Yes, California and its urban satraps are a collection of lefty clown shows. Lefty clown troupes are popular in the state, until something happens to burn the place down or their neighborhoods deteriorate into a hellscape. Yet, their popularity may not dim even then. For the rest of us viewing the scene from the outside, charred mountainsides and home tracts and the nihilistic urban encampments aren’t exactly a come-hither look for the state.
Clown shows are popular in other places. The foreign policy clown show of Donald Trump has taken over the executive branch, and California-level chaos will be visited upon the rest of the world and us through the naïveté of a real estate developer (Trump) and his real estate lawyer sidekick (Witkoff), and a supporting cast of others in face paint. Today, clowns are trendy on both the Left and Right.
Why are we attracted to clownish political leaders in this day and age? Interesting question, and one with an answer. Clowns are what the crazies in the parties’ bases will give us. Democrats are doubling down on transgenderism (XY girls in XX girls’ spaces, teenage genital mutilation, etc.) and neo-Marxist class war and eco-totalitarianism. Republicans are busy twisting themselves in knots justifying a trade war and the unraveling of our alliances and an appeasement push. Replacing one set of clowns for another will alternatively give us a ravaged way of life at home and a world debilitated by a weakened America standing alone, isolated.
The venerable Thomas Sowell warned us in 2015: “What is even more remarkable is that, after six years of repeated disasters, both domestically and internationally, under a glib egomaniac in the White House [Obama], so many potential voters are turning to another glib egomaniac to be his successor [Trump].” (See #2)
Today, Trump is on the run to catch up with his 2024 campaign rhetoric. On the trail, he declared that he’ll solve the Ukraine War in 24 hours. He backtracked. Earlier this month, he admitted (see #1), “Well, I was being a little bit sarcastic when I said that.” Do ya think!? We’re entering the third month of that pledge. How’s he going to achieve it in whatever time scale? By the only means at hand: bullying the Ukrainians into making concessions and pandering to Putin. We used to call that appeasement. That old and threadbare cliché, “Some take Trump seriously, others take him literally”, is banality devoid of any real meaning. He is now president and he is blundering.
Trump’s real estate lawyer pal Steve Witkoff – Yes, real estate lawyer! – is active in the Gaza and Ukraine theaters. Being a lawyer, and Trump being a developer, both see the world as transactional: you get something, I get something. Of course, their transactional experiences of life occurred in the padded romper room of American rule of law, of tort and bankruptcy laws. However, the big wide world isn’t so accommodating, or as predictable. If you apply the bargaining approach of New York contractors to the world’s thugs, miscreants, and naked aggressors, you’ve just taken a blow torch to rectitude. For instance, to Stalin in the 1930s, we’ll give you 3 million Ukrainians (the 1930s Holodomor) and diplomatic recognition in return for trade concessions for American exports. It boggles the mind.
Witkoff recently confessed to his gullibility about Hamas, gullible about the ways of the world outside the cocoon of American corporate law. On Fox News Sunday (3/23/2025), he said about Hamas in the Doha talks, “I thought we had a deal, an acceptable deal. I even — I even thought we had an approval from Hamas, maybe that’s just me getting — getting, you know, duped . . .”. Try not to forget that Hamas are the same people who hunted down over 1,200 Israelis, murdering, raping, torturing men, women, children, the young and old, anyone who happened to be in the way, taking hundreds as hostages, many to die mercilessly in captivity. Negotiations at this point devolve into how much will Hamas get away with.
Bewilderingly, Witkoff is willing to admit to being “duped” by Hamas but not by Putin. On Putin, Witkoff takes on the role of Lenin’s “useful idiot”. He sounds like the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens after visiting the Soviet Union in 1919: “I have seen the Future [sic] and it works.”
In an interview with Shannon Bream of Fox News, Witkoff said about Putin (see #2), “I feel that he wants peace.” Once again, try not to forget that Putin has interfered in Ukraine for decades, attempted assassinations of Ukrainian leaders, subdued two provinces in the east of the country, seized Crimea in 2014, and in 2022 tried to decapitate the country’s government and conquer the rest. Come to think of it, Putin is busy constructing a Russian Third Reich – the czars, the USSR, and now Putin’s Russian Empire. History is highly instructive here. Third Reiches are hard to pacify without giving away the store.
The ploy requires “useful idiots”, American “useful idiots”. Trump brands Zelensky a “dictator”, who by the way was elected and functions with a duly elected parliament, badgers him in the White House, and strangles the victim with a cut-off of intelligence sharing and arms. Trump continues to call Putin “a man of peace” and in the past has called him a “genius” and “saavy”. Outlandishly, he blamed Ukraine for starting the war. The UK’s Boris Johnson’s retort was succinct (see #5):
“Of course Ukraine didn’t start the war. You might as well say that America attacked Japan at Pearl Harbor.”
Putin’s poodle, indeed. This isn’t bargaining with union bosses or local politicos for a rezone, all operating within the context of law, DAs, grand juries, and the courts. Bluntly put, Trump is running way outside his lane.
What Trump and his coterie are bringing to foreign policy they promise for international trade and our alliances. Trump’s schtick is American victimhood. In Trump’s fevered imagination, we are the patsies of the world, as if we get nothing out of the deal, as if 20-25% of the world’s GDP means nothing. He peddles the “trade deficit” as if it is a form of fiscal calamity. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s a numerical concoction with very little bearing on the state of the economy. It’s the kind of thing that a halfwit peddles because he doesn’t know any better.
But it provides great cover for his cherished tariffs. Tariffs are like a safe space for a drunk to drink themselves into an early grave. They allow us to blame others without taking stock of our own malfeasance in the diminishment of certain sectors of our economy (manufacturing and the primary industries). The Rust Belt became rusty when American labor laws empowered our avaricious labor unions to cannibalize the very companies that they rely on for their paychecks.
Companies fled Big Labor’s garroting by doing what Californians have been doing for the past few decades, fleeing. In this context, fight or flight leads to flight, flight to right-to-work states or more accommodating foreign lands. Michigan’s loss is Tennessee’s gain. Anywhere looks better than the mailed fist of a blue state’s lefty hive and Big Labor hegemons. Understandably, trying to coax foreign companies into our snake pit will be met with mostly blank stares.
Fetid water is poured into the open wound in the form of eco-zealotry and their attendant administrative state. Not only that, but waiting in the wings are our armies of lefty social revolutionaries chomping at the bit to impose their designs on a company’s workplaces.
Trump’s beloved tariffs mask the reality of our own policy misconduct. Here again, we have the esteemed economist Thomas Sowell commenting on Trump’s first go-around with tariffs in a 2018 interview with Thomas Hazlett of Reason Magazine (see #6):
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Hazlett: Thoughts on the Trump trade war?
Sowell: Oh my gosh, an utter disaster. I happen to believe that the Smoot-Hawley tariffs had more to do with setting off the Great Depression of the 1930s than the stock market crash. Unemployment never reached double digits in any of the 12 months that followed the crash of October 1929, but it hit double digits within six months of passage of Smoot-Hawley, and stayed there for a decade.
Hazlett: What about the view by President Trump that other countries are ripping us off by running trade surpluses?
Sowell: It’s pathetic. The very phrase “trade surpluses” gives half a story. There are countries that supply mainly goods, physical goods, and there are other things like services that other countries provide, and the United States gets a lot of money from providing services. To talk about one part of the trading and ignore the other part fails to understand that money is money no matter whether it’s from goods or services.
When you set off a trade war, like any other war, you have no idea how that’s going to end. You’re going to be blindsided by all kinds of consequences. You do not make America great again by raising the price to Americans, which is what a tariff does.
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All of a sudden, shape-shifting, free-trade Republicans take on the protectionist mantle of Reed Smoot and Willis C. Hawley (Smoot-Hawley Tariff) or the failed 1890 McKinley Tariff, which had to be repealed in a short eight years. A boisterous firebrand takes over the party, has an avid clique of fans in the base, and the rest of the leadership is intimidated into submission. It’s awful to watch.
The absurdity reaches new depths in the plagiarizing of the Democrats, of the Joe Biden claque – yes, that Joe Biden, “Slow Joe” in Trump’s words. Well, “Slow Joe” Trump stole the Democrats’ argument for his automotive tariffs.
“Emergencies” are great way to shoehorn tariffs into law, while, better yet, wrapping them up in “national security”. Biden used the Defense Production Act to impose much of the Green New Deal. Trump’s choice is the national security provisions of Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act to tariff-bash automotive imports. Either way, whether it be Biden’s greenie infatuations or Trump’s obsession with American victimhood, the purpose of the law in its plain language shouldn’t be allowed to get in the way of a policy fetish.
To Biden, or whoever ghost-wrote his apologia, the actual suicide pill of the Green New Deal was a matter of national survival. Huh? Yeah, go figure. Trump turns around and pushes automobile tariffs as the Strategic Air Command of national defense when the report above his signature claimed (see #7), “. . . automobiles and certain automobile parts are being imported into the United States in such quantities and under such circumstances as to threaten to impair the national security of the United States.” Get that? Affordable cars and affordable parts are the equivalent of Russian nukes aimed at us in first-strike numbers. Can it get any crazier?
But it does. Trump and his people ritually bash Biden and, at the same time, use Biden’s people to scratch their tariff itch. They cite a 2023 U.S. International Trade Commission report to try and paint Trump’s tariffs as a boon to the U.S. economy (see #7). Of course, missing from the Trump memo was the Biden report’s evidence of greater losses in related industries. Economists, no matter their orientation, can’t completely ignore the concept of trade-offs. But Trump can, and often does.
Trump doesn’t shirk from using the propaganda ministries of the Left to advance his agenda of American victimhood. Maybe that’s because Trump is part leftist, that being his desire to direct the economy and everyone in it according to his likes. So, he grabs Big Labor’s mouthpiece in the Economic Policy Institute, long a booster of tariffs and ally of today’s neo-socialist Democratic Party, to refute the charge of an inflationary impact of tariffs (see #7). It’s nonsense. Tariffs raise prices in the affected industries, and sap resources and depress activity in other parts of the economy. They distort the economy to the benefit of small groups and spread harm to many others. One goes up, many others go down. Trump’s 2018 tariffs on aluminum and steel were a boon to the United Steelworkers union but wreaked havoc on many more workers in American automotive, appliance, and fabricator plants.
Amazingly, Trump uses Biden’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen as an authoritative source (see #7). She tried to justify Biden’s tariffs as Trump is doing the same when she said, “I don’t believe that American consumers will see any meaningful increase in the prices that they face.” Trump can’t decide if Democrats were a disaster or a beacon of truth.
America under Trump is coaxed into Alice’s Wonderland and down the rabbit hole. Thugs are “peaceful” and “geniuses” and fellow friendly and humane democracies are “dictatorships” and “starters” of wars. Foreigners ought not do business with us. Woe be to them if they should ever achieve a trade surplus with us. They’ll be quickly relegated to the ranks of exploiters and victimizers and subject to punishment.
The whole thing is a clown show, and not befitting of a great power.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Trump says he was ‘being a little bit sarcastic’ when he promised to end Ukraine war in 24 hours”, Sarah Fortinsky, The Hill, 3/16/2025, at https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5197961-trump-says-he-was-being-a-little-bit-sarcastic-when-he-promised-to-end-ukraine-war-in-24-hours/
2. “Trump Envoy: Hamas ‘Duped’ Me; ‘I Don’t Consider Putin a Bad Guy’”, Jim Geraghty, National Review, 3/24/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trump-envoy-hamas-duped-me-i-dont-consider-putin-a-bad-guy/
3. “Why Have Elections?”, Thomas Sowell, Townhall, 9/15/2015, at https://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2015/09/15/why-have-elections-n2052085
4. Don’t forget the vile Trump post about Zelenskyy and Ukraine on Truth Social from Feb. 2025. You can read it here: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114031332924234939
5. “Trump Called ‘Putin’s Poodle’ as European Media Decries Ukraine Remarks”, Newsweek, 2/20/2025, at https://www.newsweek.com/trump-putin-european-media-decries-ukraine-remarks-2033772
6. “Thomas Sowell Returns”, Thomas W. Hazlett, Reason Magazine, December 2018 issue, at https://reason.com/2018/11/26/thomas-sowell-returns/?utm_medium=email
7. “Trump’s Bidenesque ‘Fact Sheet’ on Tariffs”, Dominic Pino, National Review, 3/27/2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trumps-bidenesque-fact-sheet-on-tariffs/