Trump, Tapper, Tariffs, Mao, and Madness

If your head is spinning you're sane.

Marc Cooper May 29-30

For those of us who, out of masochism or professional obligation or some other psychological aberration, are obligated to follow the news, it’s been one helluva dizzying week. Between the ADD nature of the broadcast and online media and the twisted erratic pathology of the Trump regime, there’s something wrong with you if your head is not spinning.

Anybody who says that news cycles shift every 24 hours…well… you are off about 23 hours or so. At least that’s the perception yours truly has. I like to cogitate a couple or three days in advance on what I am going to write in this venue. And as soon as, or even before, I settle on a focus, the state of play takes another unexpected and radical turn and diverts my attention. As intended, I suppose.

Five or six days ago I decided I was going to write about Jake Tapper and his “bombshell” book. But, wait, Ice Barbie in Arabia then butted in. Then Elon Musk formally retired from destroying the country. Then came not one, not two, but three consequential court rulings on Trump’s illegal tariffs. Then more political gunfire over Trump trying to sink Harvard. And underneath all these events, a low-intensity but continuous and criminally under-reported humming as the Senate deliberates on Trump’s Big, Beautiful and unprecedented transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich and tries to agree on exactly how many of millions of needy Americans are going to be sacrificed to please the accountants who advise our plutocrats. All this as Trump makes one pathological unhinged public statement after another.

I’m going to try to tie up most of these anecdotes into one single field theory now, so wish me luck.

My kickoff is a personal anecdote and a disclaimer about Jake Tapper. I just can’t resist the temptation even if his boom cycle petered out to more important realities 4 or 5 and 15 or 16 news cycles ago. I begin with this disclaimer. I am a journalist. And I truly believe that all truths must be told regardless of personal sympathies or political consequences. ( No, I am not about to praise Tapper. Hang in there,)

Back in 2008, while working as Editorial Director for the Huffington Post’s citizen reporting project, I was the editor who originally green-lit and rewrote a stringer lead for the high-profile story on Obama’s condescending statement about guns and God that roiled his campaign for days. I was an Obama supporter. So was Arianna Huffington. So was my co-editor. So was my editor in chief and so was the reporter.

But we agreed this was a truth that needed to be told. Not just because we are journalism saints! But also because we thought that Obama needed to be aware of how off-putting his remarks would be to so many possible voters. BTW, his campaign took the affair in good stride and his press guy, Bill Burton, in public remarks accepted the criticism and refrained from attacking any of us. And this so-called “Bittergate” story even made the Sunday shows.

The fallout from the story lingered for a week or so. And some days after its publication, I was relaxing at a poker table when I got a phone call from Jake Tapper with whom I had no previous contact. I knew who he was. He was already an overpaid arrogant bloviator on the tube so I was curious why he was calling me. He was red-hot angry because apparently, the reporter on the Obama story had made some remark somewhere about Tapper’s mediocre work. I was amused to witness in person what a self-important a-hole he was as I has imagined.

He began to scold and patronize me as if I were a 14-yr-old intern at a high school newspaper. I mean, what was the Huffington Post to CNN (even though at the time HuffPost had more readers than CNN had viewers). I listened patiently to his bitching for a few minutes and then I reminded him to be courteous to his elders, that CNN meant less than nothing to me, he meant even less, and that while he was still playing pocket pool in junior high school I was already reporting from combat lines in Central America and… yes… I also told him piss off and stop whining like a baby.

(I just realized his call to me over basically nothing rather contradicts his statement during his book tour last week that criticism of him means nothing unless it’s from people he respects.)

In the intervening years he has become top doggie at CNN and pulls down $8 million a year to uphold his insufferable public posture of unbridled smugness and arrogance.

So, I can’t honestly say that I picked up his Original Sin book without some negative priors.

It’s well-written and it’s completely useless. I learned absolutely nothing that I did not see with my own eyes during the Biden presidency and found the book, and its shameless promotion, to be nothing but well-marketed clickbait. I think most of us knew that Biden was in serious decline and those around him were trying to downplay it. However, what kind of a “bombshell” was this story anyway, given that Biden resigned his campaign months before in an unspoken admission that he was unfit?

Where was Tapper’s reporting on his decline during the previous three years? By his own admission he “pulled punches” and pleaded that he did not want to “lose access” to the White House and, we all know, access always trumps truth in beltway journalism.

Then, he handed the Trumpoids one of their biggest propaganda victories ever when he went on the vicious, extremist MAGAist Megyn Kelly’s show to “apologize” and to confess this lying right-wing witch was “right all along.” Really? She was always right in acting as a Trump megaphone, zealously defending Trump’s extremism and, yes, like most of us, noting that Biden was impaired? Revolting, Jake.

CNN and Tapper himself morphed into QVC in the month before its publication with Tapper on at least 20 occasions during his show holding up a mock-up of its cover and excitedly announcing that it was only 18, 15, 9, 5 days before it would explode in your hands. It was beyond self-serving and shameful.

In the heated run-up to the pub date over Memorial Day weekend, there was a deafening media chorus of anticipatory praise about the book coming out on Tuesday and Tapper was popping up literally everywhere. I almost was expecting him to pop out of my morning Cheerios box to push his opus.

Let me be clear, as someone on the Left, I believe Tapper or anybody else has the perfect right to further demean the 82-year-old defeated Biden who is now on the sidelines while the current president is five times more bonkers and still holds total state power. Though, the timing is not…um…suspect as it is just plain dissonant. It’s weird. Tapper is a front man only for Tapper, not for Trump.

One could not help but notice, nevertheless, that within 24 hours of the release of the book “proving” Biden’s impairment, the actual, living breathing, 79-year-old President of the United States posted the below on his own social media platform. If he had a living parent, this document alone, published on the day when we memorialize all fallen soldiers—Republicans, Democrats, Christians, Jews, and Socialists alike—would be sufficient evidence to have Adult Social Services seize him on a preliminary 72-hour psych hold from which he would probably never emerge:

@realDonaldTrump
HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY TO ALL

HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY TO ALL, INCLUDING THE SCUM THAT SPENT THE LAST FOUR YEARS TRYING TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY THROUGH WARPED RADICAL LEFT MINDS, WHO ALLOWED 21,000,000 MILLION PEOPLE TO ILLEGALLY ENTER OUR COUNTRY, MANY OF THEM BEING CRIMINALS AND THE MENTALLY INSANE,THROUGH AN OPEN BORDER THAT ONLY AN INCOMPETENT PRESIDENT WOULD APPROVE, AND THROUGH JUDGES WHO ARE ON A MISSION TO KEEP MURDERERS, DRUG DEALERS, RAPISTS, GANG MEMBERS, AND RELEASED PRISONERS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD, IN OUR COUNTRY SO THEY CAN ROB, MURDER, AND RAPE AGAIN — ALL PROTECTED BY THESE USA HATING JUDGES WHO SUFFER FROM AN IDEOLOGY THAT IS SICK, AND VERY DANGEROUS FOR OUR COUNTRY. HOPEFULLY THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT, AND OTHER GOOD AND COMPASSIONATE JUDGES THROUGHOUT THE LAND, WILL SAVE US FROM THE DECISIONS OF THE MONSTERS WHO WANT OUR COUNTRY TO GO TO HELL. BUT FEAR NOT, WE HAVE MADE GREAT PROGRESS OVER THE LAST 4 MONTHS, AND AMERICA WILL SOON BE SAFE AND GREAT AGAIN! AGAIN, HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY, AND GOD BLESS AMERICA!

I’ve been writing for 50 years and find myself at a loss for words. What’s wrong with a country and its media that goes orgasmic over revealing the old news that the octogenarian former president is a bit daft while shrugging over the clear evidence that the current president is dangerously psychologically disturbed, spinning conspiracy theories, defying court orders, denying he lost the 2020 election, grossly enriching himself through graft and tariff blackmail, partnering up with brutal and corrupt petro-fascist dictators, deporting hard-working immigrant families (including those being nabbed by masked ICE thugs while INSIDE immigration hearings in compliance with the law), and showboating his paranoia by singling out his political opponents for persecution, trashing the courts and rule of law, appointing a cabinet of equally stupid and dangerous fools, and carrying out an insane vendetta against the most prestigious and oldest American university, denying funding for critical medical and scientific research, portraying the richest and most powerful nation on earth as a “hapless victim” previously led by “scum,” demonstrating a striking ignorance of the global economy, conjuring up an imaginary invasion by Venezuela, and now boasting about banning Chinese students from enrolling in “our American” universities… and I don’t know what kind of psychotic wet dream he’s come up with in the last hour I have been writing this.

Steve Schmidt summed up the current scene as "an untreated psychiatric patient" and his cabinet of "imbeciles, incompetents, sociopaths and cheap hustlers."

I guess one word does occur to me as a way of describing this situation neatly: MADNESS.

Just like Jake Tapper might write a book about Trump’s severe mental disorder 4 years from now, I guess I will have to wait till I’m done writing this to discover Trump’s latest display of symptoms.

I will say this much about two declining presidents in a row. Biden seemed to be suffering from a common ailment among too many elderly. Some sort of cognitive and physical decline and perhaps some sort of dementia onset. He was also having trouble walking and that’s sad but not a crime against humanity.

Trump’s disorder is much more proactive and dangerous. While Biden sank into passivity, Trump is a roaring active psycho with a whole lot of power. Biden stumbled on some airplane stairs and was caught like a deer in the headlights in his final, fatal debate. Trump is wrecking millions of lives and dismantling our constitutional democracy. This is not some sort of symmetry between the two.

Here’s a great ten-minute rant from Steve Schmidt on the madness outbreak.

Substacker Drew Pavlou has a slightly alternate theory. I buy about 40% of it but it’s worth reading in total as it is both an original and resonant take. Trump as Mao.

MAGA Maoism: Trumpism as a Third World Movement

Trump and (Tapper as well) did suffer some serious setbacks this week. Dispensing first with Tapper Trivia: The hullabaloo over The Greatest Non-Fiction Book in History sort of got torpedoed by the news on the eve of its pub date that Biden has been diagnosed with metastatic cancer and is therefore more or less terminal. No doubt that put some crimp in the book sales as some folks think it unseemly to kick someone who is down like that. Even psycho Trump issued a solemn and sane wish of good health to Biden, only to call him scum 72 hours later.

Trump’s setbacks were much more consequential. In the last 48 hours two different Federal courts ruled his tariffs illegal and unconstitutional as tariff policy is delegated to Congress. Unless there is the sort of “economic emergency” that Trump has invented. The tariffs were stopped cold on Wednesday and then put back in effect, temporarily, by an appeals court. But however the appeals court gets briefed in the coming days, this case will go to the Supreme Court. And most serious legal observers, including a former clerk to Justice Gorsuch, think Trump will not get more than 2 votes. The tariffs are practically dead as nobody is going to do much trading at all while this greater uncertainty persists.

Yet another federal court ruled Thursday that Trump’s order to Harvard to not enroll any foreign students was also out of bounds. This, too, will wind up with the Supremes as will the myriad pending cases on deportations.

The spooky part of all this are the sharpening attacks on the judiciary from the White House gang. They sure sound to me like they are laying the groundwork to formally disobey even the Supreme Court and thereby making the Trump administration an official rather than a de facto dictatorship. We’ll find out soon enough when Trump and the Supremes battle it out, or roll over, on court deportation restraints.

Yes, the judiciary have held remarkably well, but it’s foolish to count on them as the ultimate obstacle to Trumpism. The DOJ is not going to do a damn thing about the obscene epidemic of full-on corruption and outright coercion and bribery led by the Trump Family. And the Supremes have ruled against Trump more times than I ever thought possible but also with obvious hesitations and “narrowness.” And the Republican Senate. AYFKM?

The missing factor here is the American people. Can effective activism outrun conformist resignation and numbness, not to mention mass ignorance. Let me mention this disheartening anecdote. About ten days ago in the heat of the House passing the bill cutting social services in favor of extending the $5b tax cut for the wealthy, a major poll showed that 65%-75% of voters disapproved of every major Republican plank —especially cutting Medicare. But an astounding 27% said they recently has heard nothing about Medicare or didn’t know what it was.

Two weeks from now on June 14 Trump will pleasure himself with a mini-fascist military parade which I suspect over which the media will conduct a giant circle jerk in glorious patriotic coverage. On that same day, progressive groups are organizing hundreds of No Kings rallies coast to coast and in D.C. They better be big and loud and we better get thinking on where we go from here because Trump ain’t goin’ nowhere for the time being.