Greetings and welcome to this latest performance of the Carnival of Fools! It has now been two weeks since Donald Trump officially took office, and if you thought the madness ended with last week’s torrent of executive orders, then prepare yourself for the first of many encores — probably enough to carry us all the way to the 2026 midterms, at this rate. (Also: Subscribe. Lean awkwardly on your friends and family members to subscribe. Place inappropriate professional pressure on workplace colleagues to subscribe.) I promise you we’re not running out of news anytime soon around here. Because — to paraphrase a wrinkly green Muppet sage — “Begun, the Trade Wars have.”
The Fire Rises
But first, let’s survey the broader field of battle. Last week, I opened the Carnival of Fools by asking observers of the new Trump administration whether they were still spin-dizzy from the sheer whirlwind force of its first eight days. There have been a few minor updates since last we spoke, of course: Trump has — among other things — banned the federal government’s involvement with youth transgender medicine, thwacked the president of Colombia over the head with a Big Stick, and offered to buy out and then terminate literally every single employee on the federal government payroll.
This last one was an Elon Musk special — he pulled a very similar move when he took over Twitter — and his team of delightfully youthful cracked engineers is now running through the entire federal government’s funding obligations with a chain saw. Or at least that’s the take from mainstream media, who are currently shrieking as if a gaggle of post-adolescent Leatherfaces are on the loose inside the Office of Management and Budget, massacring career civil servants.
I suspect the squawking is primarily theatrical — done out of venal concern and for the benefit of a media audience — and I myself am more than happy to see something like USAID, for example, shuttered instantly. (Making it legally disappear altogether is going to be a stickier wicket.) You can tell me “it’s a minuscule part of the federal budget!” and I will tell you yes, it is: It is a minuscule part of the federal budget that has long served as a wink-and-a-nod slush fund for activist organizations with long-standing “inside/outside” client relationships with the progressive administrators burrowed into every aspect of the government’s funding apparatus. Year in, year out, USAID quietly disbursed millions to favored political activist groups whose work abroad was almost entirely cosmetic.
Has USAID done good in its day? Sure. But those days are long over — they mostly expired with the Cold War — and that’s not why progressives are fiercely defending it as some precious lever of democracy promotion. The purpose of a system is what it does, not what it claims to do. Foreign aid per se is not the issue; corruption, nest-feathering, and a lack of results are. I’m looking forward to seeing what else this young and talented group of pitilessly unimpressed quants are capable of stripping out of our bloated government.
How Did George Lucas of All People See This One Coming?
But of course nobody’s talking about any of that. Instead, it’s impossible not to notice that — and this would read better as an opening narrative crawl on the big screen — turmoil has engulfed the Federal Republic. The taxation of trade routes to the outlying North American countries is in dispute.
Yes, I’ll admit that I too had no idea why George Lucas decided back in 1999 to premise the first installment of the Star Wars prequel trilogy upon the topic of international tariff policy. But perhaps that smug old Ewok was on to something. Because while the rest of us were just minding our own business on Saturday, Donald Trump launched a trade war with most of the rest of North America. Trump finally followed through on his long-repeated threats on the campaign trail, the ones nobody really took seriously: He slapped 25 percent tariffs on all exports from Mexico and Canada (he limited the tariff on Canadian energy to 10 percent). Almost as an aside to this — but of far graver importance — he unilaterally imposed a 10 percent tariff on all Chinese imports (including raw materials). Both Mexico and Canada immediately announced retaliatory tariffs. China has not reacted yet but has promised to — and it will.
So, a trade war it is. How does life during wartime feel? Bluntly put: You do not read me for my economic insight. (You can read nearly everyone else here for that.) It is safe to say that I am opposed to taking on our two allies with whom we share the continent and talk as if we need to disentangle our economy from theirs at the same time that we impose similar sanctions on a grave enemy. But I’m not sure we’re taking them on, at least not yet.
How seriously should we take all of this? After all, right as this column was about to head to the printers with twice as much splenetic verbiage as it now contains, Trump agreed to “delay” the tariffs he announced for Mexico for 30 days. All it took was a phone call from President Claudia Sheinbaum and an agreement to do the exact same thing her country did in 2021, when Joe Biden took office: send 10,000 troops to the northern border for show. (That certainly availed Biden little.) Beyond that, as Noah Rothman points out, Trump and Sheinbaum have reached nothing else save “an agreement to make an agreement”: a monthlong pause after which the tariffs are slated to return.
And then what’s more, right after this column landed in my editor’s inbox, Trump announced that — surprise, surprise — he was offering the same 30-day window to Canada after a “good conversation” with Justin Trudeau. This obviously suggests that — regardless of what Trump avers in public — he views tariffs not as an end unto themselves but rather as a blunt instrument to wield in negotiating favorable trade arrangements. I am well aware that, rhetorically at least, Trump has spent the last 40 years of his public life obsessed with tariffs; they are perhaps his sole ideological idée fixe. But so far he has used them primarily in strategic ways, even if ineptly. I sometimes wonder whether his publicly implacable rhetorical tone is merely his idea of taking a tough bargaining position, while always leaving himself private room to climb down later.
The truth is that I don’t know, and I never have known with Trump. He remains President Wild Card, which is why it’s impossible to repose real confidence in him. But so far it seems like the trade war is shaping up to be merely a phantom menace. The U.S. and Mexico will likely reach some agreement, as will the U.S. and Canada. It’s a crude, vulgar bit of international power politics, destined to fray nerves and weaken trust for the United States across the globe. (China will be less malleable.) But it’s Trump’s negotiating style, like it or not, and while I fear we will one day reap what we are sowing now, I’ll wait to see the results of that blue harvest.
Super Bowl LIX: Whoever Wins, We All Lose
By the time next Tuesday’s column appears, America will know who its new Super Bowl champions are. The problem, of course — and I want to say this specifically to all of the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles fans in the audience — is that, regardless of the outcome, the rest of America will suffer.
It was obvious that America wanted a Bills vs. Commanders Super Bowl matchup for next Sunday. It was at the exact moment I realized this that I also realized America was therefore destined to get a Chiefs vs. Eagles matchup instead. (Because you’ll get nothing, and like it.) Perhaps you tell yourself that you narrowly prefer the Eagles this year over the impossibly over-exposed Chiefs, but that’s a rookie mistake. Remember: This fan base already won a Super Bowl back in 2018 and, as a city, handled it precisely as well as you would have expected. No, Chiefs vs. Eagles is the Harris vs. Trump of Super Bowls for me: The most I can hope for is to watch the most annoying team in the league get humiliated by the second-most annoying one.
Until next week.