FLASH
Shkruar nga Pamfleti
Dependent on Fox News and even more extreme media outlets, President Trump finds support and justification for actions that are disastrous for Americans and the world...
Having delighted in destroying the post-1945 international order that gave his country prosperity and power for eight long decades, Donald Trump seems determined to destroy the American economy. And he is doing so because he and the American right have lost their ability to grasp reality.
Start with the economic vandalism, unfolding in real time and stunning to watch. For weeks, you could watch the U.S. stock market plummet, and on Thursday the S&P 500 hit an unwelcome milestone: It was down more than 10% from its peak less than a month earlier, a decline that meets Wall Street’s definition of a “correction.” In other words, even if the market eventually rallies, it’s not a mistake.
There's talk of a recession now, and you could tell that Trump himself suspects it's coming. "I hate to predict things like that. There's a transition period because what we're doing is so big. We're bringing the wealth back to America... It's going to take some time," he said.
The source of the trouble is not mysterious. It is Trump himself. His actions since taking office less than two months ago have spooked investors. They want stability, but they see a president who governs on whims. Those whims can change hourly, imposing a tariff after breakfast only to lift it before lunch. One minute it’s a 50% tariff on Canadian aluminum, the next it’s a 200% tariff on European wine, only for one or the other to be dropped within hours. It keeps Trump in the news, which he loves, but it plays havoc with companies that need to plan for the long term. Faced with chaos, they prefer to wait and see where things will settle. That means backlogs of orders, unemployed workers, less money in everyone’s pockets.
To be clear, it’s not just the manic style of Trump and Elon Musk that’s causing alarm. Even if they’re imposed calmly, tariffs are a prosperity killer. Trump may be their biggest advocate, but it’s clear he doesn’t understand how they work. He talks as if the people who pay them will be hated foreigners, like China or Canada forced to pay billions into U.S. coffers. When, in fact, tariffs are a sales tax imposed on American consumers who have to pay extra for imported goods. A tariff on foreign cars, say, is not paid by Germany, but by an American who buys a BMW. It raises prices for Americans. When other countries retaliate with tariffs of their own, making American products harder to sell, you’re in a trade war that only makes everything worse.
When I spoke with Heather Boushey, who served as an economic adviser in the Biden administration, for the latest Politics Weekly America podcast, she told me that Musk’s supremacy over much of the federal government, even as he continues to run his mega-businesses, has a particularly chilling effect. “Companies are looking at this and saying, ‘I can’t compete with an Elon Musk who’s at the head of regulatory agencies, who’s going to do things for himself.’ That’s going to stifle investment, it’s going to stifle innovation, and ultimately it’s going to be terrible for the American economy.”
Boushey adds that Trump's US will be less able to withstand a recession because the Trump-Musk cuts are stripping away so much of the supporting infrastructure, cutting a combined total of more than $1 trillion from Medicaid and food stamp programs alone. When the storm hits, families will go hungry.
It's bad for the country and bad for Trump politically: The people most dependent on soon-to-be-defunct government assistance like Medicare or Medicaid are Trump voters. Many Americans may resent the president who promised to make their lives better. Especially when they see him push through with his signature policy: a $4.5 trillion tax cut that will massively benefit the very wealthy.
Why, then, is Trump pursuing a course of action that can only hurt the country and damage his own standing? The explanation lies in the way Trump sees the world. Which is through a lens clouded by the very phenomenon he once did so much to identify: fake news.
For much of the past decade, the focus has been on people like Trump and Musk as purveyors of lies. Less attention has been paid to their role as consumers of lies. And yet it has long been clear that Musk is spending a lot of time on X and is growing his supply exponentially.
Trump is no better, believing the demonstrable nonsense about Volodymyr Zelenskyy's single-digit poll ratings, when in fact the Ukrainian leader's numbers are much better than his, to pick just one example of Trump ignoring information he could have from the world's best-sourced intelligence agencies and preferring to use the internet instead of Google.
Like Saddam Hussein in his bunker as US forces approach the palace, he is told that tariffs made the US rich in the 19th century and will do so again, that Elon Musk is popular and that people are grateful to their leader, even when the economy is in decline. Inside the information bubble, any dissenting voice can be dismissed, even if it requires acrobatics to do so. Trump’s latest target is the conservative Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, which dared to point out the dangers of a trade war: Trump countered that the “globalist” WSJ was “owned by the dirty thinking of the European Union.” Inside the bubble, there is no place for truth: it must be kept out by lies.
For now, and armed with the loudest megaphone on the planet, the US president can keep reality at bay. But eventually, Americans will be able to see with their own eyes and in their own lives what Trump has done to the US and the wider world. Their daily experience will expose him for what he is: a confidence trickster who has made them poorer and less secure. The only question is when?! /Adapted from “Pamphlet”, from “The Guardian”
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