Greetings and welcome to this 31st performance of the Carnival of Fools! I’ll admit, we’re convening under somewhat chaotic circumstances — “Liberation Day” went a bit more bumpily than Trump is willing to concede, after all. As I write this, the markets convulse and gyrate to news leaked on Twitter/X like a patient under defibrillator paddles guided by a doctor suffering a streak of seizures. I hope you enjoy roller coasters, folks, because right now every middle-aged normie with a retirement plan feels like he’s riding one into his own grave.
Then again, perhaps we all need to calm down for a moment and take the president’s advice: “Don’t be weak! Don’t be stupid! Don’t be a PANICAN,” for God’s sake! (Avoid that, if for no other reason than that it would make you sound like a pelican, enormous wobbling gullet and all.) Instead, be smart. Be wily — like a coyote. For if America began Donald Trump’s second administration still well situated at the apex of world power, it takes a certain kind of genius to supervise the complete dismantling of the country’s economic, political, and moral position in the world in less than three months. And yet here we are — Donald Trump is promising to get the hard work done in less than a week. And all it took was setting our economy on course to jump off the cliff.
Readers, the Carnival of Fools is a one-man show today.
In the Real World, Gravity Always Wins
I am part of that last, blessed generation who grew up with the Looney Tunes cartoons as an unavoidable childhood reference point — the classics ran every Saturday morning, while a “new generation” of Spielbergian Tiny Toons kept them top of mind every weekday afternoon — and have thus developed a profoundly nuanced appreciation for cartoon physics and karmic justice. It soon became clear to me, as a young man, that the Road Runner and his nemesis, Wile E. Coyote, had as much to teach me about the sad realities of human nature as did my father, the church, or Plato for that matter. Some truths are timeless, and none more so than the example of someone driven to serial failure by a mixture of tragicomic overconfidence and mad obsession. (What makes the entire dynamic oddly poignant is that, as creator Chuck Jones stipulated in his rules for the series, “the Coyote could stop anytime — if he were not a fanatic.”)
I related to the Coyote back then — mostly because cartoons are make-believe. It is far more difficult to laugh when the fanatic is real and wields his power over all of us like one. So it is with President Donald Trump who — convinced of his own superior intellect — has crowbarred open a newly delivered crate of ACME Trade Policy, unboxed Peter Navarro circa 1996, and strapped on his goggles and rocket shoes to catch that elusive, slippery trade deficit once and for all.
With all the certainty of a man who operates by the rules of cartoon political physics, Trump is convinced that just so long as he refuses to acknowledge gravity, he will not plummet to the ground, even as he sends the American economy careening over the cliff. Everything is going according to plan! The negotiations will be beautiful! Such phenomenal deals there are to be made! (In the alternative: This is not a negotiation at all! Get used to it, peons!) But here in the real world, the realities of economic physics supplant those of the MAGA narrative, and financial gravity is currently winning, as it tends to.
I am not going to re-explain for you why these tariffs are so pointlessly self-destructive. I have done so before. Many others at National Review have done so as well. Former Senator Pat Toomey — as if emerging from the nightmarish fog of recent political history like the Ghost of Christmas Future, clanking his chains and moaning ominously in the night — did an eerily prescient job back in March of warning exactly what would happen and why. In fact, seemingly the entire world is pitching in right now to add a helpful second to the idea “Hey — how about let’s not send the American economy hurtling straight into a granite wall crudely painted to look like a railroad tunnel?”
The main exceptions, naturally, are the most shameless of Trump’s paid new-media mercenaries, who will happily insist to you that while losing money means nothing, the cowardice of failing to ride mindlessly with the Trumpian horde to ruin prevents a true MAGA man’s soul from entering Valhalla. (For what it’s worth, Elon Musk — whose official departure from the administration was announced on April 2 with what now seems like suspiciously convenient timing — has taken to carefully criticizing the Trump administration’s tariff policy on Twitter/X, linking to Milton Friedman videos as well as casually and correctly noting that Harvard Ph.D. Peter Navarro “ain’t never built sh**.”)
What would the point of arguing be, anyway? The tariff regime’s supporters cannot even seem to agree with one another about the logic behind it. Turn left, and people will tell you “Liberation Day” is a brilliant plan hatched by Stephen Miran and Scott Bessent to crash the stock market and roll over Biden-era “bad debt” by chasing foreign investors into buying low-interest Treasury bonds. Turn right, and hopium addicts will suggest that it’s about achieving truly mutual zero-tariff “fair trade” between all nations. (Alas, Bill Ackman, optimism dies hard.) Spin yourself in a circle and you might even just talk yourself into buying the Trump team’s own threadbare logic at face value: This is an attempt to resurrect American manufacturing in the Rust Belt by forcing businesses to on-shore their factories and supply chains or face crippling tariffs.
In response to these mental gymnastics, I turn instead to economist Scott Lincicome for a far more elegant theory of the case: “He just likes tariffs and always has.” Folks, that’s all it is. Here’s my thesis: (1) He loves tariffs and (2) hates trade deficits for economically ignorant reasons. Some around him — those closest to him in many ways, like Navarro — have a similarly faith-based love of vulgar protectionism. The policy will continue in one form or another until the personnel changes — great, now replace the president. (It has been tried several times!)
Either these tariffs will be walked back in some significant way — complete with a declaration of victory and a horde of sycophants insisting that Trump is the Best Negotiator Ever — or they will not. I have no idea which will happen anymore. Rumors to the effect of a “temporary” tariff suspension are floating around right now without cease on social media — as I write this, one false Twitter rumor just swung the S&P 500 by more than a thousand points — and none of them is more than a wisp of a fantasy yet. Tomorrow may be different.
Be wary of “news” that Trump is “negotiating” individual deals with various nations. Even if this is the case — and I must assume it is ultimately part of the plan, no matter how much Navarro goes on television to insist that “this is not a negotiation” — that leaves several hundred nations to negotiate with before this officially goes into effect . . . tomorrow. Serious damage is increasingly becoming unavoidable, in any event: There is the “market reaction” as seen in the fluctuations of Wall Street, but beyond that there is the “long tail,” the hidden supply chain shocks and pricing deformations that will take far longer to work out.
I end with a look backward to January 20, 2025, where with typical procrastinative flair I slipped my predictions for the second Trump administration right under the wire at 10:57 a.m., before he took the oath of office. At that time I certainly had no idea quite where we were going — I’m hard-pressed to imagine that anyone saw all of this coming in its pell-mell detail, and if you had “MAGA’s lead defenders adopt Marxist rhetoric” on your bingo card then my hat is off to you — but it’s clear enough from my choice of references that I didn’t think it was anywhere good. Others were exuberant in their anticipation. I instead titled my piece after Brad Pitt’s famously despairing question at the end of the film Seven: “What’s in the box?” And as I went through my predictions in one field after another, I spent the most time on the economy:
On the economy, I expect nothing but disaster. A recession seems overdue in any event, and setting that aside the chances of a positive outcome over the next several years is entirely dependent upon Trump not getting his way in terms of his avowed policy positions. I am no apostle of unqualified free trade. . . . If I thought Trump’s tariff threats were meant as a way to disentangle us from [China], I might support short-term pain as preparation for a longer-term economic war. But I am not a fool, so I grasp that Trump’s preferred tariff policy is showboating, and a quick and easy path to rising prices and misery for no end. I assume he will not get his way, or else we are all in trouble.
Last Wednesday, Donald Trump got his way; and we are all in trouble. It is the biggest disaster any administration has willingly and instantaneously inflicted on itself, all done with eyes wide open. In the context of fiction, this would be classic comedy, an emotionally slapstick tale of arrogance breeding hubris — just like the classic Coyote and Road Runner shorts of my childhood.
Instead, it is a tragedy, because the consequences are entirely real: Trump and his cheering throng of myrmidons are taking America off the cliff with them, and what’s even more insulting is that they are demanding we cheer alongside them, with blithe spirit, as we all plummet farther and faster toward a concrete end. Pardon me if I focus on the ground instead and don’t even bother trying to open the parachute strapped to my back — there’s probably only a piano inside.
That’s All, Folks!
I had a number of secondary notes ready to discuss in this space — Donald Trump’s unlawful extension of the TikTok sale/closure, for one, which is in its less discussed way as bald-faced a violation of black-letter law as any he has committed during his administration so far. These will have to wait, for sometimes even a variety show like the Carnival of Fools must yield to the magnitude of the main event.
Until next week — or whenever we hit the ground.