Donald Trump resorts to writing checks he can’t cash
Considering his shady history in the real estate business and his endless string of bankruptcies, Donald Trump has spent his life literally writing checks he couldn’t cash. Now that he’s in politics, and he’s predictably failing in inept and derangedly criminal fashion, he’s resorting to writing figurative checks he can’t cash. In fact he’s spent the day spelling out that he knows he can’t win this.
Donald Trump has lost his trade war. He made some aggressive but naive moves which he thought would force America’s trade partners to hand him favorable deals. Instead, because these other world leaders aren’t the suckers that he’s used to dealing with in the business world, they’ve responded by pushing back with even more harsh tariffs. The thing about a trade war is you can only win it if the other side backs down; if both sides commit to the trade war, then both sides lose economically.
So now that Trump has lost the trade war, he’s reduced to posting this tweet today: “The United States is insisting that all countries that have placed artificial Trade Barriers and Tariffs on goods going into their country, remove those Barriers & Tariffs or be met with more than Reciprocity by the U.S.A. Trade must be fair and no longer a one way street!” There’s not one word in that tweet that he can actually enforce.
Donald Trump has also lost his immigration gambit. He took the kids hostage, then he realized he can’t use them as a negotiating tool to get anything he wants, and so now he’s just a guy stuck holding hostages while everyone moves in on him. He’s now also been exposed as deranged enough to take kids hostage. So what’s he doing now? Demanding that there be no “Judges or Court Cases” for these immigrants. He’s even using lots of capital letters. But he can’t make any of this happen. He’s reduced to making threats he knows he can’t carry out, because he’s near the end anyway.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report