Trump's Golden Age of Delusion and Chaos

The Felon's long winded speech, if one can call it that, on Tuesday put much of the lunacy of the Felon's agenda in focus: creating chaos at home and abroad while positioning America as a client state of Vladimir Putin.  The "speech was laced with outright lies - e.g., that millions of dead people are receiving Social Security payments - and the only policy initiatives are giving huge tax breaks to the super wealthy while slashing programs and agencies that benefit everyone else, and waging war on all things "woke."  Just as distasteful was seeing congressional Republicans applaud whatever the Felon said.  The Felon could have farted loudly and these self-prostituting individuals would have likely applauded. Meanwhile, the stock market is down, consumer prices are up, and uncertainty surrounds the economy.  The Felon's promised "golden age" is defined by delusion and chaos with of heavy dose of misogyny. With nothing positive economically flowing to the MAGA base other than supposedly "owning the libs" and a rewarmed version of Jim Crow, one has to wonder what it will take for cultists to realize they will be worse off under the glorious leader than they were during the Biden years.  A piece in the New Yorker looks at this age of chaos and insanity:

Six weeks and two days after returning to the Oval Office, Donald Trump headed back to the Capitol, the site of his very recent swearing-in ceremony, to declare victory—again and again and again. Over Joe Biden. Evil foreign gangs. Canada. In his address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, Trump claimed that he had done more in his first wild weeks back in power, with his “swift and unrelenting action,” than any President ever, including George Washington.

A flood of words followed, so many that Trump, channelling his inner Fidel Castro, easily broke the modern record for a Presidential address to Congress: Bill Clinton’s one-hour-and-twenty-eight-minute stem-winder in 2000. And yet there was little news in it . . . . Trump made little effort to explain his disruptive moves to jettison America’s traditional alliances and assault the federal government at home, preferring instead to string together greatest hits from his campaign rallies and brickbats aimed at his predecessor, “the worst President in American history.” Much of what Trump said was inflammatory, radical, and dangerous. But it was also familiar, his by-now-standard mix of braggadocio and self-pity, partisan bile and patently absurd lies.

There’s no doubt that Trump, in just six weeks, has compiled a most unusual list of accomplishments to boast about—much of it a result of allowing the world’s richest man to take a chainsaw to the federal government, cutting hundreds of thousands of federal jobs and unilaterally shutting down federal programs and contracts worth billions of dollars in defiance of Congress. The lawless rampage of the second Trump Administration has already touched everything from rangers at America’s treasured national parks to the very pillars of the decades-old transatlantic alliance.

But you wouldn’t have known it from hearing Trump wind his way through nearly a hundred minutes of mostly standard-issue Fox News culture-war talking points and alpha-male American exceptionalism. (Sample: “Wokeness is trouble. Wokeness is bad. It’s gone. It’s gone,” he said. “Don’t we feel better?”)

Trump’s only major legislative proposal in his second term is to make permanent the tax cuts that Republicans in Congress passed during his first term; his big reveals in the speech were an announcement of a planned “Office of Shipbuilding” in the White House and a pledge to balance the federal budget, which literally no one thinks can be redeemed.

No amount of performative distraction, though, could erase the sense of the world in a state of Trump-induced chaos, whether he chose to mention it or not. The day of the speech, after all, had begun with a Trump-prompted market plunge as his long-threatened twenty-five-per-cent tariffs on Canada and Mexico took effect. In the morning before Trump went to Capitol Hill, the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, made a dramatic televised appeal, “directly to the American people.” “We don’t want this,” Trudeau said. “We want to work with you as a friend and ally. We don’t want to see you hurt, either. But your government has chosen to do this to you.”

Trudeau’s plea captured a bit of the bewilderment of the moment—how is it that one man acting alone could upend so much in the world? And just why, exactly, has Trump decided to turn Canada from America’s best friend to its enemy? . . . . “At the same time, they’re talking about working positively with Russia, appeasing Vladimir Putin, a lying, murderous dictator. Make that make sense.”

Trump can’t and he won’t. The remarkable thing, as Tuesday’s speech showed, is that he doesn’t even seem to think he needs to.

In the speech itself, however, Trump waxed almost poetic about the beauties of the tariff as a tool of national power. “Tariffs are not just about protecting American jobs,” Trump said. “They are about protecting the soul of our country.” Rather than foreshadow an imminent deal to end the standoff with America’s two neighbors, the President warned his supporters to brace for “a little bit of an adjustment period” and, later, “a little disturbance,” which was as close as he came to acknowledging the threat of spiking prices and crashing stocks that economists have warned about. In fact, Trump said he was doubling down on tariffs, promising that on April 2nd, reciprocal tariffs would go into effect on every country in the world that imposes any duties on American goods. So much for Wall Street’s conventional wisdom.

As for the geopolitical consequences of alienating America’s allies, abandoning Ukraine  and pivoting U.S. foreign policy to a decidedly Putin-esque view of the world, Trump hardly mentioned it. . . . . It was one of those tree-falls-in-a-forest moments with Trump; if he blows up the liberal international order but doesn’t explain why America is now on Russia’s side, how do you know if it happened at all?

Even before the gut punches of the past few days, Trump was already in negative territory with the public. According to FiveThirtyEight, he had a net negative favorability rating of close to two per cent as of today—worse than any other President of our lifetime at this point in his term, except for Trump’s own first term, when he was already six points under water, as the pollsters put it, on this day in March of 2017.

[T]he scene of the night came even before Trump started talking, as he walked down the aisle and was, briefly, confronted by a Democratic congresswoman from New Mexico, Melanie Stansbury, wielding a small, hand-lettered sign. “This is Not Normal,” it said. Almost as soon as she flashed it, a Republican congressman from Texas, Lance Gooden, ripped the sign out of her hands and threw it in the air. Call it the Trump era’s new normal, where members of Congress fight like toddlers on the House floor while Putin gloats over the greatest self-own in modern history. It’s a golden age, of bunk.