Month: April 2025

Bill Maher announced weeks ago that he’d agreed to have dinner with the current occupant of the White House, Donald Trump. This has made a lot of people very angry and was widely considered a bad move. On his Friday show for April 11, he took the first part of the show to give a ‘book report’ detailing exactly what went down.

I should link it, but that would mean giving his show more exposure, so no.

He started by saying that this all started because he got an invitation to the White House “from my good friend Kid Rock” – and I imagine a lot of liberals would say ‘there’s the problem right there.’ Not necessarily. Remember when Kid Rock played with Sheryl Crow? He used to be cool, or at least not AS much of a douche as he is now. I actually liked Kid Rock before he started rhyming “things” with “things.”

But Kid’s cultural relevance has declined in proportion to his political alignment, and maybe Bill should have taken that as a clue. Maher said that Trump had a sense of humor and could laugh at himself. Which was a tell that Maher isn’t as clued-in and informed as he believes. Even I have seen speeches where Trump could make jokes at his own expense. Bill said “I never felt like I had to walk on eggshells around him, and honestly, I voted for for Clinton and Obama, but I would never feel comfortable talking to them the way I was able to talk to Donald Trump.”

Maher’s own conclusion, that Trump is a different person in private than the image he projects, ought to have told him something. One of those presentations is an act. Probably both.

The real tell I see in the long term was in what happened afterward with the guests and the Overtime debate panel after the scheduled show. On the Overtime bit played on CNN and YouTube after the HBO show, Maher had Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin on with none other than Steve Bannon and courtier journalist Piers Morgan. Bill’s previous idea of hearing out both sides was to have a debate panel with one token conservative on with two establishment/media liberals, and Bill would gang up with the liberals on the conservative. This week it was the other way around.

Rogin said “I think you’ve fallen into the trap, and I think I represent 99% of the internet when I say this: you’ve played the game of proximity is principle.” Rogin said that Maher got buttered up to get Trump’s approval. Himself recognizing this tendency, Rogin started to play to the crowd, saying “We all love Bill, right?” And Bill just said, “Don’t patronize me … I don’t even know you, I never met you.”

I mean, Bill did enough of a heel turn last Friday that I thought he was going to hit Josh Rogin with a steel chair.

Trump might not be book smart, but he is an idiot savant when it comes to conniving and grifting. Emphasis on the idiot. If Trump is reasonable and self-aware in person, why does he act like a half-orangutan for the press? How did Trump enthrall the entire Evangelical movement, when he is that much less an Evangelical than Bill Maher? Because he played to them, he flattered their expectations, and he told them what they wanted to hear. So now they serve him. And now, so does Bill Maher.

Like any other con man or stage magician, Trump has no miraculous power in and of himself. He needs his marks to buy in to what he’s selling. They give him power by giving him validity.

Bill Maher of course said years ago, “Look, conservatives: I know you don’t like it when I call you stupid, but you’ve really gotta meet me half way and quit being stupid.” They didn’t, so Bill decided to meet them halfway, and started being stupid. Or at least, willfully oblivious to the things he has already observed, and which have not changed. I like the take from Vlad Vexler: “Maher said insubstantial things and made substantial conclusions from them.”

Is the important take that, yeah, Trump acts like a goon for the camera but can be a real human when he wants to? What’s on camera is what’s making policy. Why is the allegedly pro-wealth, anti-socialist president forcing economic controls that will destroy the global market? Why can’t the president pressure the dictator of a tiny country to release one legal resident who was sent to him by our leave, if he can pressure Ukraine to surrender its provinces and thousands of citizens to Russia?

Perhaps these questions should be a stronger focus than whether Mr. Trump extends his pinky when drinking a Diet Coke?

In the abstract, yeah, I can see Bill and Kid Rock’s point that you need to have dialogue with the other side. That you need to “break bread” with them. But not here and not now. You want us to break bread with the guys who tried to stop Joe Biden’s inauguration by force? You want us to break bread with the guys who started the Civil War? Sure. AFTER Sherman has his march to the sea. AFTER Sherman marches through Atlanta and turns it into a pile of smoking rubble. AFTER the traitors have learned their lesson. NOT BEFORE. Because we are at war, and it started when they declared war on the rest of us.

This idea of the Bill Mahers and Chuck Schumers of the world, that we can just get back to dialogue and negotiation, is exploited by the alternative-to-being-Right, becase reasonable dialogue was not working for their side, and it will not come back in this era because they destroyed it, and now are just exploiting the liberal need for good faith negotiation, when they will never act in good faith. People like Steve Bannon are self-described Leninists: not in the sense that they want to destroy global capitalism (though they are doing a fine job of that) but in the sense that they only act within liberal-bourgeois systems until they have gained enough control over them to neutralize opposition, and at that point, there is no dialogue, just dictating.

Bill, don’t give us this “I’m not important, I’m just a comedian” spiel. So was Zelenskyy, when he started out. You are good enough at what you do that people pay attention to what you say, and that’s why Trump wanted to coup you. And he did.

Now you will be just like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, elitist liberals who used to be on the completely opposite side and bought into Trump for the sake of their ulterior motives, and in exchange he destroyed their brands by association. Your reputation as a truth-teller is gone. And just like how Trump switched and told his cult to buy electric vehicles to support his new friend, all the “conservatives” who despised you for repeatedly making fun of them are going to yuk it up and cheer you on like you’d agreed with them all along. Because they are gullible and stupid. But as we can see, you don’t need to be stupid to be gullible.

Fuck you Maher, I am never watching your show again.

“Sometimes a man wants to be stupid, if it lets him do a thing that his cleverness forbids.”

• John Steinbeck, East of Eden

One of the reasons that the world is stuck in the current Age of Trump is that everything that could be said against him is already baked in. One might say it’s part of the appeal. When he does something, no matter how disastrous it appears even to Republicans, Trump just blows off his critics, says belligerently stupid things and makes goonish faces at the camera, ALMOST AS IF he were a total retard who can barely spell his own name.

Which begs the question of whether the performance skills that serve to be a clownboy for public amusement are sufficient to lead the largest government in the world. I mean, even Jerry Lewis knew how to direct movies.

The main example right now is “Liberation Day,” or the broad based global tariff program announced April 2 (because April 1 would have been too obvious). It was so popular and business friendly that Trump held his press conference to announce it after the markets closed. In the following days the markets loved the policy so much that it wiped out over 11 trillion dollars compared to the week before Trump was re-inaugurated.

On Wednesday morning, Trump declared he was putting most of the across-the-board tariffs on a 90-day “pause”, which caused the markets to rise 3000 points.

All bow down and serve our new Lord and Savior, who causes the grass to grow and the birds to sing. Who is the only reason the sun rises in the east every morning, by his allowance. Verily, let us all love and worship our new Lord and God, Donald John Trump. Cause he makes that Jehovah guy look like a fuckin’ pussy.

But then, His Majesty said the targeted tariffs on China would actually increase over 100 percent to 125 (it’s probably higher now) prompting the Communist government in Beijing to respond with equal tariffs on us. And that caused everything to crash on Thursday again. The Dow Jones industrial average is still a net -4 percent from April 1. Things picked up on Friday, but who knows how long that’s going to last? You just have to keep watching The Trump Show!

The general consensus was that Trump caved because the same financial class he was trying to impress told him the policy wasn’t working. It is also more evidence that he has less emotional stability than a teenage BTS fan. At the same time he wants to preserve the option of tariffs because that is his main economic agenda.
Several observers, like Senator Chris Murphy (D.-Connecticut) and right-winger Richard Hanania have a different take. Both of them came to the conclusion that Trump’s apparent fickleness on tariffs is actually a form of leverage on the population at large, where “every industry or company will have to pledge loyalty to Trump in order to get sanctions relief.” Hanania: “Trump has always believed in tariffs, but something that he appears to have discovered is that they are an excellent way to aggrandize his own power and sense of importance. Countries and businesses want exceptions, and you get them by deferring to and praising Trump. Politicians who are subject to pressures from private sector interests also must go hat in hand to the president. …This is not to say Trump has ever thought all of this out. Rather, the man has an instinctual understanding of how to manipulate and control others.”

This theory makes a lot of sense, not least in that it tracks with Trump’s desire to see himself as a Mafia boss, and his already demonstrated moves to turn his ‘administration’ into a patronage outfit. There’s just one problem with the theory: This is Trump we’re dealing with.

The US borrows money by selling Treasury bonds. Those bonds are in the hands of rich guys and in the hands of other countries. Like China. The value of these bonds is based on concepts like “the full faith and credit of the US government”, which is no longer guaranteed. Normally in a stock market crash the bond market would stay secure, the problem was that everyone knew that the crash was artificially created and arbitrary, meaning, other assets like bonds are not secure because government (Trump) policy is not secure. After “Liberation Day” there was a spike in creditors dumping US bonds. Jake Broe: “And when bond yields go up, all other asset classes go down, your real estate, your crypto, your gold, because this is the risk-free rate that every investor has to weigh against. ..This is something any individual or nation can do. Why risk your money in stocks or equities, when you can put it in bonds?”

In other words, by directly undermining securities (not just threatening them), Our Lord and Savior was undermining the leverage he needed to control the elites.

Truly, Our Lord is all-good, all-powerful, and all-wise.

But while tariffs may not work as long-term scheme to control the country, the on-again/off-again was a great scheme for insider trading, as Trump twitted “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!” as stocks were down, just before announcing the tariff pause. NASDAQ call volume went up 10k volume minutes before the pause was announced.

Which is another reason that when (or if) this colon cancer of a political party is removed from power we need to child-proof the whole process of government.

But in the short term, one might reasonably argue that we depend too much on foreign trade or that our manufacturing sector is too dependent on China in particular. I honestly think that is a national security issue. But clearly the ‘administration’ that put Pete ‘Whiskyleaks’ Hegseth in charge of the Pentagon doesn’t care about national security. If rebuilding the manufacturing sector is a priority then you make it a government priority by incentivizing American businesses to build here (since it was they, not China, that decided to outsource American industry). And you do that BEFORE starting a trade war that does more to undermine American businesses than the Chinese government. Just as Trump clearly seeks to establish not mere self-sufficiency but economic autarky – or as North Korea would call it, Juche – not in the interest of workers, but because he seeks to invade his neighbors (like Canada and Greenland) and minimize the consequences of blockade. Like Germany did.

But when Nazi Germany re-armed, they actually did rebuild both domestic and military industries with economic policies that were dodgy but actually did work in the short term. One thing the Nazis didn’t do was immediately alienate all of their trading partners in the first three months of the regime so that they would start blockading or working around them before the Nazis started their expansion in earnest. They also didn’t alienate the vast majority of the population before starting a war, including the people who voted for them. Clearly the 2024 election demonstrated that a critical mass of Americans don’t think that fascism – excuse me, ‘post-liberalism’ – is a danger and may even see it as attractive. But Trump and his cult are both so high on their own supply that they think they can piss off every American who isn’t them before they attain absolute power, when their margin of popular victory was 1.62 percent in an election where a lot of Trump voters didn’t choose a candidate for Senate, which is why a lot of the swing states that went for Trump still elected Democratic Senators. As a result, Republicans are getting massive protests even in Idaho.

That’s the problem with the Trump Party: They can’t even do fascism right.

Hi, I’m Donald Trump.

Hi, Donald.

And I’m bein’ told… that I’m a dummy.

We’re not here to judge.

But I’m like, the President of the United States, and I’m in control of the largest economy on Earth, and I got some people tellin’ me that it’s not workin’ out.

That’s why we’re here. What would you like to know about economics?

Lots.

Well, can you be more specific?

Well, the tariff thing. Last week, I announced this great, big beautiful tariff plan, cause I wanted Wall Street to like me.

That’s why you did it?

Yeah, cause before I came along they had this thing called progressive income tax where you have to pay more money if you’re rich.

Yes, because the rich have more money.

Well, I’m rich, and I don’t like that. Nobody likes that. But before we had progressive income tax, we had the tariff system. Tariff. It’s my favorite word. And groceries. It’s all about the groceries. Did you know I invented that word? Groceries.

I did not know that.

But the reason this country was so great before the Radical Left took over is cause our government ran on tariffs for consumers and not income taxes on the rich. That’s how it worked with William McKinley.

Wasn’t he the president that got assassinated?
What?
Never mind.

But I announced these tariffs to help the upper class, and they don’t like it! Like, the stock market has been going down by thousands of points every day since! Even Elon Musk is saying free trade is better than tariffs!

Maybe he knows something you don’t.

The whole point is these other countries have been ripping us off cause we give them more money than they give us.

That’s … not how free trade works.

Well, what’s wrong with tariffs, then?

Well, let’s look at one hypothetical case: If the US is the largest economy in the world, and we trade with say, Bangladesh, Bangladesh is a really small, undeveloped country. So by definition there’s gonna be a trade imbalance cause they’re not on the same scale of economy as us.

Okay.

Smaller countries trade with us cause they have some things we don’t have, and we have money and things they don’t have.

Okay.

That’s how ‘trade’ works.

That sounds like a rip-off.

So that’s why you came up with this tariff plan. How does it work?

Well, in my big, beautiful White House presser, I showed everybody the chart and it shows all the tariffs we got against EVERY country in the world.

Except … Russia. And North Korea.

Really? Well, they’re not the ones screwing us. They’re my FRIENDS.

Okay, where are these numbers coming from?

Well, it’s so beautiful. What we did is, the figure is trade deficit with a country divided by their exports to us.

That’s NOT how trade works.

Well, who cares.

I’m looking at this list and one of the territories is ‘British Indian Ocean Territory.’

Yeah.

That’s Diego Garcia.

Yeah.

That’s a US military base.

Yeah, well, it said ‘Diego Garcia’, I figured it was Mexican.

Why are you having all these high-level tariffs against territories that don’t even have people?

Well, what happened was, we just ran everything through an AI program to make extra sure. Cause like Howie was saying Sunday, if you leave anything off the list, them other countries are gonna art- artifice – get around the tariff program.

Jesus Christ, you fucking hammerhead, now I see why that assassination attempt failed. The bullet bounced off your skull.

Yeah, well the preachers around me says that I was saved because God wanted me to be President.

Really? Have you read the Bible?

Uh, yeah. Sure I did.

In Exodus, God hardens Pharaoh’s heart and has him resist Moses when he says to let the Hebrews go. So the Hebrews are kept in bondage in Egypt and to punish Pharaoh, God sends a bunch of plagues and they culminate in the death of the Pharaoh’s firstborn son.

Wait, Pharoah does what God wants and then God punishes him for it?

I’m just saying, this God guy doesn’t necessarily have your best interests at heart.

Yeah, well who cares.

Then why are you asking for advice?

Cause- cause look, you seen all them protesters on April 5? How did they get all those protesters? They had thousands of people in Utah! They LOVE me there! How did they get all those protestors? Don’t people have jobs?

Well, maybe a whole bunch of people became unemployed in the last two months for some reason.

They got everybody real antsy! We had Rand Paul sponsor a bill to take my tariff powers away! Rand! He’s like Ron, only with better hair! They can’t take my tariff powers away! That’s not in the Constitution!

Actually it is, sir. Article I.

Well, who cares. If anybody ever read the Constitution, I wouldn’t be here.

True enough.

But it’s worst than that! If I lose enough Senators and enough Congressmen, they’re actually talkin’ about IMPEACHING me! Like, it might WORK next time!

That would be a shame.

I mean, the whole point of bein’ President again was cause I was gettin’ convicted of crimes – crimes which I had EVERY RIGHT to commit, by the way – and if I was a regular citizen again I’d have to pay fines! Might even go to PRISON!

Gee.

I don’WANNA go to prison! …I’m too PRETTY for prison…

There, there.

I never really wann’ed to be president really! I just wanted all the power of an unaccountable god and none of the responsibility!

Really.

Why do you think I got Elon running everything?

That would explain much. But really sir – did you ever think that even if you’re the most powerful man in the world, you can’t always get away with screwing everybody all the time?

….no….

Then you really are a dummy.