If I understood anything about economics, I would be living on an island with a butler and a chef, and not writing this column. But while maths-y ideas like trade deficits and reciprocal tariffs cause my brain to shut down, I do understand words.
I understand that words like “looted, pillaged, and raped” do not apply to the world’s largest economy, as though America were a bonneted maiden being monstered by, I don’t know, some rice farmers from Laos or Pfizer techs from Ringaskiddy in Cork. Yet this is what Donald Trump has said “foreign cheaters” and “foreign scavengers” — we non-Americans — have been doing to America.
We foreign cheating scavengers “have torn apart our once beautiful American dream.” In retaliation for such defilement, tariffs have been imposed on islands in the Antarctic inhabited solely by penguins. One day, this will make a great comedy series.
It’s just not terribly funny right now. Like Liz Truss mid crystal meth psychosis, Donald the Deranged — not content with chainsawing the basic infrastructure of his own country using an unstable South African import — is now focused on “making America wealthy again.”
Not ordinary Americans obviously; they only voted for him. No, he wants to make wealthy Americans wealthier by risking global recession.
Except to Donald it’s all a gameshow — Wheel of Misfortune. Accessorised by idiot charts and that gigantic, narcissistic signature you can imagine him practicing, sad little Sharpie in sad little hand, desperate to make his mark on the world.
Signing himself forever into the history books of filth and failure, along with the rest of the actual looters and rapists, the asset strippers and grabbers. Catastrophically acting out all his childhood hurts on the world stage, instead of going to therapy like everyone else.
As Trump’s America continues to headbutt the world like a Millwall supporter losing 6-0 at home, we may also reflect — whilst staunching our bloody noses — on the bizarre inversion of what has come to be termed Trump Derangement Syndrome.
You’d think, logically, TDS would refer to all those in thrall to the performative destruction, to those who lost their minds as they cast their votes; but you’d be wrong. TDS refers to anyone who opposes Trump and his galloping chaos, to those of us (that is, almost everyone on earth) critical of what is happening — we, apparently, are the deranged ones.
Coined in 2003 by some right-wing pundit defending George Bush Jnr, Bush Derangement Syndrome was “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency — nay — the very existence of George W Bush.”
Such innocent times, when the stupidest thing an American president could do was invent words like ‘misunderestimate’, let people die after hurricanes and start illegal wars in Iraq; Trump, a hundred days in, makes Dubya look like George Washington.
Our only sane response is unity. From the rice paddies of South East Asia to the factories of the EU to the penguins of Antarctica, let us unite to resist. Firmly, politely, unwaveringly; we are in a snakes-on-the-plane situation. Let us unite to become not snake-charmers, but snake-wranglers.
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