A New Approach to Covering Trump
Trump made the media his unwitting partner. It’s time to stop that nonsense.
Happy Thanksgiving, fam. I’ll be taking the rest of the week off and I hope that you can get some time away from work, too. As a friend of mine often says: Leisure is the basis of culture.
1. The Tariffs
Here is my concern about Trump’s announcement that he will impose 25 percent tariffs on all goods from Mexico and Canada starting on January 20:
I’m concerned that he won’t actually do it.
Is it possible that Trump will actually slap that 25 percent number on all goods entering the country from Mexico and Canada until they stop all undocumented migrants from crossing the U.S. border and the amount of fentanyl coming into the United States drops to zero?1
Uh, sure. That is one possible outcome.
And if that happens, then prices of consumer goods in the United States will jump and we’ll slingshot into a recession.
Let me tell you a story about a more likely outcome:
On January 20, Trump will issue an EO with his 25 percent tariffs. The trigger date for implementation will be some point in the medium-future. Fox will talk about this great achievement nonstop. The mainstream media will talk about how potentially destabilizing the tariffs are.
And then at some point—maybe before the tariffs kick in, or maybe shortly afterwards—Trump will declare victory. Magically, the supply of fentanyl coming from Mexico and/or Canada will dry up and illegal border crossings will no longer concern Americans.
We’ve seen this story before, over and over.
Remember Trump’s “Muslim ban”? He signed a couple of executive orders, the courts halted them. Lawyers did a lot of pro bono work. After a few weeks everything was business as usual.
Remember when Trump tore up NAFTA? Except that he never did. He simply negotiated a “successor” agreement that was little more than new paint on the same vehicle.2
Remember when Trump built the wall that Mexico paid for? Trump replaced about 400 miles of existing barriers and built 52 miles of new fencing—52 miles! The U.S. government paid for all of this.
This is Trump’s modus operandi.
He promises his base crazy shit. He then announces that he’s about to do the crazy shit. The media freaks out at the prospect of said crazy shit. Trump then wriggles out of doing the crazy shit and—this is the key part—his voters give him credit for the crazy shit anyway.
That’s Trump’s secret sauce: The fact that his voters are never let down. No matter how little he actually does for them, no matter how many promises he breaks or fails to deliver, then never feel betrayed by him.
How do we break this cycle? We need a paradigm shift in how we approach Trump: