Cheeky Bounder Donald Trump Forgets He Can't Tariff Lorries Any More

But at least gas is still expensive!

That dim prat President Donald John Trump, so posing in his boots and britches and so titchy under his wig, so chock-a-block with cocky swanking and flashy mustard!

Though Trump spent many hours of his week hobnobbing with King Charles III, King of the United Kingdom and 14 Commonwealths, and his Queen, Camilla, upon the occasion of their first official state visit, Trump is a man who can compartmentalize, gushing over the couple, the Royals, their heritage, and how he is practically ROYAL himself, yet he still had plenty of energy in his other brain cell and texting-hand to keep crapping on Germany and the EU all week, too.

(Why he’s probably more specifically mad at the chancellor of Germany at the moment, below.)

LOVE THE ROYALS! EUROPEAN CULTURE AND TRADITION BEST! But FUCK GERMANY AND THE EU AND NATO!! He is going to take the US’s weapons and GO HOME. Again, some more.

On Saturday he went on to declare that the US will withdraw 5,000 troops from Germany. Have at Ukraine and the rest of Western Europe, Vlad Putin! Because those Europeans are just all so rude and mean to him. At least the European elite will stay safe because they all have plenty of ballrooms.

But still, Trump lerves King Charles! Challenged him to a marathon handshaking competition, made many warm photo ops and cozy times dining together! But then the King’s historic speech unto Donald John Trump’s legislature, Trump reportedly, and evidently, did not like that one bit, and immediately got real jealous.

Watch or skim the transcript and wonder which parts, LOL?

Well, sure, less attention for Donald Trump, King of America and Star of Stage, Screen, and Radio, that’s a given! But also maybe the part where the seventh great grandson of George III’s long-lost family empire noted that going back to at least the Magna Carta, European kings have always realized that with certain Divine Rights come certain Divine Responsibilities, or else their mortal cabezas are fixing for a spiking-and-piking, ask the King how he knows? Check and balance yourself before you un-self yourself, my cousin!

---

A LOT of our longtime subscribers are having to cancel. If you are able and just never got around to it, we invite you to LOVE US LOVE US HALP! We have so many writers to feed and mouths to yell out of!

Prefer a non-Substack subscription? The button below will take any amount of your choosing at Paypal — let me know if you want the newsletter subscription too! Paypal won’t automatically sign you up for the newsletter! — or we have a Patreon too.

---

Or perhaps by the way King Charles III correctly pronounced semiquincentennial. But whatever the reason, by Friday after King Force One departed, his exotic charms had worn off and Trump was back to not just threatening to go No Contact with Germany and to being at least just as mad at Europe as he was the Sunday before, and pounded out another impotent screed on his web site.

Nice of him to organize his EU- and tariff-related delusions succinctly for a change!

Let us try to follow the example of Charles and be patient-stepdad-of-kid-with-drug-habit, here. No, dear reader, you are not crazy, the Supreme Court did, in fact, tell President Donald John Trump back in February that he could not make personal-ego-defense policy and taxes via some made-up emergency tariff-tax, and now he has to give all that money he illegally swiped from companies and consumers back. First refunds are due to start issuing the Monday after next, even!

---

Supreme Court Tells Trump NO EMERGENCY TARIFFS!

---

Go fish! But nevertheless he persisted. “Tariffs charged to the European Union,” there’s Trump’s BS in Economics working! No, they are not charged to the European Union, they are charged to you, dear car-buyer, by Uncle Sam Trump’s treasury, and if you want your cute Fiat convertible to get unloaded at an American port, you gotta cough up, Becky, were said tariffs not entirely a delusion in Donald Trump’s Swiss-cheese brain, that is.

And also wait, you say, haven’t most “European” cars already been built-assembled in America, or Mexico or Canada since NAFTA, because there are already tariffs of such a nature and have been for decades? Correct again! There are very few fully assembled European cars on the US market, mostly high-end luxury ones, your Audis, Bentleys, Bugattis, Ferraris, Jaguar XF.

But fact check TRUE, car manufacturing factories are indeed under construction, though the dollar amount is not record rates, especially if you take out investment pledges that actually happened under Joe Biden, and subtract the EV investments no longer happening. Such as the situation with that car-battery factory Hyundai was helping set up in Georgia, with robots so advanced that even the slackest-jawed high-school dropouts of rural Georgia could supervise them. Until, that is, Trump’s DHS detained and tortured the workers so badly that now few South Korean workers are willing to step a pinkie toe into our American hellscape. Still under construction! Or, the Ford factory shut down for lack of rare earth minerals thanks to Trump’s tariff and student-visa drama with China. Call it a work in progress!

---

Trump Begging South Korea To Forget THAT ONE TIME He Imprisoned All Their Workers

---

How Trump chafes at any reminder of his failures. His billionaire insider-trade-y, Polymarket and crypto pals might be raking it in and smooching his buns about it, but the little people, the ones who pump their own gas, shop for their own groceries, pay taxes from their own pockets, that rabble disapproves of him ever more nearly by the day. He knows he’s failing, and especially when it comes to his base low-information-voters’ prime driver, The Gas.

From Trump’s own Bureau of Labor Statistics’ most recent report from April:

The index for energy rose 10.9 percent in March, led by a 21.2-percent increase in the index for gasoline which accounted for nearly three quarters of the monthly all items increase. The shelter index also increased in March, rising 0.3 percent.

And gas prices have gone up from an average of about $3 a gallon on March 1 to $4.39 now, says AAA. And so goes the gas, follows the groceries and everything else. Up! As you can see has already been happening with every product from orange juice to beef in these various government charts, or any time you yourself attempt to exchange dollars for goods and/or services lately.

Trump and Republicans know they wrecked the economy, and that it is staying wrecked for a long time to come, even as they keep absurdly insisting prices are actually lower, don’t believe your lyin’ eyes or bank statement! Denying reality is what Republicans always do when they have no plan, not even frameworks for one, and wish everybody would just quit bitching. But meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, in spite of both the US and Iran in agreement that they want it open. And Trump’s strategy appears to be to do nothing and wait for Iran to give up its sovereignty and agree to become an oil and uranium colony. Just wait for Iran to explode on its own while he and his pals bravely watch the poors at home get poorer, like he told Fox News last Sunday:

“[I] took the greatest economy we’ve ever had, and I said, we’re going to have to take a little detour and stop that from happening. And that’s what happened. It’ll come to an end very soon, and we’re going to be very victorious. So when you do that, no other president was willing to do that.”

But how long will our low-energy detour-stop last, with the USA pariahs of the world and its serfs being forced to choose between The Groceries, The Gas, and The Heat Bill while Europe and NATO count us out as allies forever?

Is our new Trump-branded Imperialist Empire, land of the unaffordable Cheerio, to remain standing after this Great Enbrokening? Will Trump, for the next two-plus years?

Stay tuned and we’ll all find out, we guess!

[Vanity Fair / The Hill / Al Jazeera / Paul Krugman]