The eternal mystery at the heart of American politics
By 
JFC on a pogo stick:
The details of the tariffs are still unclear, which is one reason the markets are so on edge. Political leaders are on edge as well, because Mr. Trump has made clear that the tariffs will fall on adversaries like China as well as nations that, until recently, were considered America’s closest defense and intelligence allies.
Trump administration officials do not dwell on the price that will be paid by consumers, nor on the effects that the inevitable retaliation will have on American farmers. But just as curiously, the administration has not described any cost-benefit analysis of the president’s actions, such as whether the revenue gained is worth the damage done to America’s central alliances.
Gone are the days when Mr. Trump merely threatened to pull troops out of nations like South Korea and Japan that run a trade surplus with the United States. Now, he wants them to pay up — for some kind of ill-defined mix of subsidies to their own industries, taxes on American goods, free-riding on American security and refusal of his expansionist demands.
Mr. Trump is already showing signs of concern that his targets may team up against him.
A few days ago, he posted a middle-of-the-night warning on social media to his closest allies that “if the European Union works with Canada in order to do economic harm to the USA, large scale Tariffs, far larger than currently planned, will be placed on them both.”
There’s nothing “curious” about this.
Look, if I went out and played tennis with Carlos Alcaraz, I wouldn’t win any points. And this would not be curious. In any way whatsoever. You wouldn’t have to hire an expensive sports outcomes consultant to figure out why. You certainly wouldn’t need to go to a diner in Elmira, New York, to interview five locals about why this was happening.
Donald Trump does incredibly stupid things because he’s incredibly stupid. Donald Trump also thinks he’s really smart, which by the way is itself an extremely common and really bad and potentially destructive side effect of being incredibly stupid. The psychologists even have a name for this. And when it’s the president of the United States you can strike the modifier “potentially.”
Trump’s tens of millions of ardent fans are also incredibly stupid, and don’t recognize this about either themselves or him, because . . . Do we really have to keep doing this?
It’s not interesting! Carlos Alcaraz beating Paul Campos at tennis by winning 48 points and losing zero over two sets of spirited competition is not interesting. It just isn’t.
We are a nation of morons, led by a moron who thinks he’s a genius. This state of affairs has certain eminently predictable consequences.
No further expensive political consultants or journalistic trips to the diner are necessary.