His empire of dirt
Trump's failure in record time
In less than three months, Donald Trump has gone from people anticipating great things from him to believing his policies are just gonna hurt them even more.
This graphic for a CBS poll done last week shows the dramatic turnaround in American public beliefs about tariffs and the impact they will have on American consumers.
Whatever happens on Wednesday - expect less than the advanced billing - Trump 47 will continue to flip, flop, and fumble. That’s not a defect. That’s the design of his chaotic administration. Trump himself is not intellectually disciplined and so that erratic, chaotic way he works and that we all saw during Trump 45 is still the operative condition.
That’s why, from the outset, a relatively small number of people - your humble e-scribbler included - suggested the best approach to Trump 47 was just to wait and see what happens. Now we have enough information to work up a strategy that works for Canadians rather than the panicky response in Canada so far.
Take retaliatory tariffs as an example. Don’t bother. Trump’s plan for “reciprocal” tariffs will do the job for us. They just increase our costs since those tariffs are a tax on the importer not the exporter. Let Trump's tariffs hit his own people. They'll know how to pay Trump back.
Those billboards? Way better. They will drive those polling numbers hard against Trump 47 and his Republican enablers who are already frightened to death of the political slaughter that could come in the 2026 midterms. There were reports Monday that the American Capitol is flooded with lobbyists and corporations looking for exemptions from the crazy tariff man’s next assault. That will make Trump 47’s internal management even more chaotic and eventually the thing will explode or implode or both.
Make the truth hurt even more by putting up the real Churchill quote about lifting yourself up by the handle of the bucket you are standing in. It’s all about tariffs and let Winston pown Trump 47 from beyond the grave.
The signs of Trump 47’s endless problems are everywhere.
Elon Musk likely won’t be staying on at DOGE. That’s been a disaster, again pissing off Trump voters, and Musk himself has severely damaged his own companies through his antics. Regardless of what he says to cover his flight from the administration, Musk won’t leave because of success but because he’s been a failure. A spectacular failure. Same as with Twitter, which he bought and then demolished, just as surely as Tesla stocks have plummeted.
It’s taken a few weeks but now everyone - including Trump himself - can see Russians laughing at him in Ukraine. The peace deal he brokered blew up like a Russian airfield under attack from Ukraine.
Finnish President Alexander Stubb visited Trump in Florida and told reporters in London on Monday that “[Trump] is quite impatient with Russia's actions, this kind of scheming and delaying regarding the ceasefire. I tried to explain that this is completely normal Russian behavior. First, we negotiate something – and then the conditions are changed once again.”
Trump’s pissed off because Russians negotiate just like he does.
Sweet.
Meanwhile, his international security team blew themselves up in the now ridiculous Signal scandal. The Vance trip to Greenland was a complete disaster in every respect. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick - all over media in the beginning - is now in the Witless Protection Program (spelling intentional) and other Trump financial advisors like Peter Navarro are pushing even harder to promote tariffs despite the political damage they are causing. “Tariffs are tax cuts” he told Fox News with a straight face.
Basically, there’s nothing Trump has done in the first 100 days in office that has come even close to working as promised.
Nothing.
It’s all had the opposite effect than the one intended. The American position is worse off than before and there’s no way to make it better by sticking to the same plan.
Like Mark Carney’s defence of a candidate he should ditch or CPC election strategy. Conservative supporters (who are in many cases also Trump lovers) have turned TDS - a thing their Republican friends like to throw at Trump’s critics - into Trudeau Derangement Syndrome as they hammer away at old targets and ignore or turn off potentially accessible voters. Their winning election is slipping from their deranged fingers as we speak.
You could make this stuff up.
“It is the theory of the Protectionist [like Trump or Furey’s Liberals] that imports are an evil. He thinks that if you shut out the foreign imported manufactured goods you will make these goods yourselves, in addition to the goods which you make now, including those goods which we make to exchange for the foreign goods that come in. If a man can believe that he can believe anything.”
“We Free-traders say it is not true. To think you can make a man richer by putting on a tax is like a man thinking that he can stand in a bucket and lift himself up by the handle.”
Be there!
7:00 PM tonight.
First livestream on the Substack app.
A Subscribers-only feature.
We’ll talk a bit about Trump, a bit about the federal election, and whatever comes up.
