WTF Weekly | The Monkey With The Gun

"When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent" - Isaac Asimov

Friday April 11, 2025

Greetings from the blue bubble! I'm back after taking a month's personal break, and I have some learnings over the last four weeks:

1) Don't trust those AI-generated eye cream transformations you see in social media

2) Chicago springs feel as cold as shoving a popsicle where they don't belong

3) The White Lotus finale was worth the slow start - and while my seasonal finale theory of monkeys getting ahold of the gun and shooting someone may have been a bit misguided, it aptly describes Trump's last 3 weeks: chaos with opposable thumbs.

There's a lot to cover, but we're going to focus on the economy this week.

• The Monkey With The Gun (The Economy)

• White Lotus Season Finale

• Something Positive

• I also wrapped up Part 2 of the special into Trump being a Russian asset. If you haven't yet read Part 1, it's here.

The Monkey With The Gun (The Economy)

If you've seen the season finale of White Lotus, allow me to introduce you to a metaphor stemming from my malformed prediction of the end of the show - that a monkey gets the gun. For the last 90 days since his inauguration, Trump IS the monkey with the gun.

As of today, April 11th, Trump has reneged on the sweeping tariffs he put in place with everyone except our most consequential trade partner - China. Regardless, most Americans I've been chatting with are...uniformly uninformed...on the economy, stock market, and tariffs. I see people justifying tariffs to correct 'trade deficits'; a word I'm relatively certain they can't define. Republicans and Democrats are equally invested in the stock market according to a 2022 Gallup Poll (64% of Democrats and 66% of Republicans). Which begs the question: If a majority of citizens are invested, how the hell is everyone so misinformed on how economics work?

Trump (incorrectly) told his followers that the tariffs were 'reciprocal' - an easily disprovable lie. Their imposed tariffs were actually based on trade deficits with countries for whom we will never have (or want) equal trade with. We export things like defense equipment, aircraft, iPhones, and oil. It's impractical to expect countries like Cambodia and the uninhabited McDonald Islands to import as many 737's as we buy in Target bath towels. So the next time you hear this as a justification for tariffs, respond that plainly. That's how stupid and simple it is - really - which is why the markets reacted violently and globally when he announced this stupid plan. It's transparently not going to work and the stated goal is nonsensical. The monkey had the gun and nobody knew who it was going to hurt next, so everyone lost confidence in the market. Investors around the world seemed to agree and say: "Shit's about to get loud, dumb, and wildly inappropriate."

And before you start listening to someone comparing this stock market crash to COVID, here are a few distinctions:

1) COVID inflation and economic collapse was global. Nobody benefited. And everyone recovered in parallel at different paces - we actually recovered more quickly than any western nation.

2) On March 9 2020, when the impacts of COVID were becoming increasingly more obvious, the S&P 500 fell 7% and trading was halted. When Trump announced broad tariffs on April 2, 2025, the S&P 500 fell 10%. Translation: Trump intentionally destroyed more economic value with a misguided strategy than the pandemic did.

2) The on/off/on/off tariff wars Trump is fighting makes business and supply chains unpredictable for US businesses and foreign trade partners, which is leading to countries permanently changing trade and supply deals to get around an unreliable partner in the US.

I also find it interesting (but not surprising) the length to which Trump voters are willing to go to protect their ego from bursting over what was a bad choice in 2024. "Things will get better, just wait six months..." or "He's fixing our trade deficits and although it's painful, someone had to do it." Really? Where was this sense of understanding and patience when our last president was steering the country out of a fucking pandemic? Were they okay with a six month wait? Would they have been ok with Joe Biden saying "there's going to be a little pain at the grocery store for a while". We know the answer. I seem to remember many of them complaining about federal guidelines around masks and social distancing from day 1 of the pandemic, and complaining about inflation in the back half of 2024 when it was already brought down under 3%. (By the way, Biden ended in 2.7% inflation, historically low unemployment, and the highest stock market in history. And we made it out of the pandemic, reopened businesses, and were able to do away with social distancing guidelines as a result.)

So what can we attribute to most American being completely misinformed on economics? My theory is that most Americans are (intentionally) deeply stupid on matters that directly affect their livelihoods. The US is unique to other Western countries in that we treat government - which we call 'politics' - like a sport people can be disinterested in. It's as taboo as sexual kinks because there are so many deeply stupid people that everyone's afraid to lose a friend or colleague by giving a voice to their own point of view. You are not helping anything by staying quiet. That's called compliance.

How many times have you heard, "I'm not really into politics"? What does that even mean? You're not interested in government decisions that affect your employment, investments, healthcare, children's education, and if that pot-holed freeway you drive on gets fixed, or if the airport your transiting has a 1hr security line? Politics is there affecting your life whether you like it or not. It's your choice whether you participate, and you can make your own inferences about people who choose not to.

Personally, I think the indifference is because we had things relatively good and stable for so long that people are used to letting the government run on autopilot without actively participating in it. They think that every four years will be more or less the same as the four prior and voting is like rooting for a sports teams their neighbors and friends support.

If you want to spot an uninformed person, look for the people that:

1) Say they're not interested in politics

2) Throw their hands up, making "both sides" arguments

3) Say they don't trust the news (but you know they trust what they're reading in their Facebook newsfeed)

4) And a bonus - they defend tariffs even though they don't understand them

So, why is Trump putting so much chaos into the market? Some possibilities:

1) Market manipulation to buy low and sell high, which benefits investors - primarily millionaires and billionaires - that are able to invest at scale when the market is low. That ain't me, is it you? Most of us don't have boatloads of money to dump into stocks when the market collapses. Elon Musk has a long history of doing this with his own companies and crypto via posts from X. We actually don't have to guess....Trump told us this is a reason:

2) Trump is a Russian Asset and ruining the US economy is collectively beneficial to billionaires, US oligarchs and Putin. Destroying the economy decimates company values and allows oligarchs to buy them up at low prices. Exactly how a man thanks who has laundered Russian oligarch money in shady real estate deals. The collateral damage in terms of job losses and disrupted supply chains and consumer prices doesn't affect them. It's well outside of their impermeable bubble of billionaire relevance. In the words of Lucille Bluth, "How much can a banana cost? Ten Dollars?!"

3) Like I said, Trump is a Russian Asset. There isn't a use case in history where tariffs have corrected 'trade deficits'. Making products other countries want to import at prices that make them efficient to produce at scale is what fixes trade deficits. Since nobody on Trump's team was suggesting the tariffs, and Republicans in the Senate are against them, this underscores that the calls are not coming from inside the house. They're coming from the Kremlin.

Republican senators are starting to question Trump's 'strategy' on tariffs out loud - a pretty rare phenomenon

4) Trump is definitely a Russian Asset. Tariffs were not imposed on Russia, Belarus, nor North Korea. A common thread there is those three countries are allies, and are collaboratively fighting against Ukraine. Since Trump is a Russian asset, he's not even concerned with a look of impropriety by not imposing tariffs on Russia while imposing them on our allies and says the reason is that it wouldn't be appropriate since the US is trying to negotiate a peace treaty. But look at Israel who is actively fighting a war, and the US did impose tariffs on Israel. Most US presidents would be concerned with the way it looks to impose tariffs on our allies and not our enemies. Since Trump is working for our enemy, he simply can't do this.

5) More proof this didn't come from anyone but Russia. Peter Navarro, who spent four months in jail for refusing to answer to a congressional subpoena asking for testimony and documents pertaining to January 6th, was hired by Trump as a Senior Counselor for trade a manufacturing. He's one of the 'strategists' behind Trump's trade and tariff strategy. Of the thirteen books Peter Navarro has written, five of them reference an economic expert named "Ron Vara". Ron Vara is actually just a misarrangement of Peter Navarro's last name, and is a completely fictional character. So there is no expert source or four-dimensional chess here. There are no experts that think tariffs wars correct trade deficits that don't actually need to be corrected. It's just more chaos from incompetent people. No really, if you don't believe me on the Ron Vara bit, check out the Financial Times. So if there isn't a real strategy behind these moves, who does it benefit?

White Lotus Season Finale: Amor Fati

Did you enjoy the finale? I did. I thought the family should have stayed in Thailand, but after reflecting more on why they didn’t, I remembered they didn’t have any money since the father, played by Jason Isaacs, was caught with financial crimes back in the US in the first episode. With the monkeys being shown every five minutes, I began to create a story in my mind that monkeys would get ahold of the security guard's gun in the seasonal finale and shoot someone randomly. Since that didn't happen, I suppose they were a metaphor for how our crazy natures are always just outside of our doors, and we can't just leave them behind because we decide to go on vacation. That’s always been the theme of every White Lotus season but I thought it carried through each episode more so in season 3 than 1 or 2. I did like how the three girls got closer once Laurie (Carrie Coon) was vulnerable enough to say she didn't like internally competing against the other two girls. The theme of this season seemed to be twofold: Everyone's on their own journey, it's not a race, but you can't outrun your own karma. Angry thoughts manifest chaos. So in a way, the theme was about what happens when a monkey gets ahold of the gun. Unpredictable chaos.

Something Positive

You really should be watching Hacks if you're not already. It's on HBO Max, and the fourth season is just being released. It's crass, hilarious, and gay-friendly. Dip in! See ya next week!