dumbest president ever just tariffed an island of penguins

‘they hate us for our beef’

everyone knows that penguins have been taking advantage of us forever. those tuxedo-wearing motherfuckers are so smug. ‘look at us, we’re formal.’ big fucking deal, no one’s impressed. what are you dressed up for? you don’t have anywhere to go. you don’t even have real wings. eat tariffs, you fucking parasites.

Mad King Donny just levied tariffs on an island inhabited solely by penguins. sounds like something only a crazypants imbecile would do, right?

well, there you go.

so, Donny’s done gone and done it. he went ahead with his “liberation day” of reckless and ruinous tariffs — and, because Donny is Donny, he did it in the most capricious and incoherent way possible, slapping a different, seemingly-random percentage on every county in the world.

oh wait — not on every country in the world. Russia didn’t get tariffs. that’s pretty weird, isn’t it? probably just an innocent oversight, I’m sure.

did you have Sundowning Grandpa Befuddlepants once again free-associating about groceries on your Batshit Bingo card? well, bucko, then you won.

“likewise, an old-fashioned term that we use: groceries. I used it on the campaign. it's such an old fashioned term, but a beautiful term. groceries. it says a bag with different things in it.”

for the umpteenth time, Donny soliloquizes over his bizarre fascination with the world ‘groceries.’ he keeps imagining that groceries is some long-forgotten word that he plucked from Merriam-Webster’s shitpile and gifted back to us — and this time, he provides a definition: it’s ‘a bag with different things in it.’

thanks alot, Professor Doofus. we had no idea.

we’re in Grandpa Simpson tying an onion to his belt because it was the style at the time territory.

Donny wasn’t the only blithering dingus gracing the airwaves yesterday.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — the psychopath billionaire who had been muzzled after he said it was no big deal if grandma’s Social Security check fails to arrive — was let out of his gilded doghouse long enough to show up on Fox and make an utter jackass of himself.

“I mean, the European Union won’t take chicken from America. they won’t take lobsters from America, they hate our beef, because our beef is beautiful, and theirs is weak.”

great. in twenty-five years, we’ve gone from ‘they hate us for our freedoms’ to ‘they hate us for our beef.’ I guess that’s progress.

hey, maybe that’s why the penguins got tariffs. those fuckers won’t eat our beautiful beef.

here’s a fun fact: Donny waited until after the markets closed to make his announcement. what was the logic here? did he somehow imagine he was going to slip his world-economy-destroying policies past the markets? that somehow they wouldn’t notice, because it was after 4pm?

as if, dumb-ass.

futures plummeted the second Donny went on TV and opened his fat yap.

the longer he gibbered, the faster they fell.

Dow futures plummeted more than 1,100 points, or 2.7%. S&P 500 futures sank 3.9%. Futures tied to the Nasdaq 100 plunged 4.7%.

US stocks had closed higher Wednesday afternoon ahead of Trump’s announcement on tariffs, but a selloff began as he unveiled his plan, holding up a chart that depicted how rates would increase for each country.

hey, tell me if CNBC sounds terrified of what’s to come.

“market reacion after hours, I’ve never seen anything like it. this, I think it’s fair to say, is worse than the worst case scenario of the tariffs that many in the market expected the president to impose.”

worse than the worse case scenario, is that bad?

“you laid out a number of the percentages there, and there’s some question of how the administration calculated the percentages they’re responding to in each of these cases.”

that was the question on everyone’s mind: where the fuck did President Yap Yap come up with these cockamamie numbers? well, apparently, Team Donny took America’s trade deficit with each country, cut that number in half, and called it a “reciprocal tariff.”

ok, but when Donny’s team of economic brainiacs got to Heard and McDonald Islands, by what insane fever dream did they calculate a ten percent tariff? because it’s in the middle of the Antarctic — and, as noted at the top of this post, is inhabited only by pengiuns.

how are we generating a trade imbalance with penguins, for fuck’s sake?

because I’ve seen penguins in the zoo. you throw a fish at them, they catch it in mid-air and swallow it down — and then they waddle around, hoping for more. that’s it. that’s their whole deal. it’s an economy based on free fish.

and pray tell, why the fuck did they slap an 10% tariff on the British Indian Ocean Territory? because the only thing there is a US military base. these morons just tariffed their own soldiers.

they also slapped a 10% tariff on these people.

this is the meteorological station of the Arctic Sea island of Jan Mayan. it’s a small Norwegian island with no permanent residents. something like 18 researchers work there. they don’t have an economy.

here’s the infuriating thing: Congress could put an end to this fuckery in a heartbeat, if they cared to. because like executive orders, tariffs-by-presidential decree aren’t actual laws. Donny is imposing his tariffs by using an insanely-broad interpretation of the emergency powers a president is granted when there is “a threat to national security.”

yeah, those fucking penguins are a real threat to national security — as are our own soldiers in the British Indian Ocean.

fun fact: Congress could revoke those emergency powers any time they wanted to. in fact, the Senate did exactly that, just yesterday.

four Republicans — Rand Paul, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and Glitch McTurtlehump — joined with Democrats to shitcan the tariffs on Canada.

this effort will no doubt die when it gets to the House — the MAGA majority there won’t lift a finger because the cultists just want to watch everything burn to the ground — but the point is that it’s possible.

just as with Donny’s executive orders, his tariffs are being treated as law only because Congress has abdicated their responsibility to y’know, be a co-equal branch of government.

five months ago, The Economist literally describe the American economy as “the envy of the world.”

this morning, however, markets around the world are in free-fall because America’s voters handed the keys to the world’s largest economy to a low-wattage imbecile who went broke running casinos.

why didn’t anyone warn us that this would happen? oh wait, someone did.

enjoy this supercut of the numerous times Kamala Harris spoke of the dangers of Donny’s tariff policies.

buckle in, because the serial failure who literally could not sell water in the middle of a desert has once again spun the Big Wheel of Economic Stupid — and where it stops, nobody knows.

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here’s your daily reminder that I can be found on Blue Sky at this link.

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this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.