THE AMERICAN POSEIDON ADVENTURE

As Trump diverts from Epstein, the economy and national security, he heads to China for a meeting with President Xi. Trump is weakened and clearly inept. The fear is Trump will make some deal to rehabilitate his image and add to his family fortune with a deal that puts the American people in the woodchipper. When you consider where we are and what our reality is, we all need to fear Trump will sell us down the river as he did with Putin. 

Catherine Rampell called Trump “an economic serial killer”, as she considered the current outcomes after the Tariffs, Tax Cuts and Trump’s Iran war. Paul Krugman is telling us about reality now.

‘The so-called experts warned us about Donald Trump’s claims during the 2024 campaign:

• that he would bring grocery prices down on Day One and cut energy prices in half.
• that Trump’s tariffs would raise consumer prices while failing to bring back manufacturing jobs.
• that Trump appointee Pete Hegseth’s emphasis on “warrior ethos” rather than competence, …would degrade the U.S. military and be disastrous in a war
• that Trump’s attack on Iran would lead us into a quagmire and cause a global energy crisis
• that Trump’s contempt for international agreements and his threats to friendly nations would undermine the world’s trust in America, 
• that we would find ourselves without allies when we needed their help.

The so-called experts were completely right.

Right now:

• inflation is surging; 
• manufacturing employment is down; 
• the Strait of Hormuz remains closed; and 
• Trump is traveling to Beijing as a supplicant, in effect begging China for help getting out of his Iran mess.’

“To be fair, experts aren’t always right.”

“But political figures who think that they know better than the so-called experts are much more likely to be wrong than right. And they’re especially likely to be wrong if their rejection of expertise stems from wishful thinking, personal obsessions and, last but by no means least, corruption.”

“Trump is, of course, a perfect example of the kind of political figure who absolutely shouldn’t disregard experts and absolutely will.”: 

• “he dismissed warnings about what could go wrong and 
• insisted that it would be easy 
• his economic policy reflects his decades-old fixation on tariffs; 
• his energy policy is still shaped by his anger over a wind farm that he thought spoiled the view from his golf course; 
• his Iran policy has been driven in large part by a determination to reject everything Barack Obama achieved. “

“Yet the catastrophic stupidity of current U.S. policy shouldn’t be attributed purely to Trump’s personal unfitness to lead. …:

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; scornful of compromise and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

The rejection of science, like so much of the U.S. political landscape, has a lot to do with the influence of the fossil fuel industry. Warnings about climate change threatened that industry’s profits, so it was necessary to attack climate science, and this generalized into hostility toward scientific research as a whole.

Beyond this specific issue, anti-democratic movements have an inherent distrust of expertise, of anyone who knows what they are talking about. Experts can’t be trusted, because they might think independently. In her classic book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote that

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

… The degradation of the federal government’s competence, the gutting of American science, and the epically bad judgment that led to Operation Epic Fury are all part of the same story.”

More than ever before Americans need to vote for their own and America’s wellbeing not their party’s.

VOTE!!!

RESIST!!! & EDUCATE!!!