We are watching in real time what happens when you have an authoritarian poised to take power and planning to eliminate his enemies when he does so. Chief amongst those enemies is the one Trump himself calls “the enemy of the people.” This is a common theme in right-wing circles for the very simple reason that if an independent press is eliminated, then it’s all propaganda, all the time, in the right-wing adamantine, echo chamber silo. That, unfortunately, is not exaggeration. That’s where we have dropped to in this culture.
The Washington Post has had no end of troubles since Jeff Bezos decided to bend the knee to Trump not only by quashing the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris but just last Friday spiking (a journalistic term of art for removing something for a political reason) a cartoon by Pulitzer prize winner Ann Talnaes. So Trump has Jeff Bezos and his paper on the run.
That’s what makes today’s attack so ominous. Trump hasn’t assumed office and he’s talking like a dictator, can you imagine what we’ll be dealing with in two weeks?
Trump wrote on TruthSocial Monday morning, “The story in the Washington Post, quoting so-called anonymous sources, which don’t exist, incorrectly states that my tariff policy will be pared back. That is wrong. The Washington Post knows it’s wrong. It’s just another example of Fake News.”
Stein’s story claimed that the “critical” sectors affected by Trump’s pared-back plan could include, “the defense industrial supply chain (through tariffs on steel, iron, aluminum and copper); critical medical supplies (syringes, needles, vials and pharmaceutical materials); and energy production (batteries, rare earth minerals and even solar panels).”
Economists and even some congressional Republicans have condemned Trump’s original tariff plan as “disruptive” to the American economy, which would be felt immediately at the grocery store.
Trump also threatened Mexico and Canada with 25 percent tariffs and an additional 10 percent tariff on China if they don’t stop the what he called the influx of drugs and migrants into the United States.
“Even the revamped plans are strikingly aggressive,” Stein wrote. “The Trump team’s plans would, if put into effect, amount to one of the biggest challenges in decades to the global trade order. Trump’s advisers view this effort as necessary to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. economy, but it could invite retaliation from the rest of the world and drive prices up for consumers and businesses alike.”
It will assuredly drive up prices not only for businesses but for the consumer, the MAGA portion of which believes that in a few more weeks they’ll stroll into the market and their shopping dollar will stretch twice as far — if not more. This is the gaslighting that Trump is doing and all sensible people (including in his own MAGA camp, amongst people who know how tariffs work) there is wonder about what his end game is with this tariff smokescreen.
Trump cannot impose these big tariffs and not have prices increase. This has assuredly been explained to him. So what is his option? Short of painting Joe Biden as Goldstein (the nemesis of Orwell’s “1984” and object of the Two-Minute Hate ritual) and blaming it all on him, even when he’s out of office, nobody knows how Trump is going to handle this conflict he has created. Maybe it is that simple. Maybe he’ll just do a Two-Minute Hate on Joe Biden daily.
But two things spring to mind here: 1. Does Trump even know how he’s going to handle the chaos he has already set up? and 2. Will Trump do to the Washington Post and all other media outlets what he did this morning, which is to shoot down even basic fact pieces by a journalist who specializes in that area?
Because if that’s the case, if the Post or the New York Times or whomever can’t publish straight journalism, straight fact pieces, without being contradicted and called liars, then what hope is there for a free press in this nation?
These are sobering thoughts. But then we are on the verge of either the end of the beginning of MAGA as Trump golfs his way through another four-year term in office, or the beginning of the end of America, as we have known it.
Keep a sharp eye. Things are going to get worse before they get better.
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Ron White, a hard drinking comic from Texas, used to tell a joke about being on a small plane that suddenly had engine trouble. The passengers were freaking out. One man, in a panic because the plane lost one of two engines, asked Ron, who I’m sure was drunk at the time, How far do you think this engine can take us? Ron chuckled and said…awww don’t worry…I’m sure it can carry us to the scene of the crash. Ron…you are psychic.