1984, Idiocracy version
Trump is like Big Brother if Big Brother were an incompetent buffoon.
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This week, Donald Trump arbitrarily raised tariffs on Canada because the Canadian government dared to point out that Ronald Reagan did not support tariffs.
This latest dustup with our neighbor to the north isn’t as grimly horrible as the federal government’s ongoing campaign of kidnapping and terror in Chicago, Portland, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. Nor is it as symbolically arresting as the literal destruction of the White House. But it is nonetheless a powerful demonstration of the administration’s bizarre and idiosyncratic hybridization of fascism and incompetence.
Trump’s attempt to erase and rewrite history is preposterously bumbling. It’s as if instead of saying “we have always been at war with Eurasia,” Big Brother insisted “we have always stuffed rotten salmon up our nose until we vomit! Stuff the salmon up your nose! Do it! Do it now! Or suffer the consequences!”
Indeed, it’s difficult to overstate just how foolish and damaging Trump’s tariff policies are, not least now that those policies include massive tax hikes on Americans when global leaders fail to lie about Ronald Reagan.
Reagan’s posthumous rebuke
Trump regularly lies that tariffs are paid by the countries against which they are levied rather than by US consumers. Since he views them as a way to force other nations to give him money for a patronage slush fund, he’s spent the first year of his second term launching a withering trade war against everyone on earth — including Canada, an ally he alienated right out of the gate with his talk of annexation and “the 51st state.”
Canada has faced tariffs of between 25 percent and 35 percent on a range of goods. Trump has justified these rates as punishment for Canada failing to stop fentanyl from coming into the US — never mind that fentanyl coming across the Canadian border comprises a negligible portion of the drug entering the US.
As a result of Trump’s actions, Canadian consumers are experiencing higher prices on appliances, cars, groceries, and housing. In the US, meanwhile, tariffs are costing households an average of $2,400 a year. They’re also devastating beef and soybean industries, to name only two sectors.
In an effort to inform US consumers of just how badly their orange idiot king is harming them, Ontario this month ran an ad during the World Series explaining the downsides of tariffs. The spot includes audio taken from an April 25, 1987, radio address by Ronald Reagan.
“Over the long run such trade barriers hurt every American worker and consumer,” Reagan says in the ad. “High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation … and the triggering of fierce trade wars. Then the worst happens; markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industries shut down, and millions of people lose their jobs.”
Trump, predictably, threw a tantrum. He severed trade talks with Canada and raised tariffs on the country by another 10 percent.
On Truth Social he called the ad “fake” and babbled, “CANADA CHEATED AND GOT CAUGHT!!! They fraudulently took a big buy ad saying that Ronald Reagan did not like Tariffs, when actually he LOVED TARIFFS FOR OUR COUNTRY, AND ITS NATIONAL SECURITY.″
Trump even went as far as to lie that the ad “was AI or something.”
The Ronald Reagan Foundation — in a now familiar tradition of elite capitulation — rushed to debase itself by cosigning Trump’s nonsense, arguing that the ad “misrepresents” Reagan’s views. But while it does rearrange the order of some of Reagan’s statements, it does not misrepresent them. It even includes Reagan’s argument that judicious tariffs can sometimes be effective for a brief time.
“Minute by minute the past was brought up to date”
The Reagan Foundation is trying to do for Trump what Winston Smith did for Big Brother in George Orwell’s “1984” by rewriting history and memory-holing inconvenient facts — in this case Reagan’s enthusiastic support for free trade.
Instead of educating people about Reagan — the usual goal of a presidential foundation — the Reagan Foundation bent the knee and is trying to change truth and history in order to support the ideological whims of the current regime.
Orwell explains the tactic in his classic book:
Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.
Orwell emphasizes the totalizing power of Big Brother and the seamlessness of historical revisionism. But Trump, unfortunately for him, does not have anywhere near this level of influence or power, even with the aid of the lickspittles at the Reagan Foundation.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford pulled the ad in part to help restart trade negotiations. But, he pointed out, he’d accomplished his goal of reminding Americans what Reagan had said about tariffs and why.
“They’re talking about it in the US, and they weren’t talking about it before I put the ad on,” Ford said.
Trump’s effort to bring the past up to date shows, chillingly, just how much he wants to be Big Brother. But it also underlines how far he falls short. He can perhaps silence and subvert the Reagan Foundation. But he can’t silence and subvert Canadian leaders, who are accountable to an electorate which loathes Trump and sees trolling him as a positive good.
Similarly, Trump has not been able to force US voters to join him in doublethink. Trump insists that grocery prices are “way down,” but that’s an obvious lie, and Americans overwhelmingly are aware of that. According to polling analyst G. Elliott Morris, Trump’s approval on inflation/cost of living is a brutal -25; on trade he is -15. His approval overall is 41.7 approve/54.2 disapprove, putting him underwater by 13 points.
Those are the worst numbers for a president in this point in their term in the polling era — with the singular exception of Trump in his first term.
Big Brother is watching himself pratfall
Trump is attempting to gaslight people into thinking Reagan loved tariffs in the face of clear, unambiguous evidence that Reagan did not love tariffs. And this egregious lie is in service of a policy that is massively unpopular, and which is — even more importantly — hurting the US economy.
In addition to price increases, Trump’s tariffs have weakened the job market, just as Reagan said they would. The US lost 32,000 private sector jobs in September. And of course, Trump is helming a lengthy government shutdown that will cause further damage, especially as he promises to eliminate thousands of government jobs and cruelly ends SNAP benefits which 42 million Americans rely on for nutrition assistance.
Orwell imagined a world in which government manipulation of media was so thorough and omnipresent that people had no way to muster skepticism. If they were starving and the government said there was enough to eat, they believed there was enough to eat. If prices went up and the government said that prices had gone down, they believed that prices had gone down.
We, luckily, do not live in that world — at least not yet. Despite the ever-increasing servility of the American media, many people (and not just in the US!) are willing, able, and even eager to point out that Trump’s lies are lies. Despite Trump’s desperate efforts to convince people that his tariff bowel movements smell like sunshine and roses, a large majority of Americans are not enjoying the bouquet of rising prices when they go to the grocery store.
Truth isn’t quite dead, which means, maybe, if we’re lucky, and perhaps with Canada’s help, a better US is still possible.
That’s it for today
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This isn’t just policy incoherence. It’s Idiocracy in real time…a satire of a movie that was already a satire.
Tariffs as tantrum. Media as megaphone. Governance as grievance performance.
What we’re watching isn’t fascism with discipline…it’s pseudo-fascism with a short attention span, dressed in nostalgia and weaponized incompetence.
The Reagan reference isn’t about economics. It’s about erasing memory.
The White House destruction isn’t symbolic. It’s behavioral conditioning.
And the media’s servility isn’t accidental. It’s part of the choreography and designed to simulate dissent while absorbing it.
Truth isn’t dead. It’s being outperformed.
And the spectacle isn’t failing. It’s functioning exactly as intended.
— Johan
Behavioral and Foreign Service background
Republicans stick together even when they’re knee deep in bullshit. 🙄