Hello and welcome. As a good American, my mood tracks the stock market, which is to say I feel muddled, stuck, kind of okay, but also ready to collapse.
→ Yippy: After tariffs officially set in, hitting a 100-year high this week, Trump finally blinked. He blamed Americans for getting “yippy” and “afraid.” And so the tariffs are paused, except a blanket 10 percent, and then of course a huge one just on China, which makes sense! In the end, did it all work out well? The EU has suspended its retaliatory tariffs on the U.S. now (though they say they offered Trump “zero for zero” tariffs before this all started). White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt reminded the press that “Many of you in the media clearly missed The Art of the Deal.” I’m loosely pro-tariffs, and even I was a little confused by the last two weeks. Americans were getting too yippy, and per the White House, they should have trusted Trump all along. Or as they put it, let Trump cook. He’s having fun! So he got a little freaky with the math. Like you’ve never calculated a tip wrong under pressure.
But we mere civilians could not handle the Stress of the Deal. We had to live with ambiguity, like this Financial Times explainer: “Trump tried to resolve confusion over whether the U.S. would negotiate its tariffs away on Monday by saying U.S. tariffs could be permanent, but also subject to negotiation.” Permanent, but also subject to negotiation. Like when I say this is the last episode of Reacher I will be watching tonight—for sure.
J.D. Vance—who I feel like is always yelling at me and calling me a childless cat lady, even though I really do have children and a dog—put it this way: “It’s bizarre to see all the limousine socialists screech desperately for dependence on Chinese supply chains and inflated equities.”
Inflated equities. That’s J.D. saying the stock market’s too high—grade inflation, but it’s your retirement savings. Which is a thing that smart people (yes, J.D. is smart and has beautiful eyes) love to say. All the smart people I know love to say, “We’re due for a correction,” and they are right, in the same way that San Franciscans build on a fault line and then nod at each other and say, “We’re due for a big one.” But as a dumb person with money in the stock market, let me retort with: no. It’s not too high. It should go higher. I want my equities to be like my ego (inflated).
And to add salt to the wound, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent explained to Maine lobsterman Tucker Carlson that all the unemployed government workers whose savings Trump decimated can now get jobs working in the new American factories, using their hands to labor, like Scotty and Tuck do. Scott’s hands? They’re more calloused than a Harvard rower’s. “The president is reordering trade,” he said. “We are shedding excess labor in the federal government and bringing down federal borrowings. And then on the other side that will give us the labor that we need for the new manufacturing.” Okay, in a kind of Pol Pot “punish your enemies with labor camps” way, the idea of making the lockdown fanatics and government-bloaters become factory workers does have an emotional appeal. It does. But I don’t think we have enough forever-maskers to pull it off.
Meanwhile, the masculine virtue of factory work became a major talking point all week. Here’s Fox News’ Jesse Watters: “When you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman. Studies have shown this. Studies have shown this. And if you’re out working. . . you are around other guys. You’re not around HR ladies and lawyers that give you estrogen.” I see where this is going: Ban men from taking office jobs because they’re a form of gender-affirming care. I love that these guys imagine all factory workers as these oil-covered men standing astride a car, rather than hunched over sewing the same stitch in a thousand Spanx for some HR lady to wear while she turns you into a woman with her estrogen. I love the idea that there aren’t lawyers in manufacturing. You know what it is? It’s how gays in New York imagine factory work (heavy lifting, sweaty, proud), and I love Jesse for this, even though his visions, of course, prove he’s spent too much time in an office. Never show these boys a Bangladeshi factory line and ruin the sinewy, masculine fantasy. As Dan Savage says, don’t yuck someone else’s yum.
Chiming in on the factory work fetish is—who else?—former gay-turned-antigay Milo Yiannopoulos: “Men are depressed and addicted and broken because they have nothing to do. They get no stimulation or satisfaction from BS email jobs. I’m telling you, white Americans will love working in factories again. Making things, in the image and likeness of God the Maker.” Let me tell you: The image of God is not in the microscopic iPhone screw you’ll be mastering until your eyes burn out, Milo. Installing airbags until your elbows give out is—well, that one’s maybe in His image.
Trump, a man who famously toils with his hands, explained that people yearn to labor and love the mines. Miners never want to leave the mines, and once Americans get a taste of mining, they’ll love it too. “You could give ’em a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and a different kind of a job and they’d be unhappy. They want to mine coal, that’s what they love to do,” Trump said this week.
You don’t really want to be a product manager emailing all day, like a woman, buying cheap stuff on Amazon, like a baby. Having a salad in the break room like some kind of female. You want to work on a factory line, like a man. You want to barter for food with shoelaces, like a man. You want to lose fingers and have long scars from when Toby (he/they) forgot to lockout/tagout the gear that day. You want to be so covered in coal dust that Toby tells on you for wearing blackface.
→ Peter Retarrdo: Advising the president on tariffs has been one Peter Navarro, an old-school degrowther who once ran for office as a progressive against “developers.” Elon Musk called him “truly a moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks.” Yet somehow, in a fight with Musk, Peter Navarro won the day, I assume by telling Elon there was a cool new drone right outside on the lawn. I love this from The Wall Street Journal: “Mr. Navarro denied a rift between them. But then Mr. Musk called him ‘Peter Retarrdo.’ ”
Musk came out strongly against the tariffs, and he clearly lost in the short-term to Retarrdo (which, by the way, is a great slight in Italian). But maybe he won in the long-term with the tariff pause? By the time you’re reading this it could all be reversed and we’ll be doing 100 percent tariffs on Madagascar again.
In Musk’s defense, Navarro’s books have often cited an economist named Ron Vara, who is entirely made up. It’s just an imaginary friend Navarro uses in arguments, created through an anagram of his last name. So he earned his nickname.
