“We have the ‘water drugs’ — I call them the water drugs — they’ve been pretty much stopped,” Trump declared during the interview. “In fact, I think water fishing, I think almost anything where you have to get into a boat right now in that area would not be doing too well.”

“Basically, what we’re doing is equalizing. There’s a new word that I came up with, which is probably the best word,”

Equalize – May 2025

“You know more people tell me about groceries… the word grocery, I’ve heard it more in the last… year than any other word I think. Other than the word garbage, garbage… “

“I haven’t used the word ‘groceries.’ It’s like an old fashioned word. But really it’s not. And people understand it.”

“We have a term ‘groceries,’” “It’s an old term but it means, basically, what you’re buying, food… it’s a pretty accurate term. but it’s an old fashioned sound”.

“A bag with different things in it.”

Groceries – May 2025

“They’re not sending the good people out. They’re sending the bad people out, and they put them into caravans. I think I came up with that name,” he said, before ultimately declaring, “That was my term, and fake news and lots of other terms we came up with.”

Caravans – Trumps first term

Four months after Liberation Day, President Trump is poised to declare victory in his trade war. In July, he trumpeted his latest agreement with the E.U. as “the biggest deal ever made.”

With the reigniting of Trump’s trade war in early August, the last month has delivered a raft of trade headlines as foreign emissaries have scurried to the White House to make deals. Even if these makeshift agreements result in marked reduction from Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs, all indications point to the U.S. entering a far more protectionist era.

Ever the showman, Trump loves touting his trade war’s “success” by pointing to reopened factories and re-shored jobs. Strategically speaking, it’s brilliant retail politics. Ribbon-cutting at revived plants, flanked by dozens of smiling workers, make for great publicity.

Alas, Trump’s cunning marketing ploy has resurrected one of the oldest and most notorious myths in economics: Frédéric Bastiat’s “broken window fallacy.”

Suppose a vandal hurls a rock through a shopkeeper’s window. The shopkeeper is dismayed—this cruel stroke of luck will cost him $1,000. But a local wise guy consoles him, saying, “Actually, there’s a silver lining in this dark cloud!” The broken pane, he explains, creates a job for the local glazier. Perhaps he’ll use those hard-earned shekels to buy shoes from the local cobbler, and so on. Society is ultimately made richer from the shopkeeper’s misfortune — all thanks to the domino effect of spending triggered by two seconds of petty mischief.

t’s a nice story — but as Bastiat illustrates, it’s wildly incomplete. Had the window not been shattered, the shopkeeper could’ve spent his $1,000 on something else he valued. Perhaps he would have bought a new suit, creating income for a local tailor. Or maybe he would have bought some meat, ale, and bread for a party, creating income for the local butcher, brewer, and baker.

The fatal flaw in the wise guy’s analysis, Bastiat concludes, is confining his theory to “that which is seen” — the income earned by the glazier, the cobbler, etc. In so doing, he ignores “that which is unseen” — everything else the shopkeeper could have bought, had his window not been smashed.

Regrettably, we’ll never see what the shopkeeper would have done with that $1,000. All the products he might have bought and the jobs he might have helped create remain forever hidden in counterfactuals. All we know for certain is that society is poorer to the tune of one window.

Bastiat’s broken window fallacy wasn’t originally about tariffs, but it could have been. The logic is identical: Whether breaking windows or blocking imports, the visible gains in one sector come at the expense of unseen losses elsewhere. In the former case, resources are diverted towards less desirable uses (repairing windows). In the latter, they are diverted to less productive ones.

Should the goal of U.S. trade policy be to raise an army of millions of Americans to assemble iPhones, as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested? Not if it comes at the expense of better jobs — for example, designing iPhones. If a $25,000 assembly job displaces a $125,000 design job, Americans aren’t $25,000 richer — we’re $100,000 poorer, and plus we will be stuck paying much higher prices for iPhones. Dave Chappelle had it right: Americans want to buy iPhones, not make them.

Today’s protectionists echo this fallacy with uncanny precision. The fact that trade gets such a bad rap in American politics today is a sad testimony to this myth’s resilience. Tariffs are a clever way for politicians to smash economic windows, then brag about the jobs they create to fix them.

When Trump hails the “return” of American manufacturing thanks to his tariffs, he is cleverly drawing our attention to that which is seen: Look! New factory jobs! New, American-made products! But beware the sleight of hand. Those gains, while real for a few, come at a hidden cost to the many.

Economists often focus on the visible consequences of tariffs (higher prices). It’s an understandable instinct, since tariff surcharges are easy to point out. But Bastiat’s parable highlights the unseen consequences — difficult to measure, impossible to point to, but they’re every bit as real and destructive to the economy.

Free trade, in contrast, avoids breaking windows in the first place. Buying cheaper imports saves Americans money, which they can spend, save, and invest elsewhere in the economy. Globalization doesn’t merely give us cheap washing machines and plentiful dolls. It frees us to specialize in better, higher-paying jobs.

The result isn’t a hollowing out of the middle class or a “giant sucking sound” of jobs leaving the country — it is mass flourishing.

The Trump administration launched today’s trade war on the basis that our persistent trade deficits since 1975 constitute a “national emergency.” Yet over those 50 years, U.S. real GDP per capita has more than doubled, and the real net worth of U.S. households has more than tripled. All the while, the share of the world’s population living in poverty plummeted from 50 percent to 8.5 percent.

Trump is a brilliant escape artist. He routinely defies the laws of political gravity. But he can’t escape the laws of economics. Restricting trade doesn’t bring us prosperity, any more than paying vandals to destroy property creates wealth. All protectionism delivers is higher costs and a stagnant economy.

Scott Burns is the Charles E. Blackwell associate professor of economics at Southeastern Louisiana University. Caleb S. Fuller is an associate professor of economics in the Winklevoss School of Business at Grove City College and a Research Fellow with the Independent Institute.

Perhaps he was was sent by ‘God’, but to test you.

“‘CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!’ –President Donald J. Trump.”

Didn’t Trump say he can walk into dressing rooms and see naked girls? Didn’t he also say they couldn’t stop him because he owned the pageant?

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0

StopProject2025Comic.org by StopProject2025Comic.org is licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0

[…] The new Christian nationalism […] defines Christianity in terms of reforming external structures rather than of regenerating internal psyches. Unlike the older theological liberalisms, though, Christian nationalists seek solidarity not in the actual mitigating of human suffering but in the mostly symbolic boundary markers of taking the right amount of theatrical umbrage at culture war outrages, at having the right kind of enemies, at “owning the libs.”

The uneasy conscience of Christian nationalism pretends that our problem is the opposite of what Jesus told us: that by calling ourselves an orchard we can bring fruit from diseased trees (Matt. 7:15–20), that by controlling what is on the outside of us we can renew what is inside (Matt. 12:33–37).

This message is popular in all times; prosperity gospels and fertility religions always are. An extrinsic religion enables people to claim Christianity without following Christ and enables powerless, prayerless, porn-addicted culture warriors to convince themselves that they are goose-stepping to heaven. By assuaging our guilt with our political choices, we can convince ourselves that what we find in our new Bethel is Jacob’s ladder to heaven when it is really just Jeroboam’s calf of gold (1 Kings 12:25–31).

Nate White

“Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?” Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England wrote the following response:

A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.

Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.

Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers. And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.

There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface. Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist. Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.

And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down.

So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:

• Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.

• You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.

This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss. After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart. In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.

And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish: ‘My God… what… have… I… created?’ If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.

Over two millennia ago, a new hope was born into the world, a Savior who would offer the promise of salvation to all mankind. Just as the three wise men did on that night, this Christmas heralds a time to celebrate the good news of a new King.

On Wednesday, 21 August 2019, President Donald Trump turned, looked to heavens and proclaimed, “I am the chosen one.”