Everything is going great! On Wednesday, President Trump rolled out a slate of massive tariffs on every single country and island his administration could name—including an arctic island solely inhabited by penguins, who are now, apparently, being punished for their excess wokeness. I’m no economist, but as the bright minds at CNBC put it, this is “worse than the worst-case scenario.” Is that good???
During Trump’s speech in front of the White House, while all but guaranteeing the costs of everything are about to skyrocket, he zeroed in on one silly little topic that seems to put him in a trance every time it comes to mind: “An old fashioned term that we use: groceries. I used it on the campaign,” he said. “It’s such an old fashioned term, but a beautiful term. Groceries. It says a bag with different things in it.”
This particular snippet from Trump’s speech has since gone viral on social media, probably as a means for us to cope with how much worse our lives are about to get (excluding the ultra-rich, as always, that is). Yes, Trump’s obvious removal from reality could be an indicator of senility and mental unfitness—you know, similar to the senility and mental unfitness of the previous president, which Trump and the rest of his party refused to ever shut up about. But I’d also argue his fascination with, ahem, “groceries,” is a product of being insulated by a lifetime of massive wealth and privilege, a la Lucille Bluth. He’s never bought his own groceries or made his own meals, so, of course, the concept of doing so fills him with childlike wonder. And, yeah. He’s probably senile.
When he said he’s talked about the beautiful, “old-fashioned” concept of groceries before? He wasn’t wrong! Just last week: “The cost of groceries, a word that I used a lot on the campaign. It’s like an old-fashioned word, but it’s a beautiful word, a very descriptive word,” he said at a Women’s History Month event. The day before, at the White House: “I inherited a groceries situation. The groceries went way up. An old-fashioned word, it’s a very descriptive word.” Hours after that speech, during an interview on the far-right news network Newsmax: “I have used the word groceries. It’s like an old-fashioned word, but really it’s not, and people understand it.” But IMO, there’s no topping his invocation of groceries during a campaign stop in October, which came off more like a slam poetry reading: “The word ‘grocery.’ It’s sort of a simple word. But it sort of means like, everything you eat. The stomach is speaking. It always does.”
The stomach is, indeed, always speaking—I wonder if Trump’s stomach is what told him to slap a fat 54% tariff on China and inevitably crash the global economy??? Actually, it seems more likely this came from JD Vance, the most disliked vice president in U.S. history, who’s long parroted nakedly white supremacist conspiracy theories about “globalism” and the need for the U.S. to cultivate an isolationist economy. Tariffs are “a big change,” Vance conceded on Fox News on Wednesday—but they’re important to dismantle the “globalist economy.” Well, as long as Vance and his five best friends on 4Chan are best pleased, who needs a job??? Who needs “groceries”???
It seems tariffs that threaten to tank, well, everything, are the first action from Trump that has at least a couple of Republicans riled up. On Wednesday night, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) warned that the tariffs could have massive political ramifications for the GOP: “When McKinley most famously put tariffs on in 1890, they lost 50% of their seats… In the early 1930s, we lost the House and Senate for 60 years. So, [they’re] not only bad economically, they are bad politically.”
Some Republicans like Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville have given away the game, shrugging that tariffs will cause a “slow pain” before there’s any “gain.” Other GOP talking heads have often acknowledged tariffs will cause “disturbance” and “blips” of economic growing pain. Trump, himself, said over the weekend that he “couldn’t care less” about tariffs sharply increasing the cost of cars; before that, in March, he re-shared posts on social media telling Americans to “shut up about egg prices.” Suffice it to say, someone whose wealth has so shielded him from reality that groceries astound him like a small child entranced by jangling keys does not have our best interests at heart.
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