Look, I am second to none in my loathing of tariffs, and the stupid things the administration is doing to make up for the stupid tariffs. But this is not some crazy departure from how normal government policy works. This *is* how normal government policy works.
Enact some policy to "fix" a "market failure". Realize your simplistic mental model of how that market worked was a trifle incomplete, so now stuff is breaking, and voters are mad. Start doing a bunch of other random stuff to try to unbreak the market & unmad the voters.
Remember Obamacare? Yeah, like that. This is about the most normal thing this administration has done.
It's bog standard government stupidity. It should be covered as bog standard government stupidity.
Save Defcon 1 for sucking up to Russia and threatening the independence of the press.
Seriously, all the stuff you think is some CRAZY NEW THING Trump invented--like justifying farm interventions on national security grounds--has a rich and storied history in America's absurd tradition of giving ludicrous subsidies to farmers.
As for being mad about Trump's use of executive orders--c'mon. Unless you were protesting all the stuff Obama did by executive order, this does not carry the ring of true outrage. With Obamacare, much of the stuff he did was even less arguably legal.
It is fair to say that the tariffs were bad policy, and this is also bad policy. But maybe hold off on implying that we're one step away from the fall of the Republic.
