Dear Leader's 'Liberation Day' (Of Your Money From Your Wallet) Is Wednesday, Blessings Be!
Even more tariffs, oh boy!
Welp, on or about Wednesday, some kind of big fat new tariffs are coming. That Man and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick have taken to calling it, “Liberation Day,” because they love slogans and are wacked out of their gourds. Liberation from what? A Hyundai that doesn’t cost $100,000? Is Liberation Day the new Infrastructure Week? Is Trump going to build a great big financial wall, and give his oligarch buddies big tax cuts and liberation from laws and regulations? And you, American consumers, are going to pay for it?
Exactly how much this next round of tariffs will be and upon whom, no one knows, and Trump’s goldfish brain has not even fully decided yet. One “White House ally close to Trump’s inner circle” told Politico: “No one knows what the fuck is going on. What are they going to tariff? Who are they gonna tariff and at what rates? Like, the very basic questions haven’t been answered yet.”
On Sunday, That Man chuntered to reporters that maybe he’s just going to tariff EVERYBODY: “You’d start with all countries, so let’s see what happens.” Last week, he suggested that concessions could be made for some countries. While campaigning, he said tariffs on goods from China might get as high as 60 percent. The current tariff rate is already the highest it has been since the 1940s, and there’s already higher tariffs on $800 billion worth of goods. The Washington Post did a very nice infographic to help you visualize the current state of the fickleness of his brain.
Over the past 70 days Art O’Deal’s threats about tariffs have been on, and off, doubled, halved, with more drama than a Mexican soap opera, while he savors the attention and pleadings from prime ministers and CEOs begging him with tears in their eyes to not burn down everybody’s economy.
Anyway, whatever they are going to be, he will announce them Wednesday!
The $800 billion in tariffs he’s levied so far have already done a shit-ton of damage. American products are being boycotted around the world, companies and countries are already changing trading partners and manufacturing suppliers — a big fucking hassle not easily reversed — and American companies have already paid billions in retaliatory tariffs from China and Canada, too, with more on the way from the EU. But fake hair don’t care.
Moan-groaned the tariffer-in-chief:
This is the beginning of Liberation Day in America. We’re going to charge countries for doing business in our country and taking our jobs, taking our wealth, taking a lot of things that they’ve been taking over the years. They’ve taken so much out of our country, friend and foe. And, frankly, friend has been oftentimes much worse than foe.
Tariffs don’t charge countries, which he damn well knows, but he assumes anyone dumb enough to be listening to him does not. Louder for those in the back: tariffs charge the company that is importing the tariffed product a fee to the government, and they pass those non-savings on to YOU. Just like when washing machine prices went up during his first-term tariffs, or like when he ended up having to bail out farmers.
Fraudster-in-Chief Trump also says this collected not-tax money will go into something called the “External Revenue Service,” which he decreed into existence the day he was inaugurated, but does not appear to actually exist yet. Somebody remind Big Balls to set up a crypto account!
Is Trump still clueless about how these things work? Is this just the juvenile Opposite Day thing his brain does, like when he calls the January 6 Select Committee the “UNSELECT Committee”?
What combination of dumb, crazy or evil are we working with today?
Earlier this month, he convened car companies to beg-demand that they better not raise prices, and instead thank him for the privilege of having to pay out a double-digit hunk of their revenues, plus make new domestic parts manufacturing plants appear out of thin air, or something. Then over the weekend he told NBC News that sure, yeah, car prices are gonna go up, but he doesn’t care. “I hope they raise their prices, because if they do, people are gonna buy American-made cars. I couldn’t care less because if the prices on foreign cars go up, they’re going to buy American cars.”
Except that there are no “American cars” in the year 2025, even Fords are assembled from mostly foreign parts, DINGUS. (Again, the best working theory is that Trump’s brain stopped being able to compute new information about the world in approximately 1989.)
Though guess which company has the least amount of foreign parts in its cars at 30 percent? Why, it is Tesla! You’re welcome, Elon.
Anyway, meanwhile, doddering loyalist Trump econ loon Peter Navarro — you know, the guy who went to prison for defying a congressional subpoena — emerged from his crypt over the weekend to recite the NEWSPEAK on the GOODTHINK to Shannon Bream on Fox:
BREAM: You heard reporting there where the president says he doesn’t care if the prices go up on US cars, so what’s the message to the US consumer?
NAVARRO: The message is that tariffs are tax cuts, tariffs are jobs, tariffs for national security, tariffs are great for America, tariffs will make America great again.
Tariffs are love!
Then he blathered something about how the “chicken tax” was how Lyndon Johnson got everybody good prices on “the old hippie van.”
TL; DW: Shannon Bream was like, no, tariffs make stuff more expensive, duh, and Navarro was like no, there’s going to be tax credits for buying American, we’ll raise $6 trillion over 10 years, and then give big tax cuts to “the blue collar deplorable.” There will be no inflation because “the foreigners are going to eat most of it. … they’re going to cut prices to absorb that.”
[NARRATOR FROM CHINESE GOVERNMENT: We are not fucking cutting prices to absorb that.]
My, $6 trillion is a lot. And holy whoppers! Is it great to have Karen and Kevin Consumer wake up on Wednesday with less buying power? Only for billionaires who want to buy up distressed companies at fire-sale prices!
Meanwhile, global stock markets sure do hate the wishy-washy uncertainty. European and Asian markets tumbled Monday morning and now that the markets are open in New York, it’s a day in Trump’s America, so best not look at your 401K.
And now Canada has officially broken up with us. Prime Minister Mark Carney announced: “The old relationship we had with the United States, based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation, is over. We must fundamentally reimagine our economy.”
Yeah, sounds like we’re all going to have to do that.
[WSJ gift link / Politico / NBC]
I shot the tariffs, but I did not shoot the equity?
It's easy to find simple solutions to complex problems when you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.