Donald Trump did not fire any commissioners from the [Federal Trade Commission] today. Donald Trump declared that he had fired the commissioners. That is, functionally, he announced a desire that he should have the power to fire FTC commissioners and named the commissioners that he would fire if he were to have that power—a power which he does not, within the bounds of the law and the constitution, possess.
“It is hard to fit that into a headline!” Scocca and McLeod acknowledged. “Yet it is essential for news outlets to find a way.” I wish I saw more of an effort toward that goal, and less of the brain-breaking examples of headline torture I saw in last week’s Times’ account of Trump’s strong-arming of the GOP, titled, “Trump, With More Honey Than Vinegar, Cements an Iron Grip on Republicans.” Does that set a new standard for the mixed metaphor? Between vinegar, honey, cement, and iron, it certainly sets a mixed-media record.
Or consider a report of a more recent vintage from The Washington Post: “Trump has a plan to remake the economy. But he’s not explaining it very well.” The piece reduces the trouble the president is having on the economic front—where for the first time he’s underwater on polls—to one in which he’s left the investor class with insufficient insight into his master plan. In this telling, the president’s claims of a soon-to-arrive golden age are taken at face value. “If the administration’s plan succeeds, the $30 trillion U.S. economy would be remade,” the article claims, adding that the United States was set to become “even more self-sufficient, producing more of its energy, lumber, steel and computer chips than ever before.”
Paul Krugman greeted this article’s array of assertions and unfalsifiable claims with something more reality-based: “I don’t know about you, but I don’t think Trump’s problem is that he’s doing a poor job of explaining his plan. I think his problem is that he’s offering fake answers to fake problems, and the public—unlike, apparently, the Washington Post—isn’t buying it.” That seems right to me. Beyond that, if anyone is actually in need of an “explanation” about Trump’s economic plans, I’d say that once you understand that everything proceeds from the fact that the president is an omnidirectionally corrupt moron whose desperate need for adulation fuels his every decision, with the added problem that he has, since his first term, become more intellectually infirm, everything starts to make sense. The constant whiplashing between implementing and retracting tariffs, the constant characterization of prosperity as a bad thing, the wild-eyed talk of how economic hardship will finally set us all free—all of this stems from the simple fact that the man at the top is a deceitful asshole with a cranial cavity full of damp parsley.
