Merely one pre-apocalypse peek into its creeping reality was the president-elect's surefire conviction yesterday that the New Orleans terrorist attack was delivered unto us through our "OPEN BORDERS," created by "weak, ineffective, and virtually nonexistent leadership" including "the DOJ, FBI, and Democrat state and local prosecutors" — all of them "incompetent and corrupt," having ignored the immigrant, "violent SCUM that has infiltrated" our nation.
Once his go-to demagogic xenophobia was proven grossly inaccurate in its conclusion, he simply fired off another of his standard-issue doggerel:
"TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!" (This morning he refashioned his inaccuracy into one of his always-correct prophecies: "With the Biden 'Open Border’s Policy' I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism ... will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe. That time has come, only worse than ever imagined.")
The point to be made is not that Trump was wrong about the New Orleans tragedy. As a natural-born cretin of the highest order, he's always wrong, the proverbial exception to the rule, here. What occurred yesterday occurred yesterday; that is, it was a one-day affair. What instead should shatter our nerves is the grueling, prolonged and pervasive wrongness of his second tenure — a presidency grounded in lurching simplicities born of a simple mind.
Trump posted one, below — one with many siblings, each just as ugly as this one — on 30 December. I recall no major reporting on this simplicity, indeed none at all. And yet its stupidity far outweighs that of yesterday's, and of more pertinence, its stupidity is slated to endure for four years. If enacted, as repeatedly promised by Trump, no longer will the words "the end of America" be a recent political slogan. They'll be our reality. This causes me to ponder: Was not yet another Trumpian pledge to annihilate the American economy worthy of at least page 2A coverage?
Truth Social: "The Tariffs, and Tariffs alone, created this vast wealth for our Country. Then we switched over to Income Tax. We were never so wealthy as during this period. Tariffs will pay off our debt and, MAKE AMERICA WEALTHY AGAIN!"
He attached this graph.
Trump's enthusiasm for historical tariffs and most of the graph's peaks lack some rather necessary perspectives. The earliest tariff imposed (1790) at Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton's urging was necessary for a fledgling postcolonial economy eager to build a domestic manufacturing base. One superb way to accomplish that? Make imports costly and collect a few bucks for a shaky federal government in the process.
Another way to interpret the graph is to keep these little items in mind: Throughout the 19th-century the United States most commonly had no military to speak of, no intelligence agencies, no Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid, no food stamps, no children's programs, no education programs, no environmental programs, no housing assistance, no transportation or labor or energy department, no small business administration, no workers' compensation, no health or science research and development, etc. — in brief, everything that makes for a safe and civilized nation.
In the graph there's one other element powerfully relevant to tomorrow, one overlooked or dismissed by tariff zealots. The graph's years are difficult to make out, but see that yellow line which precedes a sudden bump in tariffs after they had nearly bottomed out because of the 1913 income tax? Yeah, you got it, that was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 in action. It cranked up rates to near-historical highs in reaction to the economy's ills, propelled retaliatory tariffs globally, devastated U.S. exports and imports, and is known by economic historians to have been a leading contributor to the depth and duration of the Great Depression.
A final note — one of irony, that which looms as a leading contributor to the American Apocalypse of 2025-2029, then a yearslong hangover. Among the Republican Party's abnormally huge number of chronic gripes is the cost of U.S. social programs. But let us again don our history caps. What political party was the first to establish a sizable one? One that by 2023 had sprawled to annual federal outlays of $151 billion?
Yes! The Grand Old Party. Even before it began waving the Bloody Shirt, the Republican Party instituted an 1862 pension program for Civil War Union veterans, plus the widows and children of those killed in action. The program's recipients ramified from there. So unique was its pension plan, the GOP was in fact a global pioneer in social spending, which soon spilled into what the party would later deride as the "nanny state." (For an unsurpassed history on this topic, consult government professor Theda Skocpol's Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States." You'll thank yourself. It's brilliant.)
An aside: In 2013, the Associated Press discovered that the federal government was "still making monthly payments to relatives" of Civil War soldiers. Payments were "going to two children of veterans ... each for $876 per year."
The Republican Party: the first, the original, the nation's all-time procreating king of "welfare queenery." Ain't no way Trump's tariffs could ever pay for all that followed, for all that keeps citizens relatively secure, and for all that maintains the economy's health. If he tries, goodbye America. (Now that's worth a pretty big news story, is it not? And one virtually every day?)
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