Orange Monday: World markets continue to collapse as investors realize Trump really is out of his gourd

As we all watch the latest market crash decimate the economy for the sake of one man's whim—the S&P 500 has dropped 15% in just the last three days of trading, at last glance—it might be instructive to look at the moves The Criminal's top advisers and hangers-on were making on Sunday to shore up public confidence and convince Wall Street and each other that no, no, Donald Trump is not a dementia-addled crook motivated primarily by vengeance and a child's understanding of the world, the administration has a "plan" and it will all work out in the end, somehow, though many of us may be reduced to eating tree bark and family pets before we see the eventual rewards.

When it comes to the details of how sawing off a considerable amount of world trade will somehow result in Making America Great Again, the economic gurus of The Criminal's current administration have been less than forthcoming. But the wait is finally over: After last week's two-day stock market crash and massive nationwide protests (the two things were not even related!), Trumpers took to the Sunday shows to explain why the now-certain global economic collapse is Good For You, Actually.

Whoops, hang on, that wasn't it. That was Tommy Tuberville recounting a very vivid whiskey dream he had Saturday night. And again, I am sincerely begging Americans to stop electing "guy who stands on top of a garbage can screaming conspiracy theories at morning commuters" to high office. It is not nearly as funny as you all think it is.

No, it was left to the top economic minds in the country to explain The Criminal's strategy for economic glory.

Hmm. Gotta be honest, that still sounds like somebody recounting a weird dream they had. Somewhere in the bowels of House Republicanism they're probably brainstorming this, so expect to soon hear that the tariffs were a necessary response to all-trans penguin basketball teams trouncing our fine American players on the underground Antarctic Basketball circuit. Or it's possible nobody even cares, given that the actual(???) Secretary of Agriculture can only muster up a bored "whatever."

Kevin Hassett, you're one of the top minds Trump called in from the admittedly limited pool of "economic advisers who are fine with attempted overthrow of the government and want to work for an unrepentant convicted felon." Want to give this a shot?

Yeah, that's not gonna cut it. Next?

Congratulations, that one might be worse than the penguin stuff.

All right, we're going to give this one more shot: Can anyone in this confederacy of dunces give us anything resembling a clear vision of how these tariffs are supposed to result in a net-positive outcome for average Americans?

THANK YOU. Gawd. Finally. That was like pulling teeth.

Yes, it was left to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to provide the vision, and he came through. America, prepare for the utopia you have longed for. The utopia you deserve. The American Dream, reborn for the new millennium.

"The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones – that kind of thing is going to come to America."

Actually, screwing in little screws has long been the domain of factory robots so—

"It's going to be automated, and great Americans, the tradecraft of America is gonna fix them, is gonna work on them, there's gonna be mechanics, there's gonna be HVAC specialists, there's gonna be electricians. The tradecraft of America, our high school educated Americans, the core to our workforce is going to have the greatest resurgence of jobs in the history of America to work on these high-tech factories which are all coming to America. That's what's going to build our next generation of America."

All right, well, that's at least approaching something like a plan. Howard Lutnick has a dream, America, and his dream, at least, is not about being financially scammed by penguins or getting the stuffing beaten out of him by roving all-trans sports teams. His dream is to Make America Southeast Asia.

Faced with ever-shifting tariff structures designed to be half organized crime shakedown, half roulette wheel, international megacorporations will be moving factories to America, because shut up that's why, and while almost no actual humans will be working in those factories it will be a golden age for people who install robots, and who fix robots, and who run the big conduits that bring electricity to the robots, and who put in the HVAC systems necessary to keep the robots comfortable.

I had a great deal to say about this plan, foremost being the note that the Biden administration was already pursuing such policies, through the Green New Deal, which identified future strategic manufacturing opportunities and cranked up investment in making sure the newest and most-desired world tech was going to be researched, developed, and manufactured right here in 'Merica. And Republicans have been trying to kill each and every small bit of that plan in favor of a new plan that would kill off the nation's institutions of research and higher education, technical knowledge being the domain of the woke, and focus instead on manly American jobs, jobs like "industrial robot lubricator" and "industrial robot clog unclogger" and "industrial line reset button operator, night shift."

What we have here, fundamentally, is a battle over what the American Dream ought to look like. For the entirety of America's post-World War II history, the nation has emphasized education, modernization, and invention; we became fabulously wealthy not just because we had a large population of thing-builders, but because we were the nation that invented most of the things getting built. The new plan is to offshore all that high-and-mighty stuff to socialist countries and instead offer up our own workforce to build whatever the rest of the world comes up with.

But there's no point in arguing over this, because even if that sincerely was the real "Republican" plan, instituting the stupidest possible tariff regime in order to bring it about is roughly like attempting to build up your upper body strength by removing your kidneys. It's ... not an actual plan.

And every world market knows it, and that's why the markets didn't really start picking up downward momentum until this unfathomable idiot looked up from his golfing game and started Saying Things Again.

Yeah, we're all gonna die. By this morning he was in a real rage, and when Trump gets really mad he invents new words.

If you want the most succinct possible example of why we're all gonna die—well, are going to be reduced to the aforementioned pet-eating, anyway—it would be this. On Fox and Friends, couch-moistener Brian Kilmeade gently proposed to Secretary of Pain Hassett that Trump issue a 90-day tariff pause to give markets a chance to, I don't know, bury their dead or something. Hassett rebuffed him, but a completely false news report burped out of the internet instead claimed that Hassett said Trump was "considering" it.

That led to a dramatic market spike, erasing all of the Dow's morning losses ... until investors realized it was fake and sent the whole thing crashing down again.

So ... yeah. Maybe don't look at the markets today, if this is where we're at? Imagine what would happen if the fake news outlets announced that tariffed penguins were now seizing oil rigs throughout the Gulf Coast.

There is, of course, an easy solution to all of this. The same fascism-backing billionaires who put Trump in office could, as they watch their power collapse in real-time, decide that keeping him in office is no longer to their own advantage. Pressure could mount to acknowledge that Trump is, in fact, monumentally unfit for office; Dear Leader's close aides could band together, announce that Actually the critics were right and Trump has too much dementia to do the job, we 25th Amendment his behind back to Mar-a-Lago, and JD Effing Vance takes over the fascist project with instruction to keep doing the racism parts but stop doing the crash-the-entire-world-economy-for-fun parts.

I don't think that's going to happen, mind you; Trump knows full well how much danger he'd be in if he had a single non-sycophantic adviser around and has made sure to knife every last person who looked like they might, at some point, pipe up with something smart to say. I'm just noting that any country corrupt enough to allow a cadre of sociopathic billionaires to install a seditious convicted felon in high office is certainly corrupt enough for the same billionaire backers to yank him right back out again, if they felt their own survival was at stake.

So if nothing else, it's going to be an exciting week not just for the peasant classes, but for Donald himself, hmm?

UPDATE: Trump is now threatening to impose "ADDITIONAL Tariffs"—an additional 50%, in fact—on China in response to China raising its tariffs in response to Trump's tariffs. Begun, this trade war has.