America Has Become Trump's Battered Wife

Published 1 month ago• 8 minute read

Credit: Dream Studio

This won’t come as a shock to anybody, but I’m no financial whiz. If I were, I probably wouldn’t be cranking out nouns and verbs and the occasional adverb (hesitantly) on Substack, like a performing monkey passing the hat. I’d be doing something more remunerative, like pushing meme coins or gold high-tops or Lee Greenwood Bibles, just like my branding-magnate idol, Donald John Trump.

Therefore, I can’t say I spent a lot of time contemplating the nuances of Trump’s tariff plan before it was sprung on us. (In fairness to me, the Trump brain trust —if “brain” isn’t too strong a word, or “trust” — didn’t appear to spend much time on it, either.) But I knew we were in trouble even well before I logged into my IRA, as the markets revolted and I watched a high five-figure sum disappear faster than you could say, “I want my mom.” (Maybe it’s for the best. After all, I’d have probably spent that money on all sorts of wasteful extravagances in my senescence, like food and shelter. )

For even Elon Musk, who couldn’t be any further up Trump’s flabby keister if he were a colonoscope, was openly mocking the new tariff debacle. Musk called the ex-con and Trump’s tariff architect, Peter Navarro, “dumber than a sack of bricks.” Perhaps the only time Musk has told the truth about anything in the last three years.

Even if I’m no economist or market expert, that didn’t stop me from providing my Johnny-on-the-spot analysis. You’ll forgive the mature themes and adult language. (But I’d just lost a butt-ton of money, and was under duress.)

But have no fear, this is not a deep-dive on tariffs. If you want that — and I can’t blame you if you don’t — feel free to check out the always excellent Jonathan V. Last on that subject. Rather, I’m more interested in how people reacted to the market wipeout. Or how they didn’t.

For if you were the kind of MAGAbot who spent the last several years complaining about inflation — which I don’t blame you for, inflation makes me cranky too, even if inflation was a worldwide phenomenon with lots of factors and couldn’t be put squarely in the lap of J’Biden — it’s hard to see how you could get super-psyched over Trump’s tariff scheme, which is 100 percent Trump-generated, and which will basically make the costs of everything you buy much higher. Save the carve-outs for Trump’s special new tech-bro friends.

Of course, the market briefly rebounded after the bottom fell out of it (before it tanked again), when Trump announced he’d be putting a 90-day-freeze on tariffs at around 10 percent for most of the world (including the Antarctic islands populated only by woke penguins and seals). Which could easily make the last five years of post-Covid inflation look like a round of pat-a-cake. Trump became responsible for the largest-two-day-wipeout in stock market history. But his 90-day audible — called after the usually-stable bond market started panicking — led to the third-biggest market gain in post WW II history.

MAGAbots, looking for some good news — any good news — rejoiced as they often do for no good reason at Trump’s “wins.” While more sober analysts — everyone from MSNBC’s Chris Hayes to former Trumpkin Anthony Scaramucci — likened congratulating Trump (who of course, didn’t fail to congratulate himself) for this new Trump bump as giving an ass-pat to an arsonist who set a house on fire, then (kind of) put the fire out, leaving a partially-burned house. Great job, arsonist! Meanwhile, while China, our third-largest trading partner, is now being hit with 145 percent tariffs on the goods they export to us (they’ve returned the favor with 125 percent tariffs on U.S. goods, potentially crippling American exporters), even good ‘ol American institutions like Walmart franchises, whose shelves are packed with cheap Chinese-made products, could face going tits up. But don’t worry, this is all “a negotiation,” except when it isn’t. (The administration has changed its story on the why or what or endgame goals of the most drastic peacetime tariffs in U.S. history so many times, it’s hard to even keep track.)

But throughout this whole ordeal, the MAGAbots have not stopped being MAGAbots. Or — and now I’m searching for new analogies — while I’ve always compared them to cultists, I now think they, and by extension us, since they make up a large enough chunk of our electorate to have brought on this mess, are more akin to battered wives. As anyone familiar with the Ike’n’Tina Turner story understands (before Turner liberated herself), it’s a classic, “Please don’t hit me, daddy. Oh, you’re so good to me (for not hitting me) daddy.” They are in an abusive relationship, that they forever fail to recognize as abuse.

And so we get this Washington Post story, with “pro-Trump creators” (i.e., internet grifters), playing down all the havoc their hero is wreaking on their country. Hey look! There’s Benny Johnson — serial plagiarist, Russian-tool beneficiary, and tight black t-shirt-wearer. (Trademarks can be fun! And Tim Pool already cornered the market on ski hats!) Here’s Benny saying something he would have NEVER said during a Democratic administration. “Losing money costs you nothing,” he said. “In fact, it builds quite a bit of character.” Character, being something he has none of. So I’m not sure how he’d know that, even if he probably has, like the rest of us, lost money at the hand of his Mango Messiah. (For the record, as the Post reports, eight months earlier, on a down-trading day under Biden, Johnson said that it was “bloody black Monday. Holy moly, the Kamala {Harris} crash is here.” I guess money still mattered back then.)

And then, as the Post reports, there was Trumpfluencer DC Draino, urging people to stop “whining” as their retirement funds get wiped out. The “preventive surgery” of tariffs, was apparently necessary. Y’know, to bring back American factory jobs that nobody wants, because so many of them are too busy being influencers like DC Draino, which is much less demanding work. “People act like the American stock market has never dipped before,” said DC, or Draino, or whatever the hell I’m supposed to call him. “It always recovers and goes back up.” When the Post contacted Draino about his stances contradicting each other (last August, Draino said that it wasn’t “a coincidence that as Kamala’s polls rise, the stock market dives”) he responded without conscience, as most Trumpfluencers do: “The short-term dip was well worth the Golden Era economy we’re about to experience.” If DC Draino were an Aeorosmith song, instead of just one of so many starblind Trump cultists, he’d have to be “Dream On.”

But it’s not just the Trumpfluencers who engage in this behavior. When I got into a political tussle the other day with a Trumpster relative — as has so often happened over the last decade — he hadn’t even checked on his IRA to see how badly the Trump tariffs were hurting his retirement fund (and he’s an already-retired senior). Whatever will be, will be, he essentially said. A laissez-faire attitude I don’t quite recall during the Biden administration.

What he was much more worried about was that the DemoRats didn’t stand up and applaud for that cancer-kid during Trump’s address to Congress several weeks ago. Because that’s what’s really hurting America! Democrats not getting onboard the Trump train! I reminded him that if he cared about the cancer-kid, he might also care that the cancer-kid’s doctors were facing devastating federal budget cuts. I didn’t hear back on that one. Even after I reminded him: “I thought Trump was supposed to be good for the economy? He promised to get prices lower on his first day. Yet the only thing that's dropped is your IRA value. So why are we all poorer? And in just a few weeks time? Even if he brings manufacturing back to America -- spoiler alert: he won't -- would you rather have your retirement fund, or a job in a t-shirt factory?”

Which is why my relative, along with Trumpfluencers, remind me of everything I’ve ever read about battered-woman syndrome. In fact, I just Googled up a checklist from Healthline, and here are some telltale symptoms:

- Denial. The person is unable to accept that they’re being abused, or they justify it as being “just that once.”

- There will be a temporary “honeymoon” period, where the abuser is on their best behavior, luring their partner into thinking that they’re safe and things really will be different.

- Being afraid to leave.

- Be afraid and never know what side of their partner they’ll see that day — a loving partner or an abuser.

- Having frequent bruises or injuries they lie about or can’t explain.

- Believing that if the abuser loves them, it’s OK, and they can change the behavior.

- Abuse occurs, starting the cycle all over again.

But hey, maybe it’ll all work out. Maybe he won’t hit you/us again. Maybe he’ll choose sanity and stability over conflict, turmoil, ego-feeding, emotional violence, and perpetual disruption. But if I were a market player, and that was a commodity future, I would short the hell out of it.

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