WTF Weekly | Trump & Tariffs: Homer Simpson in the power plant
- Tyler
- Mar 7
- 9 min read
Updated: Mar 14
"When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent" - Isaac Asimov
Friday March 7, 2025
Happy Friday fellow WTF'ers,
It’s hard to cover everything Agent Orange is destroying given the speed with which they’re doing it. I’d recommend focusing on one or a couple of topics and tracking them, but here at WTF, I’ll cover as many as we can as briefly as possible.
WTF Weekly Highlights
Trump and Tariffs: Homer Simpson in the power plant
A little (boring) education first: You never hear about tariffs because they're hardly tinkered with - for good reason. Tariffs are essentially a tax on imports coming into the country from other countries. Companies and suppliers from affected exporting countries thus have to pay an extra "tax" to get their goods to you, and pass that loss in their profit margins on to US consumers through higher prices to cover their margin loss.
So let's talk about how moronic it is of a president who presumably was elected because of post-COVID inflation to immediately start jacking with the one lever that will most assuredly raise prices on US consumers as soon as he assumes office.
Per the Independent and countless other sources, the last time the US yanked tariffs up and down as much as Trump is doing was during the US Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act of 1930. (Still awake?) Know what happened? Remember Ferris Bueller's Day Off? Anyone? Anyone?
Countries slapped retaliatory tariffs on the US like they’re doing now and we went into the Great Depression. So it's not too late to start sewing your
potato sack muumuus and getting in line for your helping of rock soup!
You have to ask yourself:
Why would Trump want to tinker with drastic changes in trade that ONLY have a history of NOT WORKING?
Why would he want to risk price increases on Americans when he was elected to bring them down?
The answer is probably multi-faceted:
A) He doesn't give a shit because he doesn't feel the need to keep approval ratings up anymore.
B) He’s a Russian agent and a grifter. Tanking the US economy and buying up pieces of the economy/companies at low prices is a bargain, even if the rest of us get fucked and lose our retirements in the process, and doing so will probably lower interest rates since none of us will be able to afford anything.
C) He's a dumbass who thinks he knows what he's doing with tariffs, not unlike like Homer Simpson in the power plant, except here he plays the roles of Mr. Burns and Homer.
TLDR: Trusting Donald Trump to manage the economy because he was on The Apprentice makes about as much sense as trusting the winner of Project Runway to engineer a space suit or the winner of Great British Bakeoff to bake uranium cakes.
Unlike the Great Depression, these tariffs are being applied by a fascist who is deeply, deeply unpopular abroad…and unlike in the 1930s, many countries, businesses, and consumers may not quickly forgive us or resort to old US-export buying behavior.
Do you think Canadian shops and consumers, who are our largest trading partner and 18% of our exports, will forgive the US and revert back to buying US products? Or, will they make permanent changes to avoid the instability of their backstabbing neighbors to the south? My chips are on the latter.
Case in point? American liquor is being removed from shelves in Canada, impacting jobs in Kentucky. The Ontario liquor board, the largest purchaser of alcohol in the world, has stopped buying US liquor and wine. And Ontario just bitch-slapped us with a +25% surcharge on electricity they export to 1.5 million homes in Michigan, Minnesota, and New York.
TLDR: Trump is irreversibly fucking up our trade relationships and diplomatic relationships.
Shocker: They're also trying to blame the economic impact on Biden. Arming you with some information here to fight that bullshit: The US GDP was growing, and forecasted to grow 2-4% until February 28th when the orangutan started monkeying around with tariff talk. Negative economic growth and inflation rising in Q1 is purely the fault of Homer Simpson in the power plant.
Ukraine: It was never about the money
Next, I'm not going to rehash the embarrassing trap Trump and Junior Dumbass pulled on Zelenskyy a week ago because I already wrote about it here. It still makes stomach acid crawl into my esophagus.
But I will give you a few updates on what has happened since and why Trump is a Russian asset.
Zelenskyy doesn't owe Trump shit, particularly not a thank you: Trump thinks Zelenskyy should thank him for "all the money we've given him". Let's fact check that. The military aid Zelenskyy received to fight Russia almost entirely came from Biden and by the multi-national coalition Biden formed. In fact, Trump blackmailed Zelenskyy when in office and withheld stinger/anti-tank missiles leading up to the war while Russia was massing troops on Ukraine's borders. Remember the "perfect phone call"? The full scale invasion of Ukraine didn’t even happen until February 2022. (Which is important since Trump keeps saying the conflict never would have happened if he was president but it actually started in 2014 when Russia invaded Crimea.)
It's not about the money, which is why Trump lies about the amount: MAGA and Trump act like this is about the money, but as we've said before, they constantly misstate the amount as $350 billion when it's closer to $119 billion today, which is less than Europe has given. Only 38% of that was financial - the rest was the valuation of outdated military weapons we already had stockpiled, which were being replaced by newer weapons manufactured by US jobs and mostly in red states. So why do you need to lie about the amount? Because it's not about the money.
It's about the cruelty and helping Russia win: Since that talk, Agent Orange has paused intelligence sharing with Ukraine, which costs us zero, and has effectively ruined some of Ukraine's satellite capabilities and ability to early detect incoming missiles from Russia that hit Ukrainian civilian buildings. Trump even paused aid that was already on the ground in Poland and ready to be delivered to Ukraine. None of this was costing the US taxpayer, but all of it helps Russia. He also stopped all military aid, which leaves missile launchers and tanks without ammo on an active battlefield. Pretty rich coming from a guy that dodged the Vietnam draft due to imaginary bone spurs. And Russia is taking advantage of the lull in intelligence to hit Ukraine, with a massive strike occurring just this morning on power plants and apartment buildings where 43 cruise missiles and 194 suicide drones were launched into Ukraine.
We didn't repay anyone for 9/11: The US had 136 countries come to our aid during 9/11, a war that killed far fewer than the Ukrainian war has thus far. Nobody asked for us to repay them. I realize most folks aren't informed on the scale of the Ukraine war since US media stopped reporting it, especially when October 7th and the war in Gaza broke out. People tend to be more informed on terrorist attacks on Israel and the war in Gaza or the United States' occupation wars following 9/11. So I'll remind you: The war in Ukraine has killed at least a million people. The 20-year Middle East occupation wars the US waged resulted in approximately 243,000 deaths, and the recent war in Gaza and terrorist attacks of October 7th in Israel led to approximately 49,400 deaths. I don't say this to pit conflict against conflict or say one is worse than the other - all war is humanity's failure - I point out these stats to call out the silence in US media given the gravity of the situation relative to other conflicts they've covered.
Yes, Trump is a Russian asset. He's not a willing idiot, he's just an idiot who is a Russian asset. A news outlet in the UK has an excellent timeline and piece on Trump being a Russian asset including real estate deals with Russian mafia in the 90's to get out of bankruptcy, pee tapes in Moscow, and Trump's first Moscow visit in 1987 which he followed up with a failed run for president in '88 where he also called for the US to dismantle NATO.
A French Senator recently summed it better than any of our representatives have: "Washington has become the court of Nero, a fiery emperor, submissive courtiers and a ketamine-fueled jester in charge of purging the civil service..."Never in history has a President of the United States capitulated to the enemy.
Never has anyone supported an aggressor against an ally. Never has anyone trampled on the American Constitution, issued so many illegal decrees, dismissed judges who could have prevented him from doing so, dismissed the military general staff in one fell swoop, weakened all checks and balances, and taken control of social media. This is not an illiberal drift, it is the beginning of the confiscation of democracy. Let us remember that it took only one month, three weeks and two days to bring down the Weimar Republic and its Constitution."
Opposition Watch and SOTU: Democracy Dies in Decorum
I won't bother restating the SOTU since I posted about it earlier. I will say that although I loved Elissa Slotkin's speech about "working hard and playing by the rules" -- and most Democrats would -- picking her to give the rebuttal is PRECISELY what's wrong with the Democratic opposition today.
Talking about prices is impactful, but didn't it sound like she was rebutting George Bush in 2006. None of Trump's lies were fact-checked. Most importantly, Democrats continue to let MAGA fight culture wars against a near-invisible trans boogeyman instead of calling out what bullshit it is that MAGA is scapegoating 0.5-0.6% of our country's population as the nation's biggest problem. And those trans culture war lines are effective in rural America. Democrats are still acting like we're fighting to change the minds of voters.
We will not beat fascism with moderates. We are not in a political environment where we will change minds. We need to activate voters and citizens to take their government back. 90 million Americans didn't vote in the 2024 election. Those folks are going to be a lot easier to convince than someone who thinks trans volleyball players are our biggest problem.
Let's contrast Elissa's speech with an interview with one of her activist Democratic colleagues, Jasmin Crockett, who is consistent in calling out Trump for who he is - a fascist Russian asset.
Why does the Democratic party put its activist leaders in the backseat? Why do they continue to put octogenarian room-temperature Democrats from the old guard in positions of power, like recently choosing Gerry Conolly over AOC to become the House Oversight Committee's top ranking democrat?
Until they fix this problem, we will not have a unified resistance and response to Trump and Elon's dismantling of democracy. Which is concerning, because I think that change will be permanent. I could laugh anyone out of a room who says "I hope we win in four years" - as if we have four years.
And what in the name of Krasnov was with those fucking AUCTION PADDLES!?
Holy hell, I've never seen a stupider, sitting-on-hands, wet-toast, quite-quitting form of protest than auction paddles when a fascist President is talking about going to war for Greenland and Panama in his State of the Union speech. He took advantage of their silence by running for two hours so there can be no viewership of the rebuttal. I would have made Johnson kick me and the entire party out on live TV.
What's worse? The one person that did (rightfully) cause a scene and get into some good trouble, Al Green, was censured by some of his Democratic colleagues the next day, and nobody came to his aid during the SOTU. It's not Al's fault that the Democratic party can't come up with something more cohesive than an old man wagging a gold cane, and I commend him for it. THIS IS NOT NORMAL. If the Democratic opposition continues to operate within a box of rules and tradition, Democracy will die in decorum. But at least we'll be able to save we behaved ourselves at the 2025 State of the Union.
Democratic cowards that voted with Republicans include:
I'm not even going to mention the parade of victims Trump put in front of viewers to distract from the fact he has no accomplishments and is tanking the economy. Because for his uninformed base, it was brilliant. He forced Democrats to clap and his followers will eat that shit up like Mississippi pot-roast. When "Person, woman, man, camera, TV" is one-upping you on speech strategy, you have a real opposition crisis. And it's a crisis Nancy Pelosi and the cane-wagging octogenarians aren't going to solve. This is going to take the new generation: Gen X, Xennials, and Millennials. LET THEM LEAD, GODDAMMIT!
So things are a little dark. It's giving Revenge of the Sith. "So this is how Liberty dies...with thunderous applause".
Some positive news; if you haven't seen Mickey 17, I saw it last night and it's a great campy movie that will make you laugh and take your mind off things. Highly recommend. Like my protest of social media, my protest of Demi Moore not winning an Oscar for The Substance lasted a few days, then I was back in the movies. :) Both trailers for you below - great distractions.
Until next week,
T
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