What’s worse—that, according to the Guardian, Trump’s ‘idiotic’ and flawed tariff calculations stun economists, or that, according to the Verge, “Trump’s new tariff math looks a lot like ChatGPT’s?”
What if both are true? That economic theory was strained through a political juicer to come up with a back-of-the-napkin math equation they’re pretending to believe in, and as the Verge reports, “if you ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Grok for an ‘easy’ way to solve trade deficits and put the US on ‘an even playing field’, they’ll give you a version of this ‘deficit divided by exports’ formula with remarkable consistency.”
What about the excellent point made by Axios: “You gotta believe?”:
“President Trump is betting his presidency on the biggest instant, unilateral, by-choice-not-necessity economic mandate in U.S. history. He's gambling that generations of politicians, economists, CEOs, small-business owners, academics and even some of his own staffers are wrong — and that he's right.And he's doing it with an issue that hits every American.”
Did you know that Larry Summers could be so funny? This from Political Wire: Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, on X:
“It’s now clear that the Trump Administration computed reciprocal tariffs without using tariff data. This is to economics what creationism is to biology, astrology is to astronomy, or RFK thought is to vaccine science. The Trump tariff policy makes little sense EVEN if you believe in protectionist mercantilist economics.”
What do you make of this nugget in the Axios reporting: “The president feels like a real estate mogul with a full inventory of mansions under his sole control, insiders tell us.”
What if that is really Donald Trump’s only frame of reference? And what if golf, tariffs and programming the Kennedy Center are all he really cares about?
Who’s worse? Elon Musk or Laura Loomer? ( Trick question—impossible to pick)
What do our universities—and law firms—think they can get by making deals with Donald Trump? Has he ever kept his word?
And speaking of universities, does anyone believe that Trump is motivated by his anger over their failure to confront anti-semitism?
When you listen to Donald Trump at one of his many impromptu tirades in the Oval Office, does he sound smart to you? Can you imagine trying to diagram one of his sentences? What does that say about him—and about us?
I’ll have more to say about that soon.