Trump to Penguins, the American Economy: Drop Dead.
Ronald Reagan said Mr. Trump’s policies “weaken[] our economy, our national security, and the entire free world.”
On April 2, 2025, Nintendo announced the release of the long-awaited Switch 2, including a 1080p screen, 4K output, and a camera button to allow players to talk to each other. They then burned significant goodwill by announcing it would be priced at $450, up $150 from the $299 launch price of the original Nintendo Switch, and the games will cost more, too. Not to be outdone, President Donald Trump terminally crashed out rage-quit the global trade order, and announced “Liberation Day” tariffs that will hike the price of everything else.
Mr. Trump waited until after the stock market closed for the day before informing America that he was ruining the global economy. Otherwise, we could watch the markets crash in real time as hallucinated numbers left his lips.
As of this writing, the Dow is down 1600 points, Nasdaq is down four percent, Amazon, Apple, and Walmart all saw six-point drops, and Nike is down seven. The tickers are soaked in red, appropriate for the murder of American prosperity.
Mr. Trump has said his tariffs are “reciprocal,” but his numbers do not align with actual tariffs imposed on the United States by other countries. The U.S. Trade Representative’s published methodology indicates the “[r]eciprocal tariffs are calculated… assum[ing] that persistent trade deficits are due to a combination of tariff and non-tariff factors that prevent trade from balancing.” This is to say: Mr. Trump’s protectionist Know-Nothings started with a deficit, imagined it was caused by some ambiguous unfairness, then reverse-engineered a harsh-looking number to match the grievance. This model divides the U.S. trade deficit with any given country by that country’s exports to the U.S., then halves the result to produce the “reciprocal” tariff. Practically speaking, their “reciprocal tariffs” are derived from some calculation of the tariff with random voodoo bullshit.
Economist James Surowiecki explained on Twitter: “So we have a $17.9 billion trade deficit with Indonesia. Its exports to us are $28 billion. $17.9/$28 = 64%, which Trump claims is the tariff rate Indonesia charges us. What extraordinary nonsense this is.”
The Verge has suggested the administration’s calculation methodology originated, not from any economist, advisor, think tank, or white paper, but rather these numbers came from ChatGPT, or perhaps Grok—the preferred plagiarism tools of the nation’s indolent undergraduates. If this is true, and I believe it is, the global trade posture of the United States was developed with the same rigor as that old social media challenge:
“Type ‘I am’ and let your phone autocomplete the rest of the sentence. No cheating. Post what you get.”
We know Mr. Trump’s list was developed in a fundamentally unrigorous manner because it included the Heard and McDonald Islands—which are populated only by elephant seals and penguins. Explain to me: how are penguins “ripping America off”?
This is the sort of thing that, if the White House had any real, clear interest in communicating factual information, they would have explained during the presentation. You know, make a joke about the stupid birds and explain the rationale so they do not look completely psychotic. But this White House does not care about factual accuracy. In fact, I think they included this as a joke at the expense of GOP Senator Ted Cruz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, knowing those men are so cucked and debased that they will simply bear the humiliation of defending the absurd.
https://www.theverge.com/news/642620/trump-tariffs-formula-ai-chatgpt-gemini-claude-grok
Frankly speaking, Mr. Trump does not understand tariffs, despite making them core to his identity. He is like a teenager wearing a Nirvana t-shirt before they even hate themselves and want to die.
Mr. Rubio explained in 2016 that tariffs “create few jobs and jack up prices…. [Mr. Trump’s] proposals… mean higher prices for [] Americans,” and even explained to him directly: “The buyer pays the tariff: it gets passed on in the price to the consumer.”
Mr. Cruz was even more forceful, telling the unbearable dither Chuck Todd on Meet the Press: “Donald’s only economic agenda is imposing massive taxes on the American people with a 40 percent tax hike of a giant tariff. That would send us into a recession. It would drive jobs overseas. It would kill small businesses.”
If the impact, then, of Mr. Trump’s economic vandalism is as Mr. Cruz described here, I hope someone asks him: “You laid out this course of events very clearly. You predicted this disaster. Why, then, did you change course to enable it? Certainly not because it was politically expedient—that would be comparable to the Greek Cassandra, in some alternate scenario where she decided to advise the Trojans to haul in that old wooden horse anyway because she thought she could profit from it.”
The late Rush Limbaugh, the Maha Rushie, called Mr. Trump’s protectionist nonsense “a death wish.”
“You don’t promise to raise tariffs on the ChiComs 25%. That’s not conservative…. You remember when George W. Bush threatened to raise tariffs on imported steel, there was an outcry. No, you don’t raise taxes, period. That’s not the way to deal with it. That’s protectionism. Smoot-Hawley. It’s a death wish.”
Populism is Not Conservatism, Jul 20, 2011
“[T]he single most exacerbating cause of prolonging the Depression was … the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which was protectionism… protectionist policies, tariffs on anything that we imported. Rather than help the economy, it strangled global trade, and this led to the rest of the world suffering an economic downturn. Businesses that suffered the most during all this, because of this, were agricultural, mining, and logging.”
Causes of the Great Depression
The late President Ronald Reagan, who was once sainted among Republicans, said:
“Our peaceful trading partners are not our enemies; they are our allies. We should beware of the demagogues who are ready to declare a trade war against our friends—weakening our economy, our national security, and the entire free world—all while cynically waving the American flag. The expansion of the international economy is not a foreign invasion; it is an American triumph, one we worked hard to achieve, and something central to our vision of a peaceful and prosperous world of freedom.”
Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance have both cheerfully compared the crashing economy to someone mortally ill. Mr. Vance said: “[I]t’s like a patient who was very sick. We did the operation, and now it’s time to make the patient better. And that’s exactly what we’re doing.” This ugly fool neglects that their operation is blatant malpractice and the patient could die.
I want to give some plaudits to Senator Rand Paul for speaking out about this. At last, the Aqua Buddha recalls he is a libertarian.
Forbes called it an “epic speech.” I concur.
If he would be an unlikely ally to the #resistance, I think we should use him. His unfortunate abdication of his father’s ideals might still be redeemed if he goes on a quest to stop this nightmare.
The National Review, who has mainly functioned as a Trump enabler in recent years, have their hair on fire right now. It seems as if they somehow convinced themselves that Mr. Trump could be dissuaded from the tariff policy he ran on. Still, their strong opposition should also be lauded.
Americans Will Pay the Price for Reckless Tariffs
All these warnings have been ignored, in many cases by the men who made them. The consequences of this will be catastrophic or worse. Typically, I would wind down an editorial like this saying: “We are at a precipice now.” That would be a lie. Like the Li’l Penguin Lost in the Cool, Cool Mountain of Mario 64, the American economy has already been yeeted off a fucking cliff.