Donald Trump seemed to be in a state of panic Wednesday morning as he tried to convince Republicans to keep doing his bidding, and the country that his trade war is a good thing.
|
Listen To This Story
 |
Donald Trump’s social media website Truth Social is many things: It is a money-hemorrhaging venture that generated sales of a mere $3.6 million last year while losing $400 million… and still managed to add a couple of billion dollars to the president’s wealth. It allows people to know what he is watching on TV at any given time. Most importantly, Truth Social is an involuntarily hilarious, frequently frightening, and typo-ridden window into Trump’s mind.
On Wednesday, all of these things were on full display.
Anybody following the president’s account would have learned that he was watching Fox News, where even pro-Trump anchors were voicing their concerns over his decision to launch an entirely unnecessary global trade war, and that he was freaking out a bit.
As his cabinet officials and White House aides hit the airwaves to lie about the pre-inauguration state of the economy, present often contradictory assessments of why it is great news that the stock market is shedding trillions of dollars in value, or explain what the plan is (because there is no plan), Trump is clearly feeling the heat.
“BE COOL! Everything is going to work out well,” he wrote mid-morning. “The USA will be bigger and better than ever before!”
A little bit later, he tried to convince Americans that “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!”
That is not what they are doing, however. In fact, investors are even shedding US government bonds, which are usually seen as a safe investment.
Trump appears to be clinging to anybody or anything that purportedly supports his harebrained idea of imposing tariffs on just about all of the goods the US imports.
For example, he quoted JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who had told frequent Trump cheerleader and tariff skeptic Maria Bartiromo that “fixing trade and tariffs is a good thing.”
What Dimon was talking about, however, was that it would be good to eliminate the uncertainty that the president’s volatile tariff “strategy” has created, and perhaps the main takeaway from the interview was that Dimon believes that a recession is now likely.
The economic nightmare Trump is creating isn’t even his only problem.
The president also has to quell a revolt among House Republicans who want to destroy the government more quickly than their GOP colleagues in the Senate.
Specifically, that means that they do not want to support the Senate’s framework for advancing Trump’s agenda. That is why the president fired off two social media posts trying to rally GOP lawmakers.
“It is IMPERATIVE that Republicans in the House pass the Tax Cut Bill, NOW! Our Country Will Boom!!!” he wrote in one, while saying that the US “will Soar like never before.”
All of this not only has the vibe of somebody who is trying to convince themselves that a terrible decision they made was actually a stroke of genius, but it also shows that Trump is weakened right now.
We are seeing more and more Republicans on both sides of the spectrum contradicting the president in ways that seemed unlikely just a month ago.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
