You have to give it to Donald Trump. The man is a marvel at multitasking.
In one sensational swoop, President Trump was able to set the global economy reeling, shatter our alliances, shred our standing in the world, tank consumer confidence, scupper the Kennedy Center and tart up the Oval Office, turning it into Caesars Palace on the Potomac.
And yet he still managed to find time to brag about winning his Jupiter golf club’s championship and sign an executive order relaxing restrictions on water pressure from shower heads — “I like to take a nice shower to take care of my beautiful hair,” the president cooed. He also ordered an investigation of an election security official he had fired four years ago for having the temerity to acknowledge that the 2020 election was not stolen.
“We’re living in a bizarro world where heroes are being targeted and scoundrels are in a position to target them,” David Axelrod told me.
Trump is also consumed with terms of surrender for top law firms and Ivy League universities in his quest to get even with those he feels went after him unfairly or embraced wokeness too avidly.
My Netflix algorithm searches for “revenge,” “lives ruined” and “mayhem.” But I don’t want that in my government.
Trump is engaging the full power of the presidency to settle scores. The White House was not meant for petty tyrants on revenge tours. In the biggest job in the world, Trump seems like a very small man.
“Revenge is the oxygen that keeps him afloat,” said Tim O’Brien, the Trump biographer.
And he has surrounded himself with small people who elaborately flatter him and puff him up in risible cabinet meetings. Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, even has a Maoist golden Trump head on his lapel.
Barack Obama’s White House portrait was nudged aside for one of Trump pumping his fist after the assassination attempt.
The Emperor of Chaos told us to “BE COOL!” as markets cratered and people got “yippy,” as Trump put it. But how is that possible when everything is so unstable?
Trump may even turn into the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Jami Warner, the executive director of the American Christmas Tree Association, warned on CNN Friday that the holiday may be difficult for a lot of families accustomed to getting their cheap artificial trees, lights and ornaments from China, not to mention presents.
I had to go to summer school for algebra, but I don’t want a government that’s bad at math. O’Brien wrote in Bloomberg News that Trump’s “tragicomic ‘formula’” for tariffs “somehow positioned Cambodia and Thailand at the top of the heap of countries posing major economic threats to the U.S. and also caused tariffs to be imposed on uninhabited islands near Antarctica.”
The Republicans’ math on the budget bill is also fuzzy. You can’t give trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy and pretend it won’t cost anything.
Even before Trump opened a Pandora’s box of economic woe, we knew numbers weren’t his strong suit. He had six bankruptcies, and his father had to buy $3.4 million in chips to save one of his casinos.
The most conclusive evidence of his innumeracy was his appearance in 2006 on Howard Stern’s show with Ivanka and Don Jr. The Trump siblings’ insistence that they got into Wharton on their merits inspired Stern to give them a grade school-level pop quiz.
“What’s 17 times 6?” he asked.
After some nervous laughter, Don Jr. replied “96? 94?” His father interjected, “It’s 11 12. It’s 112.”
“Wrong!” Stern said, adding, “It’s 102!”
Donald Trump repeated “112.”
Trump should be alarmed that investors are skittish about buying U.S. government bonds, usually considered safe assets.
“And guess who owns a lot of U.S. debt?” O’Brien said. “China, Japan, Europe. Are they feeling good about us right now?”
As everyone else gets yippy — JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon warned of a recession — the president seems to be enjoying center stage, toying with the strings like a cat.
“All of this unnecessary, orchestrated dissent and doubt and damage for his own amusement,” O’Brien told me. “He’s the kid in the garage with matches standing next to the gasoline tank.”
Now that Trump’s tariff scheme has gone horribly awry — and the administration’s attempt to spin it as an “Art of the Deal” victory has fallen flat — it remains to be seen if this will be a “Wizard of Oz” moment when the curtain gets pulled back on the con man.
Will the global chaos puncture the sense of mastery that Trump has projected?
“This is not a reality show,” Axelrod said. “This is reality.”
He continued: “People like the idea of cutting waste and fraud and abuse until it means that the Social Security office in your hometown or veterans’ health programs close down, or there are measles outbreaks, because they don’t know what they’re doing. Do these add up so, at some point, people say: ‘You know what? This isn’t really working for me.’”
The former casino owner in the White House brags that he has never gambled. But he is gambling with Americans’ lives and futures. How strange, as even the dollar loses its allure, that a man long considered a branding savant has so badly mucked up the U.S. brand.
