Like a Patient Etherized Upon a Table

This is the reality. Here’s the fantasy:

I think he meant “go boom” instead of “boom", but, whatever. If this is like a patient in surgery, I hope that the code team has been stat paged to the OR.

Canada announced retaliatory auto tariffs. Mexico highlighted the fact that Trump didn’t issue any new tariffs and claimed they were getting preferential treatment. Again, two strategies, and my guess is that Mexico is figuring that Trump will stop the tariffs after his hand has been well and truly burned on the hot stove. I don’t know about that, because he seems pretty dug in.

The absolute stupidity and recklessness of this venture is being highlighted in the media, including the news that some of the tariffs were assessed against places with no population. This really reeks of a bunch of dipshits using AI to spit out a calculation that relied on bad data (the true achilles heel of AI — it’s even more subject to garbage in / garbage out than most tech.)

Anyway, to add to the chaos, Laura Loomer apparently convinced Trump to fire some National Security Council staff as scapegoats for Signalgate. The total meltdown of the markets and rage from every country on the planet will overshadow that news, but if the economy ever takes a back seat, Signalgate is still alive, even if Democrats haven’t been making as much noise as some of us would like. And, the fact that Loomer came to the White House to get Trump’s ear makes him look like what he is, a weak old man who’s lost the plot.

Josh Kovensky of TPM just finished coverage of the latest hearing before Judge Boasberg on the rendition without due process of planeloads of supposed immigrants to El Salvador. Boasberg is hinting around about contempt charges, and he roasted the DoJ attorney on the case, but we’ll see how many divisions he has.

We should have cut up the Nick Carmody podcast into multiple episodes because we didn’t really scratch the surface of Trump’s narcissism, but one of the key facets is that narcissists like Trump can never be wrong. So if there is a backdown, it’s going to be very, very ugly. Still, we haven’t turned into North Korea in less than three months, so I expect that Trump is going to have a few very bad days, starting today.