The Crazy Part Out Loud

It’s now the umpteenth day of Maximum Crazy, the state we’ve been in since the Trump Inauguration, and tariff rates are (temporarily) down. It means that the seals and penguins of McDonald Islands can finally stop mixing their herring slurry with Xanax. That’s the plan until the end of the week, when our orca of a president scares the hell out of them again.

It may actually help to see Trump in those terms: a savagely brutal apex predator whose hunger is intermixed with a kind of merciless vitality. There’s something about him that likes to see smaller things jump. He’s not really happy until he upends the ice floe and dumps the leopard seal into the water. At that point he downs him like a slice of sashimi, but not before looking at him straight in the eyes. It’ the fear and trembling that seems to be precious to him.

I know that because he says it himself. On any given day, there’s a different reason for tariffs. Sometimes it’s fentanyl. Sometimes its manufacturing. Sometimes it’s childcare. Sometimes its human trafficking. Sometimes its the maddening sense that unspecified others have “ripped us off.” What’s clear is that there’s no sane economic theory that would require we trash our own economy.

But what is clear is that Trump finds this deeply exciting. It’s new and shiny and everyone is looking. So he keeps it going like a toddler on a playground, caught in a loop of repetitive behavior. The fact that it involves the humiliation of his peers makes the addiction irresistible. Speaking at a dinner on Tuesday night, he exulted in the fact that countries are “kissing my ass.” The pathology here is richly revealing. Nothing delivers for him like a good round of ass-kissing.

The interesting thing is that the cracks have formed. Republicans in Congress—actual Republicans!—are beginning to wonder if Dear Leader will take them down in the Midterms. Most of the loud opportunists like Lindsey Graham have yet to say a trembling word. There must be plenty of pee-pee tapes in the cupboards at Mar-a-Lago. But there’s an interesting group of Republican True Believers who have publicly called the tariff madness into question. Watch Chuck Grassley and Jerry Moran in the days ahead. The Inert Heap may yet surprise us.