These Are Not Serious People

 

Hey, Mom, I told you I'd finish the project in time. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, via Newsweek.

I had a pretty strong suspicion that there was some bullshit involved when I heard about the chart (at first on the radio) of Trump's proposed "reciprocal tariffs", announced on NPR as

a 10% minimum tariff to apply to goods from all countries. However, certain trading partners will face higher, "reciprocal tariffs" aimed at penalizing them for their trade barriers. Those taxes on imported goods are calculated on a country-by-country basis, and the levels Trump announced for some trading partners are substantial. He said he plans to impose 34% tariffs on China, 20% on the European Union and 24% on Japan, among an array of other trading partners.

and a little more suspicion when I saw the charts Trump put on display for illustration, which seem to be describing something different, or maybe two different things, with the left columns headed "tariffs charged to the U.S.A. including currency manipulation and trade barriers", and the right column headed "U.S.A. discounted reciprocal tariffs" of around half the amount given in the first column, except for a number of countries, such as UK, Brazil, Singapore, Chile, Australia, and Colombia, where the number in both columns was 10%, which looked like a reference to the 10% "minimum tariff" instead. Why were those on the same chart? 

But the thing I really wanted to know about was where the numbers in the other cells of the left column came from: how had the administration calculated a single number for "tariffs charged to the U.S.A. including currency manipulation and trade barriers" for each of the 65 countries, 67% for China, 39% for the EU, 90% for poor Vietnam? Not that I would have any ability to imagine other numbers, or even to say whether such numbers exist, but could they say something about how they did it? There are no clues in today's executive order or in the presidential memorandum to which it alludes.

Anyway, I was pleased to see that Dr. Krugman, who is probably as well positioned to talk about these subjects as anybody alive (work in international trade theory is what he won his Nobel for), put up a quick note on the Substack that has replaced his New York Time column that suggests he was wondering exactly the same thing: 

So where does this 39 percent number [representing the EU's "tariffs charged to the USA"] come from? I have no idea. Many people speculated that Trump would count value-added taxes as tariffs, even though they aren’t — European producers selling to the EU market pay the same VAT as US producers, so it doesn’t discriminate and therefore isn’t protectionist. But even if you get that wrong, EU VAT rates are in the vicinity of 20 percent, so you still can’t get anywhere close to 39 percent.

You have to wonder whether Elon Musk’s Dunning-Kruger kids are now producing tariff numbers.

Now it seems, as NPR reports it, that's pretty much what happened:

Trump calls the move "reciprocal tariffs," however, the White House acknowledged it would be hard to calculate the actual trade barriers from every country, NPR's Scott Horsley tells Up First. As a result, the Trump administration picked an arbitrary number they thought would be high enough to chip away at each country's trade surplus. Economists say the tariffs will likely mean higher prices and slower growth in the U.S.

Got that? It would be hard to calculate, so they decided they'd just make the numbers up. And it's not like it was totally arbitrary, they were careful to pick numbers that sounded "high enough". Close enough for country music, as we used to say. Everybody's OK with that, right?

It was government by bullshit. They just brought their big charts with the made-up numbers out to the Rose Garden like Trump's hurricane map and read Stephen Miller's statement, with news that is I mean cataclysmic for most of these countries, threatening them all with recession, and lay back in the expectation that everybody would treat it as some kind of real thing. Presumably it's another Trumpy extortion attempt. Hey Vietnam, nice little export economy you have here, shame if anything were to happen to it, why don't you make us an offer? (Except Vietnam did make them an offer, back in February, and ambassador Marc Knapper assured them that Trump's tariffs were not going to be aimed at them in any way. Maybe President Trump wasn't informed of what President Trump was doing.) 

I'll have more to say about the whole event later on, but I feel like this thing on its own is so key to the understanding of what the Trumpery is about: they made the numbers up, because they felt getting real ones would be too hard, and admitted it to Scott Horsley, and they still expect to be treated as adults.

Update: The actual calculations are now available from various sources, including good old Atrios, Dean Baker, and The New York Times. And Krugman, with some hard evidence that the formula was created by an Large Language Model generative AI (though Gemini 3.5 is very insistent that it’s a stupid idea). Still insane, but helpful indicators of what kind of insanity.

Annotated Edition

Mark Wilson/Getty Images, via Vox.

Annotated edition of the NBC interview with the president-elect. Nearly all of his response to the first question, "What do you plan to accomplish in your first 100 days?"

Well, we’re going to do something with the border, very strong, very powerful. 

But you won't tell us what?

That’ll be our first signal — first signal to America that we’re not playing games. 

Oh, sending a signal. Something with the border, and it's going to be a signal. To America.

We have people coming in by the millions, as you know, and a lot of people shouldn’t be here. Most of them shouldn’t be here.

It has not been anything like millions at the border since December 2023, and especially since Biden's executive order of last June.

And how do you know who should and shouldn't be here?  

But we have jails being emptied into our country. We have mental institutions from all over the world being emptied into our country. 

Nobody, including your own campaign staff, has ever been able to point to any evidence that there is any truth to this story—

Ides

Grigory Rasputin in hospital, 1914, after a first assassination attempt, via History Daily.

Friday afternoon's press conference, 35 minutes in, I thought I heard Trump say he wasn't going to get tested for Covid-19, though he didn't exactly say that:

Q: And also Senat- -- I want to ask another question, if you’ll let me. Senator Lindsey Graham and also Senator Scott -- Rick Scott -- are self-isolating. Are you planning to take any kind of precautionary measure to protect you and also your staff who was there with him?

A: No, we have no symptoms whatsoever. And we have -- we had a great meeting with the President of Brazil, Bolsonaro. Great guy. Very -- a very tremendous -- he’s done -- he’s doing a fantastic job for Brazil. And, as you know, he tested negative -- meaning, nothing wrong -- this morning. And we got that word, too.

Though he certainly hinted it very strongly at 43 minutes:

Well, I don't know that I had exposure, but I don't have any of the symptoms. And we do have a White House doctor and, I should say, many White House doctors, frankly. And I asked them that same question, and they said, “You don't have any symptoms whatsoever.” And we don't want people without symptoms to go and do the test.

But just after an hour he started suggesting that he might want to defy the doctors' recommendations and get tested "anyway", for the reason that he "thought" he would:

West of Eden: The War is Over, You Read It Here First

Baghdad, Saturday, funeral procession for the Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, killed in the same bombing as the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, Photo by Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images via Axios.

Starting to feel a lot calmer about the prospects of a US-Iran was to be fought on Iraqi soil, or anyplace else, not least thanks to Donald's belligerent tweets on the subject, offering some new light on what he might think of the distinction between "warning" and "threat" but otherwise displaying pure impotence:

....hundreds of Iranian protesters. He was already attacking our Embassy, and preparing for additional hits in other locations. Iran has been nothing but problems for many years. Let this serve as a WARNING that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets, we have.....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2020

....targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD. The USA wants no more threats!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2020

Sure, Jan. Who exactly has targeted how many sites over the New Year holiday, and how did they come up with that interestingly symbolic number?

April Fool: I'm glad with that

Big Donald did an excellent April Fool funny, that unfortunately not too many people noticed:

Unless, you know, Donald still hasn't found out what Obamacare is or what Republican senators are up to and isn't joking at all, which is a possibility, I guess. Senator Rick Scott (FL-Death Eaters) had showed up on NPR in the morning to provide some of the evidence:

Mr. Trump is Not Authorized to Speak For the Trump Administration, part 42

Art by Jim Cooke via the late lamented Gawker, March 2016, from a lovely and prophetic Ashley Feinberg piece.

Kenneth Adelman, of all people, Ronald Reagan's UN ambassador and lead arms control negotiator and, as I just learned, author of Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard's Guide to Leading and Succeeding on the Business Stage—but also a Republican who managed to denounce the Iraq invasion by 2006 and vote for Obama in 2008—showed up on both NPR and BBC this morning to provide some advance panditry on the Trump-Putin summit or whatever it is.

He said something I thought was kind of interesting: NPR's interviewer, Noel King, was confronting him with the line that the Trump administration had after all been very tough on the Putin regime, sanctioning them in various ways, and Adelman just said no; the US government did that stuff—I guess he meant primarily Secretary Mattis and the Congressional leadership—and he welcomed it, but Trump himself wasn't working in the interests of the US government, but his own, the political interest of satisfying his base. He could have gone further, I think, and said that Trump has worked consistently against the US government on the Russia issue, trying to stop the sanctions or counter them in any way he can, and he could have suggested that Trump works in his financial interests too, funneling taxpayer money into his businesses and continuing to look for opportunities: I'm absolutely convinced he hasn't given up on the idea of that Trump Tower Moscow. What else could he have meant in that bizarre pair of tweets?

President Trump is Not Authorized to Speak for Himself

National Guard troops outside Hidalgo, TX, in 2011. AP photo via MPR.

Yesterday, in the wake of Trump's announcing to a press availability on Tuesday that he was pulling all the US troops out of Syria and "The White House" clarifying a few hours later that no, that was not in fact the case ("President Trump," they did not add, "is not authorized to speak for the Trump administration"), BooMan wrote,

He may be crazy and flat wrong on many details, but he is the president and if he wants to end our commitment to the region, you’d think that he could force a change in policy. But he can’t. Obama found himself handcuffed in some respects, too. If there is such a thing as the “deep state,” this is how it manifests itself. Even presidents have to bow to them on occasion.

I thought that was exaggerating both the existence of a "deep state" and this president's involvement in the government:

Meanwhile, in the Palace

W.W. Denslow, "Dorothy and the Giant Head". from L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).

Struck by this tweet:

Trump Plans Expulsion of Russian Envoys Over U.K. Attack, Sources Say https://t.co/bdUMdBVU5P

— Ming Nethery (@MingGao26) March 24, 2018

Really? What sources?

two people familiar with the matter said on Saturday.

Trump agreed with the recommendation of advisers and the expulsions are likely to be announced on Monday, the people said, though they cautioned that Trump’s decision may not be final. Trump is prepared to act but wants to be sure European allies will take similar steps against Russia before doing so, aides said....

President Trump is Not Authorized to Speak for the Trump Administration (continued)

Image via The Vintage Laundry

Trump tweets create confusion on GOP plan to avert shutdown; Ryan tries to calm Republicans https://t.co/TbUmR0p5mb

— montag (@buffaloon) January 18, 2018

GOP lawmakers had spent the morning trying to make sense of Trump’s early-morning tweets, which seemed to directly contradict the Republican legislative strategy by calling for the separation of a long-term extension of the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) from a short-term spending bill to keep the government open through mid-February.

While Republicans like Ryan suggested that the president was endorsing the GOP’s approach, others found the tweets inexplicable and unhelpful ahead of a possible election-year shutdown.

“We don’t have a reliable partner at the White House to negotiate with,” said Graham, entering the Capitol building on Thursday morning.

It's one thing to stage meetings between the Emperor and his legislators, preferably public, so he'll be able to refrain from using expressions like "shithole", giving him the opportunity to appear stern, thoughtful, and engaged in the legislative process, but Congressional Republicans really need to figure out ways of preventing him from actually participating, and especially through Twitter, which the entire nation at risk of being captured by whatever fascist blowhard is addressing Trump through the Fox cameras at the moment. He is too "uninformed" (General Kelly's word) and too self-involved to play any useful role other than signing the bill when it shows up at the White House and telling his base how great it is. Sometimes, as in this case, he threatens to torpedo the whole process and endanger the lives of millions of children out of pure ignorance.

If they're afraid he won't sign, in some fit of pique, and they really need to know what Trump thinks, General Kelly (who Trump seems to genuinely fear, even more than he fears Sessions and Tillerson) is a much better guide than the Twitter feed.

President Trump is Not Authorized to Speak for the Trump Administration, Part 418

Via.

Via TPM, following up on this morning's post, h/t Jordan:

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley on Sunday insisted that the United States will remain in the Iran nuclear deal.

President Donald Trump on Friday said he would likely pull the U.S. out of the deal unless Congress and the other nations in the seven-country accord made a handful of adjustments he demanded.

“Let’s see if we cannot address the flaws in the agreement by staying within the agreement, working with the other signatories, working with our European friends and allies within the agreement,” Tillerson said on CNN’s “State of the Union”....

“Before the Senate not long ago, your counterpart at the Pentagon, Secretary Mattis, was asked if he thought staying in the agreement was in the best interests of the United States,” Jake Tapper said, referring to Secretary of Defense James Mattis. “It sounds like you agree with that as well.”

“I do agree with that,” Tillerson said. “And I think the President does as well.”

On the same day on which President Trump has skipped the deadline, as he announced Friday he would, for sending the congressionally mandated letter to Congress certifying that Iran is in compliance with the JCPA and that the agreement is in the national security interests of the United States, on the grounds, we're told, that he does not think it is in the national security interests of the United States, not at all.

But then as usual, how would Trump even find out what he thinks? It's not like Fox News covers that in any depth.