Breaking through the denial

As many people have pointed out, the basic problem the media face, besides being owned by plutocrats who put the expansion of their wealth ahead of all other social goals, is that any straightforward description of who Donald Trump is and what he represents is going to sound impossibly hyperbolic. This is illustrated by the fact that the Smart Money ™ simply refused to internalize the reality that Trump was going to do exactly what he said a thousand times over the course of the campaign that he was going to do. They refused to believe this because it could not possibly be the case that the president of the United States is stupid enough to actually believe things like this:

“I spoke to a lot of leaders—European, Asian—from all over the world. They are dying to make a deal, but I said, ‘We’re not gonna have deficits with your country,’” Trump told reporters on board Air Force One Sunday. “We’re not gonna do that, because to me a deficit is a loss. We’re gonna have surpluses or at worst we’re gonna be breaking even.”

“To me a deficit is a loss” is, from the perspective of page one of Econ 101, the equivalent of 2 + 2 = 5. It says you don’t understand the idea of comparative advantage, which is the same thing as saying you don’t understand the idea of voluntary financial transactions, which is the same thing saying you don’t have the first fucking clue about the most basic possible facts about our world and how it works.

And it simply CANNOT be the case that the president of the United States, the most powerful politician in the most powerful country in the world, is a person who doesn’t understand something as utterly basic as that. Because if that were true, that would mean our entire political system, and the broader culture that undergirds it, would have suffered a catastrophic and comprehensive failure, of a sort that would, if actually understood to be that, would potentially delegitimize the whole system, root and branch.

And so here we are today.