Subject: Trumpers: you voted for...
a narcissistic idiot.

Donald Trump
Unfettered.

This week, President Trump blew it all up. In a Wednesday ceremony, he revealed his baseline universal tariffs and his “reciprocal” tariffs, which aren’t really reciprocal at all and rely on a crude formula potentially devised by an A.I. chatbot. This supreme and unholy amateurism produced such outputs as a 47 percent import tax on the poor island nation that produces most of the world’s vanilla; a 50 percent import tax that will “kill” Lesotho’s economy for its crime of exporting clothes and not having enough money to buy anything in return; and, yes, a 10 percent tax on a bunch of penguins. It’s all too hard to process “Liberation Day” in full. That’s going to be a job for historians. But let’s set aside, for the moment, the sharp increase in the likelihood of recession, inflation, and generally a global economic meltdown that this augurs. Let’s even set aside how this is probably lights-out for American global leadership and how, between this gut punch to the economic world order and Trump’s months of spurning military allies and abandoning soft power, China’s going to have a lot of new potential friends knocking on its door. What might be the most frightening is what it revealed about how decisions get made in this White House. The policy is slop, developed in secret and implemented unilaterally, unraveling 80 years of work at the snap of a finger. There are no longer any impediments between the weird ideas Trump developed in 1986 and their actualization. There’s no one to talk him out of anything. He is one-sixteenth of the way through his term. Slate's The Surge