simply because he is, in a word, an idiot.
