MAGAts Confess They Cannot Compete with Penguins on a Level Playing Glacier
Trump is well on his way to causing, with his stupid tariffs, the same kind of economic damage as COVID did, but without a global epidemic as catalyst and excuse, just himself and the batshit advisors who refuse to tell him no.
At least some of Trump’s handlers hope this will lead one after another country to supplicate Trump, begging for favors. Depending on who you ask, that may have been one of the poorly considered and often conflicting goals.
But even before price hikes start to affect consumers, there are signs of pushback.
After the Senate passed a (thus far) mostly symbolic law sponsored by Tim Kaine reversing Trump’s emergency declaration for Canada, Chuck Grassley teamed with Maria Cantwell to propose restoring Congressional authority over such taxes. (Grassley did not support Kaine’s bill; Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Rand Paul, and Mitch McConnell did.) See this Aaron Fritschner thread for an explanation of why this second effort might have more prospect of success: because the House has not yet stopped time with regards to the latest emergency Trump declared to accrue more power.
The pure insanity of Trump’s tariffs is best (ahem) personified by his inclusion of Heard and McDonald Islands, which are inhabited largely by penguins.
Two tiny, remote Antarctic outposts populated by penguins and seals are among the obscure places targeted by the Trump administration’s new tariffs.
Heard and McDonald Islands – a territory which sits 4,000km (2,485 miles) south-west of Australia – are only accessible via a seven-day boat trip from Perth, and haven’t been visited by humans in almost a decade.
[snip]
Like the rest of Australia, the Heard and McDonald Islands, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands and Christmas Island are now subject to a tariff of 10%. A tariff of 29% was imposed on the Norfolk Island, which is also an Australian territory and has a population of about 2,200 people.
Heard Island, though, is barren, icy and completely uninhabited – home to Australia’s largest and only active volcano, Big Ben, and mostly covered by glaciers.
It is believed the last time people ventured on to Heard Island was in 2016, when a group of amateur radio enthusiasts broadcast from there with permission of the Australian government.
Taken literally, Trump’s inclusion of two islands (over)run by penguins means that he believes American workers cannot compete with penguins without some kind of help — a 10% tariff — to level the playing field. A glacier field.
Right wingers who applaud Trump’s insanity are, effectively, confessing that their own industry and pluck is no match for a colony of penguins.
The penguins are useful for something beyond the MAGAt confessions that they are not as industrious as penguins. They help to identify how the Trump Administration came up with this hocus pocus.
James Surowiecki figured it out — the Administration took the trade deficit (Surowiecki later figured out it’s only the trade deficit in goods, not services) and split it in half.
This was largely confirmed when the Deputy WH Spox attempted to dispute Surowiecki’s description, only to confirm that’s precisely the formula they used (sorry, you need to click through for the pure dumber-than-a-penguin-glory).
So because the penguins have shown up as trading partners in a few different years, they’re included on here.
Russia is not. Russia, Belarus, North Korea. The Administration says that’s because sanctions effectively mean we have no trade with them, but we do — certainly more than we do with the penguins.
I guess Trump is more terrified of the Russians than he is the penguins.
This is a shit show. But it’s the kind of shit show that may disrupt the Republican lockstep in Congress. Whether the penguin tariffs were the cause, John Thune had to pull the first of the budget resolutions that were supposed to give legal sanction for Trump’s agenda (as well as massive tax cuts to the rich) yesterday. And Teddy Cancun Cruz has spoken up against the sanctions, calling them (accurately) taxes.
Even before constituents start to pay through the teeth, Republicans are beginning to accurately describe that these are taxes.
It’s unclear how this will end up, and billions of people will be hurt in the process (though, as with much else that Trump has done out of pique this Administration, China will likely find a way to capitalize on Trump’s idiocy). But this is the kind of disruptive event that presents opportunity to disrupt Trump’s power.
Penguins aren’t dumb, they at least take tender care of their young, which is more than you can say for some billionaires.
That is a great headline to some bizarre economic policies.
Via Bluesky:
That well-dressed Penguin is showing more respect
for the Oval Office than TRUMP and Vance are.
A couple comments from Mastodon:
Somebody’s pooping on one of the chairs and it’s not the penguin.
I assumed that the litter box on the coffee table was for the penguin. To be fair to Trump, he’s probably wearing Depends. Vance, otoh, seems to be holding it in./~
For anyone wondering what’s driving all this, look at the final few seconds of that France24 clip at the top of this post. I don’t know who Trump was yelling and gesturing at, but that display lifts the veil on his thinking and motivations. It’s a combination of taunting, threatening and bravado — like you might see in a prison yard during exercise time, or a mob-rivals’ face-off.
Someone on Sirius XM theorized that some DOGE bro tried to download a top level country domain listing as the population of “countries” to apply tariffs to, and picked up some territorial listing instead. That’s how they got all of these islands that have few or no people on them. Morons. This expert also said, as Marcy does, that tariffs are supposed to be very granular and applied to specific products like ‘rolled carbon steel’ and ‘extruded aluminum I-bars’ to address unfair advantages that some nations have or take with certain products. He said there are 1,700 categories of tariffs. You DON’T apply them to a whole country! When you apply Trump’s ridiculous formula to an entire developing country like Viet Nam, that runs a large surplus with America now, you get ludicrous tariff rates of 40+%. Trump is a belligerent moron and a lifelong bully and the entire world is going to suffer because of it.
It makes you wonder how many people in the Trump administration have even heard of the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, let alone actually looked at it.
I’ve been reminding MAGAts that higher prices and “Buy American!” decreases personal choice.
To Trump and DOGE,
Higher prices means our dollars are less efficient.
The penguins can legitimately claim to be bird brains. Can’t expect much from them.
I wonder what the administration’s excuse will be.
These tariffs smell like a Miller production, who is not nearly as clever as his biases claim. After all, aren’t penguins half black?
No King (penguins)!
Heard it through the grapevine about the Mickey D’s island, so they had to ketchup with the fries.
Spell check: “Herd”
Nah.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YG2g8Zcyos
“I Heard it Through the Grapevine – Saxophone Music”
I have heard three reasons given for the tariffs. First, they are revenue generating. In that case, the Administration would want imports to continue and for consumers to pay the tariffs to the Treasury. (As a side note, the 16th Amendment and the passage of the income tax was a progressive measure grounded in consumer hatred for tariffs.)
A different purpose is that they are protectionist and intended to grow the US economy free of foreign competition. The goal is autarky. This purpose is antithetical to revenue generation.
A third explanation is that they are negotiating tools to some unspecified objective. This goal is contrary to the other two. No one is building a new semiconductor facility in the US if the tariff on Taiwan is written in invisible ink.
But the design of the tariffs reveals a fourth and likely true purpose. The tariffs are punitive. The tariffs go to zero as the trade imbalance disappears. This of course has no salutary economic purpose. It is self-destructive madness.
Your last graf — that. Reduce income taxes while the tariffs eventually produce less revenue, AND a recession reduces consumption killing income tax producing jobs…
This is intended to completely starve the US government into nothing. This is why Grover Norquist ain’t saying shit because he’s too busy filling the bath tub.
Fxck Grover Norquist. And Gingrich, too. They are the genesis for this entire shitshow, starting in the 80s
Great post pointing out the conflicting goals. I think I’d add two unspoken goals:
Trump gets to act as Caesar, dispensing waivers and exemption to friend and donors. And Trump thinks outrageous tariffs gives him better bargaining power with other countries.
Assuming that there is some grand strategy at work , Trump is so arbitrary and undisciplined that he will make so many exceptions that the grand strategy will be defeated. The sooner the better.
It’s also possible that they’re too dim to understand that a net-zero trade balance is unachievable, but they’re also so dim they think it’s a good goal.
You forget a fourth, extremely stupid idea, which is to completely destroy the economy and send bond rates down to near zero, then refinance America’s $34 trillion debt, then ride the ensuing epic prosperity to pay off that debt in full, when American joy will soar. While that more reflects a happy way to refinance a sagging office building, it is something the deep MAGA’s are saying
I thought all you had to do was a quid pro quo with the Saudi prince.
Wouldn’t refinance bond rates be high because the credit rating of the country has tanked?
The most troubling (for me, at least) aspect of this is we are all speculating about the real goal(s)of Trump’s tariff war. He and his allies have stated some goals, which are contradictory or not going to be achieved by what Trump is doing. This leads us to speculate about hidden agendas. Trump appears to be deliberately tanking the economy for ???.
Putin’s revenge?
I suspect The Felon Guy has tried that multiple times, with varying results.
(I lived in an apt complex which, when I moved in, was owned by an entertainment lawyer, who used it for a tax loss. He was turned down when he tried to refinance, and it ended up in receivership.)
Lol. Reminds of the business loan applicants who would come in with financial statements showing losses for tax purposes and wondered why we wouldn’t lend them the amount they wanted.
@RitaRita
It was actually a nice (and well-managed) complex. The company that bought it out of receivership were also good – we had a live-in manager *and* live-in maintenance, through all of that. The next owner didn’t care.
I’m always a little curious about how the tax loss works. You can’t write off income not received through rents. You can write off expenses, but those are actual costs which could be padded (fraud) if there was never an audit of the return. You could write off interest on a loan and taxes, but those are also costs. So outside of high costs, padding is the only way I would see to have write offs, but I would be open to hear how it works.
I am hearing that exact strategy being floated now. (The pay-off-the-debt one.) One problem with it: MAGA wants to enormously increase the debt with its tax cut plan.
Goes without saying: tariffs are the most regressive kind of tax. Rich people’s taxes will be cut, but the rest of us will pay through the nose.
One possible lens for understanding all the batshittery: Trump may be acting out a personal vendetta against Biden, washing away his economic & foreign policy legacy as revenge for beating him in 2020.
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That’s one angle, but it’s probably not Biden alone he’s attacking in this fashion. He’s likely going after the Obama administration on behalf of his “sponsor” Putin, which included Hillary Clinton as its Secretary of State — and what Biden, Obama, and Clinton understood was that Putin was highly problematic and a threat to NATO as well as the Pax Americana.
We may also be ascribing to a man who can be easily gamed a possible strategy when it may be just as likely his transactional reflexiveness born of malignant narcissism and neurocognitive decline is being gamed by entities he personally sees as authority figures, whether it’s Putin, Netanyahu, MBS, Kim Jong-un, Musk, so on.
He’s also a crook. This may simply be the biggest shakedown he’s ever been able to pull off.
Thanks Rayne. Among the many possible reasons, angles, purposes, designs, explanations, and strategies for all of Trumps actions (our reality), don’t all roads lead to one final road, at the end of which is Occam’s Razor (Trump’s reality): Putin? All the dictators, living and dead, are just the friends that Trump meets along the way paved by grift and the suffering of his enemies.
As for the tariffs themselves: Is there any way, however small, in which Putin doesn’t benefit from them?
YES. Don’t overthink it. Putin orders Trump to weaken the US, wreck the economy, alienate/attack our allies, destroy NATO, abandon our status as Superpower, weaken the military, install Russian assets to head our agencies, acknowledge Russia as the good guys, etc. Trump does as he is told, or at best manipulated, to do.
Every possible thing that Putin would want on his wish-list for an American president, Trump has done or is working to fulfill. His payoff is that he is allowed to loot the US government for his own benefit, akin to what the Russian oligarchs did during the fall of the Soviet Union. For instance, I’d imagine that any company CEO that wants tariff relief can have it, for a price. Trump’s angle is always- what’s in it for me?
I don’t think Putin is actively involved. Way too obvious. I can imagine the role he plays, if any, is just tell Trump he is a genius for coming up with the idea of a tariff war.
How would we know whether Putin is directly or indirectly involved? Does it matter when Putin has been in direct contact with Musk? Does it matter when one of the Signalgate participants was calling from Moscow?
How would we know if another country’s assets were involved directly or indirectly, on behalf of Putin or themselves, when the Saudis and Qatar own 25-30% of the dead bird app?
And of course there’s that fucking idiot Laura Loomer insisting the head of NSA be fired, the one guy who likely knows *exactly* who’s involved directly or indirectly.
Ugh. Don’t get me started on how Trump and Vance both managed to parrot Putin’s talking points at Zelenskyy.
That’s the word, Rayne: shakedown. That’s what it is.
Could be that the reason no one can pin down a motive for trumps actions is because there is no logic or complex goal to begin with. He has an idea and he is never wrong. He may, if he feels cornered, stick more to his genius ideas and defy everyone. Completely unpredictable.
So how long before trump and maga say this is all Biden’s fault
3 weeks ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhiHqKclQBI
If I could stomach listening to that orange twatwaffle all the way through that, I’d add up the number of times he used the singular, first-person pronoun “I.”
I, I, I, I…there’s no room for anybody else in his blather, no genuine concern for the public’s well being. He keeps a litany of scores in his head like his golf game and that’s it.
I don’t have any direct evidence of what I’m about to say. However, anyone who knows how global trade actually works (at the individual shipment level) will recognize this.
Here’s how the tariffs on the penguins thing happened. International trade requires international standards. And the one that matters here is UN/LOCODE codes. (Yes, the name is officially redundant). In short, every international shipment (and the vast majority of intracountry commercial shipments) get categorized with an origin unlocode and a destination unlocode. These are a combination of a two character country code and a three character city (or airport) code. Those two character country codes are from the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 standard which is coincidentally used for internet domains. Seriously, the internet domain thing is a coincidence.
Now, for reasons I won’t go into here, these don’t always match the ship from and the ship to addresses. The unlocodes are entered separately from the addresses and doing data validation to ensure the correct unlocode is used for a particular shipment is surprisingly difficult. Generally, the best effort is to validate that the user entered a valid unlocode. And there are valid unlocodes for those islands (HMHEA for Heard Island and HMMCD for McDonald Island)
So, somewhere along the way, some clerks somewhere entered the wrong unlocode for one or more shipments and that created the appearance of international trade between the U.S. and the penguins… Of course, if you fire or ignore the people in the Commerce Department whose job it is to clean up stuff like this …
When the boss can never be wrong, one loses the incentive to correct him.
There’s a Guardian article which describes mix-ups on bills of lading although it doesn’t mention unlocodes:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/apr/04/revealed-how-trump-tariffs-slugged-norfolk-island-and-uninhabited-heard-and-mcdonald-islands
Trump’s people clearly weren’t checking things as thoroughly as they should have.
Interesting that the tariffs are calculated using only the balance of trade in goods (and do not include services). The US has a trade surplus with respect to services ($267 billion in 2023), as the US leads the world in providing high value services. Essentially, we were importing stuff (made by cheaper foreign labot) in exchange for technical expertise. It is unclear whether other countries will respond by imposing duties on services. If they do not, the pain will fall more heavily on the red states (agriculture, mineral extraction) and the midwest, while the East and West coasts will be slightly better positioned to weather the storm.
You make a very important observation. The super simplistic “we’re being had” argument is untrue.
Even leaving out services, you’d think the GOP would be somewhat familiar with the concept of triangle trade.
Working full time I earned x dollars in 2 years. In 6 weeks my 401k has lost the same amount.
Like all train wrecks that truly deserve the moniker, the speed of the thing is a large part of both its horror and its spectacularity.
Trump or climate change, it all reminds me of the prophetic song by Jethro Tull: Locomotive Breath.
They’re also taking aim in the culture wars on same sex marriage by placing outrageous tariffs on those islands in Scotland:
the Outer He-Brides.
HAHAHAHA! OY!
OT, punaise, how are the grand babies ?
All good,thanks! Four months (in NY), and zero minus three weeks here in the East Bay. Trying to convince 36(?)-month in punaisette to eschew the HANDS OFF! mass mobiliztion protest in Oakland tomorrow. We’ll g on her behalf and ours. Promise to behave. Considering whether it’s important not to leave a digital footprint should things get weird.
So glad to hear about the little ones. A burner phone is always an option for these events. And remember to mask…for many reasons.
In other news, have you heard the latest Qanon discovery that fits all the puzzle pieces together?
Original birth certificate for Merrick Garland shows that he was the love child of Judy Garland and Rock Hudson, the child getting the woman’s surname (to heighten the homophobic antipathy).
And this is how we know the Rapture is about to commence./~
these people can afford the good drugs, apparently. this is the kinda shit you can’t make up sober…
Nice! And I read somewhere (tell me it wasn’t here) that the penguins are being tarriffed because they’re half-black!
https://www.theverge.com/news/642620/trump-tariffs-formula-ai-chatgpt-gemini-claude-grok
This does seem like a pretty good explanation for how they came up with the formula.
A fair and simple description of a tariff is a tax on imports. Dems are missing a messaging opportunity by not emphasizing the second. So, in the spirt of Frank Luntz convincing Republicans to change Estate Tax to Death Tax, we should be talking not about tariffs, but Import Taxes.
So, tomorrow all Americans will immediately begin paying a new individual federal tax—The Trump Import Tax.
The easy-to-understand message of those opposing Trump’s 19th century tariff mercantilism—including the several Republican Senators sputtering through their incoherent excuses for the last three days—is that everyone living in this country is now subject to three federal taxes paid by the individual taxpayer, with the last representing the single largest American tax increase since at least WWII:
1. Federal Income Tax (on Earnings)
2. Federal FICA Tax (Social Security/Medicare, on Earnings)
3. Federal Import Tax (on Spending)
And, since the first two are based on what you Earn and the new, last, on what you Spend, they now get you coming and going. Yes, I know the logical shortcomings of all that. But as a message, it’ll sell in MAGAnistan.
1) I hear that from Dems all the time.
2) Why are you focused on DEM messaging and not messaging, period? This is not about parties.
Thanks Marcy! Being a member of no party (though the last national R I voted for was GHW Bush, who didn’t deserve to lose to a kinda oily young southern governor because of a mild recession that was already over), I’m very much with you on your “This is not about parties” message. But until that happy day, this is what we have to work with.
1. I hear Tariffs! from Dems all the time, sometimes but not always followed by a usually attention-losing explanation (some exceptions) of how tariffs are really taxes. My suggestion was just that consistently leading with Trump Import Tax would, over time, reduce the total volume of further explanation needed.
2. Because, while I noted that certainly should be the message of all “… those opposing Trump’s 19th century tariff mercantilism—including the several Republican Senators…” [though that gives Trump too much credit], it’s overwhelmingly D’s who will have to lead that messaging. We’ll know it’s starting to catch hold when we start seeing it used by Fox News and the Trump base, only after which will elected R’s dare to go there.
Did you miss the graphic I used for my last post? The post with the CNN excerpt which called the tariffs “the largest tax hike in US history”? O_o
Did you miss in the body where I spelled out Tariffs on imported goods = taxes on us following economist Prof. Richard Wolff’s explanation that a tariff is a tax?
I don’t think the message gets any simpler than that and it’s already disseminated widely. It just hasn’t yet hit Americans’ wallets, and until it does the MAGAts are going to continue to believe Trump is sticking it to every country because they’ve screwed him, I mean, us.
As for your suggestion of a third “Federal Import Tax” as a message: it’s never going to appear as a line item in working Americans’ paystubs and therefore won’t work. It also attributes the tax to the federal government and not Trump; MAGAts already don’t trust the federal government and a label like “Federal Import Tax” will only further validate their distrust. There needs to be a more comprehensive approach like guerrilla messaging on products affected most, like stickers on coffee that say, “Trump Stuck It To Brazil — And You,” or “This Price Increase Brought to You by Trump’s Tariff Tax.”
Rayne, I had been using your “the largest tax hike in US history” elsewhere. But as others pointed out, CNN based that solely on Peter Navarro’s boast that it would bring in $Six Trillion…and the assumptions behind that number, unsurprisingly, lack logic (it depends on tariffs having no impact on the current flow of imports). So, one could say ‘CNN says even Peter Navarro thinks it’s the largest tax increase in history,’ but that introduces different distractions. Staying simple and on point, I changed to the more easily validated “largest since WWII” (1942 tax increase of about $2trillion in current dollars).
As to “economist Prof. Richard Wolff’s explanation that a tariff is a tax,” it is objectively correct but not a simple message to the audience most needing to understand it. See my response to Marcy’s question #1 above. The entire point of my leading—as the base assumption—with Import Tax instead of Tariff, is that it switches the burden from economist Prof. Richard Wolff explaining that a tariff is a tax, to those who’ll now need to explain why their tariff isn’t a tax. As one old political maxim puts it, if you’re explaining, you’re losing (LBJ?).
You’re right, “Three Federal Taxes” is my weakest point. As one born and raised in MAGAnistan (it’s my mother tongue), I’m trying to put it in concepts they’re used to. The internet’s algorithmic stickiness and instant connectivity to like-minded reinforcement, go far in reducing a cognitive dissonance of Federal = Trump that would otherwise make their heads explode. And their strong distaste (I’m being gentle) for anything labeled Federal, leads me to try applying that existing distaste to Federal Import Tax. I’m still working through that.
As you say, there certainly “needs to be a more comprehensive approach.” Starting to use Import Tax instead of Tariff is not so much an end in itself, as laying the groundwork that could make all the things of a more comprehensive approach, easier. And I like your Trump Tariff Tax too, not least for the sticky alliteration.
As always, I appreciate your replies. You make me think.
“it is objectively correct but not a simple message to the audience most needing to understand it.” It is not complicated at all. You don’t need a professor to explain it. You are wasting everyone’s time.
Apparently they conflated places with internet codes, so how did they miss Bouvet Island (code .bv)? The seals and penguins want to know.
And you would have thought they might notice Shag Islet (north of Heard Island.) Guess they might have got stuck in Elephant Spit.
Because no shipping clerk has accidentally typed .bv on a bill of lading for an import from Bulgaria, which would have resulted in a 100% trade deficit for bv.
Another possible reason for the tariffs is his narcissism combined with his need for exponential retaliation for all perceived sleights. He knows the American people rejected him twice when he offered to be our supreme leader. A woman, then an old man both were preferred by millions more than he was. So he is going to attempt to destroy everything on the way out.
He also has the ability to enrich himself along the way by shorting the markets that he can control, or by cutting personal deals.
We also can’t forget the report that Marcy pointed out in Tass just after the election. About how Trump was beholden to the forces that re-installed him to power. https://tass.com/politics/1870713
I apologize for this thoroughly off-topic post, but I’m pissed-off. Today, the Orange Turd published a Presidential Proclamation for “National Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month”. Vicious ass-clown. Yup, it gets worse. “One of the leading causes of sexual violence over the last 4 years has been the invasion of illegal aliens at our southern border…” The rest of it is just too sick to copy/paste.
Also posted today, for “National Child Abuse Prevention Month, 2025”, states “Sadly, one of the most prevalent forms of child abuse facing our country today is the sinister threat of gender ideology…” Again, the rest is equally pure shite.
It is also “National Donate Life Month” and “Cancer Control Month” where, surprisingly, it must have been really hard to blame people of color or transgender people for the lack of organ donors or for causing cancer. Stephen Miller must have been affected his lab experiments to bring back Zyklon B.
The guy who is a convicted sex offender absolutely doesn’t get anything.
Yes, because he is an abuser and sadistic.
Depressed Chris,
You needn’t apologize, at least not to me. Anger and loathing toward Trump is a sign of intelligence and good character.
There’s an excellent piece in London Review of Books for April 3rd by Judith Butler about EO #14168, which order ostensibly covers gender ideology & the defense of women. Fluent and well-reasoned.
But can I imagine her or anyone else trying to make her argument to a magat? It would be like trying to have a conversation with a cockroach. You can’t converse with a language thug.
Which reminds me (sorry for veering slightly further off) of a quote from Charlotte Beradt (The Third Reich of Dreams):
“Propaganda is indifferent to legal and moral restraints. It is capable of almost anything and can make events happen whenever it needs to have them happen.”
From July 31 to Aug. 5 2024 the Dow dropped 2139 points.
Trump said this:
“STOCK MARKETS CRASHING. I TOLD YOU SO!!! KAMALA DOESN’T HAVE A CLUE. BIDEN IS SOUND ASLEEP. ALL CAUSED BY INEPT U.S. LEADERSHIP!”
From April 1 to April 4 2025 the Dow dropped 3675 points.
Trump said this:
“I think it’s going very well.”
Thank you Rayne.
Trump’s toxic tariffs, import taxes hurts countries and consumers around the world. Commerce has been around for centuries as a trade network with people sharing their goods from country to country. An energy exchange of currency allowing commerce.
Dictator Trump head of the Retaliation Regime wants followers, billionaires, law firms, universities to abide by his rules. If not be punished or get on the retaliation team to be rewarded. These tariffs are a way to shake down people through fear. A form of racketeering for extortion, money laundering and fraud.
Authoritarian con artist to dictate power over country and now the world, with no checks and balances.
No tariffs on Putin. Tariffs on penguins. No human or animal is safe from Trump’s toxic tariffs.
Oops thanks Dr. Marcy. Thanks to all at EW.
In reading the comments about trump’s motives, no one mentioned bringing manufacturing back. Perhaps everyone here knows that’s nonsense.
But it seems possible that trump believes it will happen.
In 1985, I attended a conference on statistical quality control and its use in competing with foreign low-wage makers.
One speaker was the RCA quality control guy. RCA was then the only US manufacturer of teevees. He held up a small metal clip and said RCA had gotten the cost down to 1/10th of a cent.
Suppose RCA had been able to halve the cost of those clips. That would have reduced their manufacturing costs by 1/20th of a cent.
Clearly not the way to stave off Sony, although he did not seem to think so. The following year, RCA quit making teevees.
Even if trump does not really believe that manufacturing is coming back, plenty of trumpeters do.
Manufacturing went overseas to places where labor (workers’ pay) was much cheaper.
Elon Musk and other private equity guys want workers replaced by AI and robotics (in large part because robots and AI won’t ask for raises, complain about working conditions, ask for sick leave, etc.). If manufacturing does return, it sure won’t look like it did in the halcyon days of yore. And it won’t be employing near as many humans. Of course, this will free up many to work in the physically demanding low pay, low benefits jobs vacated by the immigrants being rounded up.
First, South Carolina, then South Korea, as I wrote in an editorial in 1987 when the US tire industry committed suicide.
But automation goes ahead without trump. I learned something that astonished me this week: the man-hours per ton of steel in the US has dropped from 10 to 1 since the ’80s.
There was something else going on. Here is how my brother Tom (consultant to industry) explained it to me while we were at that statistical conference:
Consultants to industry (McKinsey, Harvard biz school etc.): ‘We’ll ship the machine tools to Taiwan, and then when American workers adjust their demands, we’ll bring them back.’ Tom’s comment: ‘When the guy in Taiwan sees that lathe is generating a million dollars a month, he’ll get his own lathe.’ And so it fell out.
My brother, now dead, loathed the Harvard School of Business.
The quote from the McKinsey consultant highlights the problem of business people who focus on one issue and don’t get the big picture.
It wasn’t just lower wages in China and elsewhere, it was also the fact that American manufacturing facilities were antiquated and China had ready made modern factories waiting for business. Why invest in new facilities? Sony and Japanese auto makers kicked ass by superior quality control. W. Edward Deming, a statistician, tried to convince American manufacturers how to improve quality control but they wanted to believe the problems of quality and efficiency was inept employees. A typical authoritarian answer. Deming said the problem is always management, it’s not the employees. The American solution was always firing. In the mean time, Japan had already taken to heart Deming’s message and evolved from making cheap tin toys to improving their manufacturing processes. They were economically desperate. Ford was making Mavericks and Pintos. Their cars were falling apart and ran poorly. Buy a Honda Civic.
Uh, nope. My spouse worked in automation for the auto industry. He put in a line for GM and almost the same exact line was installed in China a couple years later.
Within the next handful of years he worked on projects moving lines installed in the US to locations in China.
It was about more than labor costs, it wasn’t about facilities. A Chinese national with whom my spouse worked visited the US; he stood on my porch smoking a cigarette while looking at the sky overhead. He looked at me and said, “This is what I really like about the US. Your skies are so blue.”
That. Manufacturers had absolutely no intention of bringing manufacturing back here between 2000-2010 because they would have been expected to comply with environmental quality laws as well as other regulations covering workplace safety, etc. They don’t intend to return manufacturing now until Team Trump has destroyed the regulations which have kept us healthy and safe.
My parents bought a Corona in 1971, between the end of the dock strike and Nixon’s embargo on Japanese cars. It was still running in 1988, though age was catching up to it. (They paid a whole $2K for it, writing a check.) Even then US manufacturers were limiting their model lines to avoid that market.
The retreat of US manufacturing was part deliberate, part in reaction to events.
A good part of it was aging in place. Even as US Steel was formed, its (old Carnegie) plants were being left behind by the migration of industrial activity westward.
This is perhaps easier to see in a non-manufacturing business. A&P dominated the grocery sector by moving early to suburbs, but it failed to keep moving and was shoved aside by Safeway which repeated the mistake and was pushed aside by Kroger.
Another obstacle was theft. My brother was the Navy’s scientific adviser in Japan in the ’80s, tasked with keeping up with Japanese technology.
Before going, he learned to speak Japanese (Osaka dialect) but didn’t tell anyone. As a consequence, Japanese managers spoke incautiously in front of him. His conclusion: Nothing would stop Japan from stealing US (or other) technology, on the theory that using anything but the best available technology would be stupid.
A home grown failure was that US manufacturing corporations replaced founding engineers with financial wizards. This was ineveitably followed by bean-counting, slowing innovation and deliberate reductions in quality. Te most obvious example was the suicide of GM in 1953.
Much else went into the mix.
I’m always amazed at the excuses offered for offshoring by folks with little background in manufacturing.
As if GM’s “suicide” didn’t really happen in the 1980s with its investment in José Ignacio López de Arriortúa, a crook who managed to derail GM’s transition toward an emphasis on total quality management to make its products more competitive, instead sending GM on a chase for quarter-after-quarter profitability using unethical practices. The man’s become a fucking case study on bad ethics in business.
The argument that Japan would steal US technology utterly ignores how rapacious China is and has been about technology theft — and they don’t even bother to hide the discussions. In the late 1990s my spouse listened to a conversation between a US wind turbine company which thought it would both begin manufacturing in China and sell there as well. The Chinese hosts asked questions not to satisfy the turbine company, he said, but questions that were about reengineering turbines, doing so right to their guests face. Brazen, relying on American naivete and cognitive dissonance to escape notice. My spouse noticed, but he still suffered from cognitive dissonance because he still can’t believe the guy he kept seeing everywhere was a minder assigned to him while he was in China.
I’ve listened to the videos of Trump’s 1980s tariff talk previous to this go round (but have seen it popping up again on social media.) He was part of the Reagan-era pile on about how the Japanese were eating our lunch.
This time, rather than focusing on the thinking ruts in his dementia, I took a trip down memory lane, remembering all the great, fun tech we had as kids – in the 80s from Japan, and then South Korea, and probably do/could from China. Not to mention the people who got rich bringing it to us (Best Buy being one of the stories locally.)
So many of our finest engineering minds were snapped up by defense contractors.
Many of their engineers got their degrees in America. The local university sent an email out before inauguration to its overseas students encouraging them to get back to school before new rules were in place.
Tariff relief is nothing more than the Mafia’s protection racket writ large.
The penguins might be targeted for racial reasons. “They were white, then one day, they were black. Noone has ever seen anything like it.” /s
On August 7, 1974, Senator Barry Goldwater, Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott, and House Minority Leader John Rhodes met with President Richard Nixon to advise him to resign. Here’s hoping that something similar is in the works. Our country can’t stand much more of his idea of winning.
It’s going to be minority leaders this time, too. Because the GOP is, so far, not willing to tell him where to get off.
Not going to happen until it hurts Trump’s ego in some way badly enough that he wants out. Until minority or majority leaders figure out how to work the psychology of this malignant narcissist who is likely suffering from dementia, it’s not going to happen. This also assumes anybody in Team Trump handling him will let them get close enough to talk with him without inoculating him against them first.
Maybe they should figure out how to work Laura Loomer first because she clearly got inside the fence line to persuade Trump to fire the NSA director.
I can’t see how, except by tossing the entire lot into NY Harbor or Chesapeake Bay. They’re all walking egos or grifters or Not-sees.
Why are Penguins showing up as trading partners any years? Is it just the years researchers or tourists are there and need to have stuff shipped in?
Trump and his unhinged tariffocalypse doesn’t seem to make any economic sense to economists and political pundits. That’s because it isn’t supposed to.
It’s a means to compel loyalty from every business that will need to petition Trump for relief. The tariffs are DESIGNED to create economic hardship so that Trump has a straight face rationale for releasing them, business by business or industry by industry. As he adjusts or grants relief, it’s a win-win: the economy improves and dissent disappears—And once Trump has the lawyers, colleges and industry under his thumb, it becomes very difficult for the opposition to have any viable space to maneuver.
Everybody knows that Donald Trump isn’t smart enough to pour piss out of a boot, so we also know that he didn’t come up with the idea on his own—this has the unmistakable stink of the traitorous hacks of the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025. It’s the playbook for democratically-elected leaders who want to stay in power forever.
For more on this, check out Senator Chris Murphy’s overnight posts from April 2nd and 3rd on Bluesky, explaining what Trump’s tariffs are really all about. https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:y77n77kdqzhbg647blkfypyr/post/3lluxkmx7wc2m
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Here is another potential reason behind this madness. Trump and his cronies are deliberately tanking the stock market for profiteering. The goal is to force the indexes to drop a certain level (some mouthpieces have mentioned numbers like 35,000 DJIA at FOX news).
Once that threshold is breached, the messaging will change. Victories will be announced, e.g. Vietnam and India have capitulated and opened new opportunities for US imports.
In six months time, financial disclosures will show the big winners. However, there is no way to connect the dots since many traders and investors will take this downturn to invest heavily at around the same time.
Of course, this scenario assumes that no long term tariff war gets triggered. Not sure if the crooks understand the underlying risks, or they just don’t care about the amount of collateral damage.
Every time I read or hear Drumpf and his Fox puppets say “Buy the dip!” I want to explode. The average worker doesn’t have that kind of cash available (remember Bidenflation and groceries?). Oh wait, I forgot, just get another job. Work Sets You Free!
They’re also saying “Buy the dip!” without any clue where the bottom is, in spite of throwing the economy off the cliff into a chasm.
With the 2008 crash there was a bottom ahead, one they expected Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress to find in the first half of 2009. Ditto Biden exiting Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic. This time there’s no exit ahead, just free fall.
https://plowingthroughlife.com/potato-chip-dip/
MAGA dip and skin cream.
Secretary of the Treasury Bessent seems to telegraph tariff moves. If I were a short term trader,I might listen to him. Or maybe if Peter Navarro goes on tv and looks sad, buy on the dip’s tears
They should be required to disclose what dips they’re buying, other than The Felon Guy and his minions and cult members. And also what stocks *all* of them are buying.
The tariffs Trump announced certainly were entertaining. Places with no humans on them. Places with very small populations.
Tariffs on islands populated by penguins.
It made for a lot of jokes and laughs but it also high lights how dumb and lazy trump and his gang are. They could not even produce a list which is professional. Why some of these idiots in the room cater to trump is beyond me. Yes, he is the President, but its not that hard to get rid of him beyond the refusal of some politicians refusal to do so. Trump doesn’t have much to offer them and is too cheap to do so if he could.
Cruz may have finally seen an opportunity to get ahead of this mess. It might place him ahead of others to replace Trump, if the V.P. and Johnson are turfed also. who knows but it was a surprise that Cruz spoke out.
If I had to choose between Republicans or penguins I’d vote for penguins. They have a fairly peaceful family orientated society. Both parents look after the egg and chick. Parents usually find each other and unite to start their next family. There is no record of penguins starting wars, destroying the environment, shooting each other, lying to their fellow citizens. Perhaps that is why scares the Republicans about penguins.
Penguins also look very cute and adorable, something we just can’t say about any of those MAGA types.
…and they’re always impeccably dressed!
To know why Trump is threatening these tariffs you only need to know why he, at one point in his ongoing reality TV career, went on a national cable TV network and shaved Vince McMahon’s head.
It’s that simple. If every political reporter would sit down and watch all the WWE (WWF back then) broadcasts from say 2001 to 2006, they would understand so much better how Trump manipulates them.
Threatening was last week. The tariffs are now in effect.
May the damage be spectacular and painful, as Magats “touching the hot stove” seems like the only plausible way to wake them up and help America start to get out of this mess.
Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American April 4, 2025
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-4-2025
Linking to this WaPo article from 4/4 [I don’t have access to it]:
Inside Trump’s whirlwind decision to upend global trade
I’d like to know when he ever did care. I don’t remember ever seeing that. This just sounds like spin from the clown car czar or somebody among all his crazies.
I don’t think he’s cared about anyone or anything but himself since he was a toddler, and that includes all of his immediate family.
Our donald in a death spiral?
The motivations are too flagrantly nuts, and the possible interpretations so many and conflicting, that one Hands Off protestor’s sign read “There Isn’t Enough Cardboard.”
A relative at one of the demonstrations noted “I never saw so many different reasons for people to hate this administration.”
In the now-outdated expression, “in a sane world,” …. (Oh, i’m not even going to bother to finish the sentence.)
Some tariffs to consider on Trump’s MAGA merch:
China (34% – share of US imports 13.4%); on Vietnam (46%; 4.2% US imports); on Bangladesh (37%; <1% US imports)
They all make MAGA merch, apparently: https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trumps-tariffs-would-hurt-his-own-businesses-1969817
How much are MAGAs willing to pay to kowtow?
Will he bring his merch-manufacture back home?
Do the MAGAs even care?
https ://www. youtube. com/watch?v=NPpRJoYISSQ
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They’re eating the squids! They’re eating the fish… They get a Tariff!!
To me this is the funniest comment I’ve seen about tariffs on Heard Island. I think we all need a bit of a laugh before we go mad.