The Apex of Moronia

April 4, 2025, by Connie Willis.

Liberated from Facebook.

Today’s big news was the continued response to Trump’s tariffs (or as I like to call them, “the apex of moronia,” a term H.L. Mencken first came coined) with China retaliating with matching 34% tariffs, the Dow falling 2,231.07 points (even more than yesterday’s fall) and the S&P 500 falling 322 points.

• The Dow’s 2-day slump has wiped out 6.4 trillion dollars in the stock market’s value, and the S&P’s fall means it’s fallen 20% since December and is now in bear market territory.
• The US dollar experienced the largest single-day decline on record, dropping 2.1%.
• American auto plants are pausing production.
• Nintendo delayed US pre-orders for Switch 2.
• China retaliated by putting 34% tariffs on US goods.
• A paper planner company sued Trump over the tariffs.
• Business Insider told its readers not to “buy the dip,” (which is always the common wisdom during downturns.” They said, “This is not a time to bottom fish. It’s like catching a falling knife.”
• Trump posted that he is determined not to reverse the tariffs, and today he tweeted, “TO THE MANY INVESTORS COMING INTO THE UNITED STATES AND INVESTING MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF MONEY, MY POLICIES WILL NEVER CHANGE. THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO GET RICH, RICHER THAN EVER BEFORE!” and “ONLY THE WEAK WILL FAIL!”

Everybody’s had a day to absorb the tariffs and what they mean:

• The consensus is they’re not good. NYTimes: “It’s a disaster.”
• Governor Wes Moore: “The stock market is cratering.”
• The Wharton School of Business (the school Trump graduated from): “The biggest political mistake in 95 years.”
• Justin Wolfers: “Monstrously destructive, incoherent, ill-informed tariffs based on fabrications, imaginary wrongs, discredited theories, and ignorance of decades of evidence.”
• J.P. Morgan just upped the chances of a recession to 60%
• Megan Hossel of Markel Group: “I spoke to an investor who said, ‘If the market actually processed what happened yesterday, it would be down 30-40%.”
• Fox News took down its stock ticker for the first time in their 28-year history.”
• The Economist: “He has lost his grip on reality and committed the most profound, harmful, and unnecessary economic error in the modern era…utterly deluded.”
• Squirrel Girl: “Ah, the traditional Republican stock market crash. It usually takes them a few years to accomplish it, but this time they pulled it off during the first 100 days.” (Note: The seven largest Dow Jones net drops in American history were all caused by Trump.)
• Dem Rep Mike Levin called it “economic sabotage.”
• George Conway: “Wondering how all the country club, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley I-don’t-care-that-he’s-an-insane-criminal-convict-because-he’s gonna-cut-capital-gains-tax-rates MAGA types are feeling this morning.”
• steebyrnelive: “The Stock Market crashed so hard Trump blamed DEI at the FAA.”
• Experts are even more horrified than they were by how Trump arrived at the tariffs:
• People are saying the numbers were “thrown together in 30 minutes of internet searches.”
• Lawrence Summers: “This is to economics what creationism is to biology, astrology is to astronomy, or RFK-thought is to vaccine science.”
• James Surowricki: “What extraordinary nonsense this is!”
• Brendan Duke: “Incredible stuff. They wanted to make the thing seem more sophisticated, so they threw in 2 Greek letters that canceled each other out so it’s still trade deficits divided by imports.”
• Crowsa Luxemburg: “They’ve just asked ChatGpt to spit out a spreadsheet, haven’t they?”
• By this afternoon numerous aides in the Trump administration had admitted to the Washington Post that Trump was the one who came up with the formula. They said there were “more sophisticated approaches” that Trump could have picked and that the plan bore striking similarities to the one backed publicly by Peter Navarro. One aide said, “He’s at the peak of just not giving a fuck anymore. Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a fuck. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail.” (Except he also promised on the campaign trail to bring down prices and get rid of inflation. On Day One.)

• Trump is standing behind the disaster, and so are his lackeys:
• Trump, on being asked about the stock market’s reaction, “It’s going very well! The market’s going to boom.”
• Fox News host Jeannine Pirro: “I really don’t care about my 401K today…You know why? I believe in the man.”
• Howard Lutnick: “Let Trump run the global economy. He knows what he’s doing. He’s been talking about it for 35 years.”
• GOP Senator Bernie Moreno: “I think the stock market is going to go very, very high.”
• Press secretary Karoline Leavitt: “Trust in Trump.”
• Maria Bartiroma on Fox: “Big overreaction in the stock market today.”
• Kellyanne Conway: “You have to look at them (the tariffs) more as the old sanctions.” (Her statement wasn’t well-received. Everyone immediately screamed, “Alternative facts.”)
• Lauren Boebert: “Our farmers, cattlemen, and ranchers are THRILLED with these tariffs.”
• Bill Ackman: “Sometimes the best strategy in a negotiation is convincing the other side that you are crazy.”
• When told that we get all our coffee from other countries and that coffee prices would skyrocket, Cryptid Politics said, “People should drink water and fresh fruit/vegetable juice, not coffee.” (Who’s going to tell them we import a lot of fruits and vegetables from other countries? And that Trump is busily deporting all the immigrants who pick OUR fruits and vegetables?)
• number09: “MAGA Republicans are pissing on Americans and telling us it’s raining.”
• Emptywheel: “Let’s make sure we document all the members of a co-equal branch of government who clapped like trained seals as Trump murdered the economy.”

But some Republicans are speaking out against the tariffs:

• Republicans from Thom Tillis to Ted Cruz–Ted Cruz!–are speaking out against them.
• Senators Chuck Grassley and Maria Cantwell introduced a bill negating Congressional approval for any new tariffs. (Speaker Mike Johnson has already said he won’t bring it to the House floor, and Trump would veto it. But it’s still amazing to see Grassley do this.)
• The conservative legal group NCLAlegal just sued Trump over the tariffs.

After slapping tariffs on everyone in the whole world, including penguins and uninhabited islands, Trump flew off for the weekend (even though it was only Thursday) to a golf tournament at Doral, which he owns, for a golf tournament sponsored by Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed “Bonesaw” Bin Salman.

• But that’s not the worst. He also blew off going to Dover to formally bring home the bodies of the four American soldiers who died in Lithuania.
• HUGE sign of disrespect, but also not a surprise since he has made it plain that he considers dead soldiers “suckers and losers.”
• Even worse, the President of Lithuania came to the base to see them off with full military honors and made a speech about their bravery, and thousands of Lithuanians lined the streets to pay their respects. But here? Bubkes.
• Meidas Touch: “Trump doesn’t seem to mind the optics of Trump abandoning the White House to skip town early for his golf club after setting the world ablaze with his tariff announcements.”
• Aaron Rupar: “The optics of Trump demolishing the economy and then peace-ing out for some R and R at a Saudi-funded golf tournament held at a private club he still owns and profits from aren’t great.”

But even though he’s off golfing, that doesn’t mean Trump has stopped doing bad stuff:

• He fired Dr. David Kessler, the doctor who saved Trump’s life when he had COVID. Kessler was the one who authorized the use of monoclonal antibodies for Trump, and this is the thanks he gets!
• He fired the director of the NSA, Timothy Haugh, and his deputy Wendy Noble. did it because Laura Loomer (who has apparently now replaced Elon Musk in being the one running the government) told him to. Her reason for the firings? They had been hand-picked by General Milley.
• I said yesterday Trump fired three National Security staffers. I was wrong. It was six, and that was because of Laura Loomer, too. She said, “If you worked with the SPIES who LIED for years, all while knowing what they did while on CIA payroll during the 2020 election to run cover for Hunter Biden, you have no business being at the NSC.” (Of course. You knew Hunter Biden would come into this somehow.) I’m committed to protecting President Trump and his administration from bad actors.”
• Worse, the staffers worked for Mike Waltz, so this is a slap at him. Loomer accused them of trying to sabotage Trump by creating a scandal (SignalGate.) She claimed Alex Wong added Jeffrey Goldberg to the Signal chat, even though everyone knows it was Mike Waltz who did it. Wong wasn’t fired, but he may be next if this doesn’t make the scandal go away.
• Trump denied she told him to fire people: “She makes recommendations and people and sometimes I listen to those recommendations. She recommended people for jobs.”
• Some questions: how did Laura Loomer get clearance to barge into the White House AND the Oval Office and tell Trump what to do? Why is he taking advice from a crazy, right-wing white nationalist and Islamophobe who thinks 9-11 was an inside job and COVID was made-up?
• Mehdi Hasan: “How is this not one of the biggest scandals of the year? The bigoted loon sitting down with the President in the Oval and demanding he fire national security officials. Insane!”
• Trump is furious that people are still talking about SignalGate–yesterday he snapped at a reporter who asked him a question about it, “Don’t bring that up again!” but these latest firings are sure to start up the questions all over again.
• See what I mean? The IG of the Pentagon has just opened an investigation into the Signal chats.

And the monthly jobs report came out today:

• It was higher than expected–228,000 new jobs–and Trump and the Republicans spent all morning bragging about it.
• But it was just now revealed that all those people who Musk and DOGE laid off–at least 60,000 of them–were not included in the report. So really not a good jobs report at all.

In other news:

• Trump blocked $510 million dollars in grants for Brown University.
• Trump canceled all the National Endowment for the Humanities’ grants. (I take this one personally. I was the recipient of one of those grants and used the money to quit substitute teaching and go to England. Both “Fire Watch” and all my Oxford time travel novels resulted from that trip.)
• There are rumors that Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent is looking for an exit door. He is apparently really upset that he has hurt his own credibility and history in the market by serving in Trump’s cabinet. (Well, what did you think would happen?) He reportedly wants to move over to the Fed, but I’m not sure that’s safe either because Trump wants to take over the Fed, too.
• RFK, Jr. is rehiring 2000 of the 10,000 he fired, saying he did it by mistake. (“Oops, my bad,” seems to be becoming the motto of this administration.)

In interesting news:

• Strom Thurmond was the same age as Corey Booker when he did his filibuster, a filibuster whose record Corey just broke.

In good news:

• Eugene Robinson quit the Washington Post and blasted Bezos on the way out. The Post is trying to convince people he retired, but Robinson wrote, “Bezos’s significant shift spurred me to decide that it’s time for my next chapter…This is not the way we have worked to produce what is, I believe, the best opinion section in American journalism.” He joins Ruth Marcus, Ashley Parker, cartoonist Ann Telnaes, Michael Scherer in leaving.
• South Korea’s courts upheld the impeachment of President Yoon for attempting a coup and he has been removed from office. (Oh, if only…)

Tomorrow [5th of April] is the day of the big Hands Off protests, which will be held all over the country, with a slogan of “Hands Off Veterans’ Benefits, Hands Off Social Security, Hands Off Our Bodies, Hands Off Medicaid and Medicare, Hands Off the Courts, Hands Off Our Personal Data, Hands Off Free Speech, Hands Off Public Lands, etc. Pick your issue, make your sign, and find out where the closest protest is. They’re pretty much everywhere. Just google “Hands Off protests.”

Best historical quote, from Trump in 2024: “If Kamala wins, you are three days away from the start of a 1929-style economic depression.”

Best headline of the day, from the Wall Street Journal: “The Dumbest Trade War in History.”

Best line of the day, from Rachel Bitecofer: “Trump: ‘When I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One.’ Turns out he meant he was going to bring stock prices down.”