Yes indeed:
Trump creating a fake crisis with Mexico over fake tariff threats only to settle it in exchange for fake concessions all over a holiday week when he’s not even in office yet is a reminder of how exhausting-yet-boring four full years of this will be.
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) November 28, 2024
Whenever Trump says some outrageous thing—big tariffs until Canada and Mexico stop immigration and fentanyl!—I dither over whether to bother responding. Is he serious? Or just tossing out red meat for the rubes? I sure don't know. But I do have this regular image in my head of Trump cackling as a bunch of earnest pundits all rush off to write thumbsuckers about why his latest broadside is ridiculous and stupid.
But you never know. Maybe he's so stupid he didn't know Mexico was already slashing illegal immigration, and was therefore pleasantly surprised when Claudia Sheinbaum immediately "caved in" and agreed to slash illegal immigration. Who can divine the mind of Trump?
Either way, though, it accomplishes something Biden never did: making it loudly clear which side he's on. Even if your real-world ability to do something is limited—as it is with immigration, inflation, Afghanistan chaos, etc.—people still want to hear your outrage about it. They never really did with Biden but they sure do with Trump. That may involve a lot of phony stagecraft, but phony stagecraft has a long and illustrious history of working pretty well.
But the whole thing was he'd raise tariffs so high they'd pay OFF the national debt ! "Big beautiful tariffs" he called them.
So no pay off of debt?
HHHHHhhhmmmmmmmmmm..........
With Trump it's all showmanship all the time. Just assume that from the start. It's just like when he was shaking down Ukraine over their military aid. He just wanted them to announce a probe into Hunter Biden. They didn't have to actually do anything. Just announce it and he'll take care of the rest.
So are any of the media stories going to point out that they just agreed to do what they're already doing? Don't hold your breath. Maybe on page 12 in the 10th paragraph.
I don't think it requires "phony stagecraft" to reach people -- just talk in a way that sounds like a regular person rather than a politician steeped in consultant-crafted-talking-point-speak.
Unfortunately, the guy who has revealed this secret to us is a vile, corrupt sociopathic bullshit artist.
But if Biden or any other Democratic politician would deign to speak in short, clear sentences and say what they really believe (ignoring the horrified wails of their consultants), maybe they could eventually win over some of the people attracted to Trump.
So like Biden and Harris talk.
and Walz.
Walz yes. Biden and Harris? not so much.
I'm not sure Trump will be very happy with President Sheinbaum's response.
In her letter to him she basically called him an idiot that is unaware that Mexico has already reduced the flow of immigrants for more than a year, and called his bluff about tariffs by saying every tariff he tries to impose will be responded in kind, until companies like GM and Ford which for decades have been integral to both countries are in shambles. He also called him for the US's role in providing nearly all the weapons that cartels utilize.
At her press meeting she was even more forceful saying that unlike what the US may try to do under Trump, Mexico will never close its borders, because Mexico believes in building bridges to promote freedom and economic prosperity. In what will also sting Trump and his phony family values base, she mentioned that when Trump asked her why Mexico doesn't have such a high drug addiction problem, she said that because unlike in the US, Mexican families stay close and do support each other when a member needs help.
She has provided one of the best dress downs of Trump by any politician that I have ever seen.
... of which, alas, perhaps 1% -- if even that -- of the American population will ever be in any way aware.
Meanwhile, a good half of the population will hear how Big Strong President Trump won a battle over the TIDE of CRIMINAL DISEASED ILLEGALS who are INVADING our sacred nation, blah blah blah.
from the Foxhole
Thank you for this post. I read her response and it really shows how stupid these motherfuckers are. Good for her, she's probably dealt with bloviating assholes her whole life.
// Sarcasm >>> Too bad women aren't good enough to run this country.
She has provided one of the best dress downs of Trump by any politician that I have ever seen.
You mean, since Kamala Harris showed how easy he is to bait into incoherence last July?
The whole tariff thing is a genius political recipe. 1) slash income and corporate taxes as a sop to the already rich (his real constituency) 2) replace it with tariffs that are essentially a (regressive) national sales tax without declaring a national sales tax 3) tell "the base" that they are sticking it to the Chinese or to those nasty Canadians with their fentanyl. Result - higher US dollar which actually makes US manufacturing exports less competitive (too bad for "the base") but US dollar more powerful for financial wizards and affluent US tourists (real constituency). And a massive shift of tax burden to "the base". Mmm Mmm good.
Betcha that if Trump does impose the tariffs, he will dole out half the revenue to affected industries that already support him, like agriculture and fossil energy companies, provided they use the money to limit price hikes. And he will dole out the other half to voters in swing states by sending them "Trump Checks" featuring his mug shot.
This is how he might deal with all the critics. It won't do a damn thing to reduce our debt, but nobody really cares about that anyway.
They didn't require that last time.
Except that it can't work. Total US imports amount to about $3 trillion a year. Federal income tax alone amounts to about $2.6 trillion a year. To get enough revenue from tariffs to replace any significant fraction of income tax revenues would call for tariff rates so high that the amount of imports would fall rapidly, resulting in a rapid decline in tariff revenues, which would mean higher tariff rates to get the same revenue, which would mean imports would fall, etc. My WAG is that there's no way to get more than maybe half a trillion a year in revenue from tariffs and to get that would call for duties of around 50% on ALL imports, and enough disruption to world trade to cause pretty much a world wide depression.
You can't prevent price hikes by giving more money to agricultural producers. prices are determined by 1. supermarkets
2. international markets.
The saddest aspect is the number of people on the left who still assume Trump will pay a price when his supporters "find out he was lying".
They like that he lies. It "makes liberals cry" and their "heads explode". The average MAGA cultist couldn't give a continental whether tariffs get imposed on Mexican imports, or the border gets closed. They get their jollies from watching Trump upset all the people they dislike, among whom a Mexican president would definitely be numbered.
Read Tomasky, Trump isn't lying, he's telling the lies the base wants to hear and believes. Trump isn't even smart enough to come up with this stuff on his own.
Crawl out of yourselves, the problem isn't the one you think it is.
Never mind the MAGA cultists. How about all the "normal" people who voted for Trump because of inflation (many of whom were former Democratic voters)? Let's see how they react.
... phony stagecraft has a long and illustrious history of working pretty well.
The problems in this case being (1) it's ALL phony stagecraft, in the interest of underhanded greed, pure chaos, or both, and (2) the response of much of the legacy media and the Informed Commentariat seems to be "jeez, Dems need to forget all this 'governance' stuff and get better at empty stagecraft!"
It's gonna be a long four years. I just hope we recover from it, cuz that's not at all a given at this point.
Presumably, when things like planes and satellites are falling out of the sky because the FAA and NASA* have their staffs cut and can no longer hire competent people to run everything, regular voters will take notice and be like “holy shit why is everything such a mess?”
But even then there will likely only be a coin toss chance that voters will correctly place blame and vote for the party that can bring competence back to government.
*feel free to substitute any other function and agency overseeing that function - “holy shit why are people dropping dead everywhere from preventable disease” after CDC, NIH and other agencies have no qualified doctors on staff anymore; “holy shit why are the banks all collapsing and all my money is gone” after SEC, FTC and other agencies have no qualified economists on staff anymore; etc. People are about to discover that, yes, modernity does require a minimum number of people in government who know what they’re doing to keep everything going… and they’re gonna also discover rebuilding a functional modern society is a lot more difficult than tearing it down was.
Because -- unlike the incoming Republican regime and its large cloud of gifting hangers-on -- I actually CARE about planes not falling out of the sky, pandemics not spiraling out of control, financial panics not running us into multiyear depressions, etc., I DON'T want those things to happen, even if perhaps somehow it WOULD lead to some kind of comeuppance for the sh!theads who caused it.
But to make matters worse, even IF those things happen -- and they may well do! -- I DON'T think said comeuppance necessarily would follow, because (1) the damage would not be immediately apparent, nor the responsibility obvious, (2) the Republican Noise Machine would kick into overdrive muddying the waters and blaming illegal immigrants or transgender restroom groomers or whomever else they could come up with, and (3) a large fraction of the American population would at least half believe them and/or forget about a lot of it after a few more trips around the goldfish bowl.
I think all we can do is work to mitigate the damage, yell louder about the corruption and incompetence, and organize our people to turn out more heavily next time. (After all, it was a very close election. Again.) And I think things are likely to be unfavorable for the Reps in '26 at least. (I just hope we still have non-Russian elections at that point.)
Biden wasn't capable, at least for the last couple of years. There are so many blames to go around, and he was a good president, but he simply wasn't competent at the end to do that. Hell, he barely knows where he is anymore.
And, yes, it'll be godawful to watch or listen to. I remember NPR's weekly round up being a great program to listen to, then Trump, and it was all Trump, all the time. HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE!
You know, I was only 10 at the time, but I don’t recall us being this shitty to Reagan, and he allegedly was just as mentally out of it as Biden supposedly is. Hell, Trump allegedly is just as mentally out of it as Biden supposedly is and we’re about to give him the nuclear football again. Why is all this disrespect for mental health deficiencies heaped solely on a Democrat? Why do Republicans always get a free pass on being incompetent and/or senile?
We weren't this shitty to Reagan because we didn't know, at least I didn't. I had absolutely no idea how out of it he was at the time. It was covered up. And don't tell me it's not covered up by D's too, FDR's name springs to mind.
It's always covered up, the difference is Biden went out and showed the world how bad he was. Maybe that had to happen because it was the only way, sometimes you have to have people fail in public in .gov, I don't know, but he deserves the criticism.
And I truly wish it hadn't happened, as a 1 term president he was great. Someone should have stopped him from trying for a 2nd term though.
And I disagree on Trump, he's not that bad. He's a mess, has no business being in office but he's not where Biden was, not yet. 4 years to find out though.
Again, the problem isn't Trump, he's a symptom of the problem that made him the problem.
I'd go with Wilson before FDR.
I don't have a subscription to get past the paywall, but https://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/11/us/reagan-criticizes-comments-on-age.html and https://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/11/us/reagan-s-health-how-issue-emerged.html may be interesting from a "from the time" standpoint.
Found via a web search for "reagan mental abilities" using Kevin's now-not-liked search engine, and setting the timeframe to 1900 to 1990
Thanks. I was 19 in 84, a wannabe R, well-reformed now, and just trying to get through JC. Heck, barely had access to the SF Chronicle, just a local rag that exists only in name today.
Reagan's worst mental incompetence came during the later part of his second term, when his being re-elected was not an issue.
Reagan looked more than a little lost and confused during his first debate with Walter Mondale. He mostly recovered in his second debate and he was prepared for the age issue with a joke that he wouldn't hold Mondale's youth against him. Leslie Stahl was scheduled to meet with Reagan in 1986 and this is her description of the man (after being instructed not on ask questions):
"Reagan was as shriveled as a kumquat. He was so frail, his skin so paper-thin. I could almost see the sunlight through the back of his withered neck…His eyes were coated. Larry introduced us, but he had to shout. Had Reagan turned off his hearing aid?
…Reagan didn’t seem to know who I was. He gave me a distant look with those milky eyes and shook my hand weakly. Oh, my, he’s gonzo, I thought. I have to go out on the lawn tonight and tell my countrymen that the president of the United States is a doddering space cadet. My heart began to hammer with the import…I was aware of the delicacy with which I would have to write my script. But I was quite sure of my diagnosis.'
she decided not to report this but many others saw signs of Alzheimers as early as 1983-1984.
Biden had one bad debate. However, he has done and continues to do an excellent job and is entirely compos mentis.
Hell, you barely know where you are, apparently.
You're just gross, man.
With a bunch of people who can't see the truth apparently. As I said, I thought Biden did a decent job as president, but he had no business being within a 1,000 miles of a debate with anyone, even a dead person. That was a man not up to that job and unfortunately, I've seen that up close before in my family.
Don't like the truth, don't like it.
"Biden wasn't capable, at least for the last couple of years."
Your unsupported statement is not a fact.
Yglasias isn't on Bluesky yet?
Trump is not a hypnotist, a gifted orator or a master of "stagecraft". There is no staging - he just talks. The base believes him because he tells them what they want to hear - that's it's OK to be bigoted. If liberals are always telling them that's it's not OK to be bigoted, who will they prefer? The important thing then is the solidarity of the white, Christian, straight, male-supremacist tribe against the "others".
Likewise Fox News doesn't have any magical "stagecraft" or entertainment to draw viewers, the format is basically the same as real news programs, just people talking. Fox News also attracts viewers by telling them what they want to hear about bigotry, and then it provides the "alternate facts" that the base believes in.
Do almost half the voters choose Trump because they are racists? Even if that is not the primary motivation, those voters are willing to tolerate the blatant racism and other intolerance that Trump and followers showed, especially in the last days of the campaign. Trump voters also ignore his actual economic record, which consisted of tax cuts for the rich, deregulation and attempting to kill real benefits for lower-income people.
The outrage and fear that motivate people to vote for someone as obviously unqualified as Trump is not economic, it is a matter of the loss of tribal supremacy. This is what determines the "sides" among the majority who do not benefit from Republican economics. The cultural sides are more important than the economic or class sides.
The cultural sides of which you speak are real, but aren't enough to win an election. They account for maybe 40% of voters. There were significant shifts among those in the middle toward Trump, mainly due to economic issues. This is how elections are won and lost. The reality is that Dems are good at governing, but terrible at campaigning. Until they learn to communicate better, they're going to continue to get their asses kicked.
How are they terrible?
They don't have billionaires spending on media to cover them?
"The outrage and fear that motivate people to vote for someone as obviously unqualified as Trump is not economic, it is a matter of the loss of tribal supremacy."
I believe this is true. And they operate at a subliminal level so that people behaving thus are usually not aware that they are acting out of the fear of losing tribal supremacy. And the behavior is deeply ingrained. And that is what Vance and other Trump wannabes are counting on in the future.
+1
Well Trump was involved in professional wrestling. You'd think he might have learned a thing or two about "professional stagecraft".
And he speaks in that sing-song bray straight out of the ring. Apparently, some voters just love it. As if the last eight years wasn't enough, we now have another four or more years of hearing it nonstop.
I have cut back on my "news" habit. It's become same old, same old. Trumpty trump, trumpity trump, trump trump trump trump trump. I voted to cancel, but we got another four seasons, anyhow.
There are two things universally true about Trump:
(1) He always lies
(2) He's always selling (marketing) something based on his lies
He will end up raising tariffs, just you wait. This is only the ending of the first act.
+1
D_Ohrk
He MAY get to raise tariffs on one country but Mexico, for now, seems off the hook
The problem is that he NEEDS tariffs raised on multiple countries in order to come close to making up the difference in revenues that his tax cuts will cause
For those of use who incredulously ask what can the Dems do differently its this. Trot out Trumps boasting about tax monies rolling into the treasury, how the cuts would pay for themselves etc etc etc. Use video footage.
It appears as though too many DEMs believe that people will wake up. Sorry but most people need a nudge to wake up
"The problem is that he NEEDS tariffs raised on multiple countries in order to come close to making up the difference in revenues that his tax cuts will cause"
Serious question: why on earth does he "NEED" to make up any lost tax revenues? In right wing mythology, tax cuts pay for themselves. And even if he did need to make it up, he would not know that. And if he knew that he would not care.
And to tie it all back to reality, recession reduce tax revenue and tariffs at the level he is bloviating about would cause a recession.
Donald Trump is 100% id.
There is no room left for mind.
I thought everyone knew this.