A surreal Sunday, from a real un-POTUS

Yesterday, Fox News' Maria Barfaroma introduced a hard-hitting interview with America's Russian commander in chief and 18th-century macroeconomics wizard with an otherworldly observation: "Look, I know that you inherited a mess."

Thus did Miss B. pre-justify the nation's soon-inescapable pyroclast caused by his sorcerous detonation of President Biden's thriving economy with a megatonnage of mercantilist stupidity: "Are you expecting a recession this year?" Trump answered that he really "hate[s] to predict things like that," which he promptly did. "There is a period of transition," he said. (Note not the euphemism for recession, but the conditional's absence.)

Is Alfred E. "worried about a recession?" This he was asked later on Air Force One. His initial response was a singular truth: All I know is this. And the one thing he honestly knows? "We’re going to take in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs and we’re going to become so rich, you’re not going to know where to spend the money."

Though truthful Mr. Trump was, he nevertheless omitted a couple of items. American consumers and the businesses from which they buy — those domestic enterprises that must pay his import taxes, not the exporters — will shell out hundreds of billions of dollars to America's kakistocracy so that Stubby Don (see: Stormy Daniels' rather intimate testimony) and his fellow kleptocrats can become so rich, they’re not going to know where to spend the money." (Well, maybe in Gaza, post-eviction notices to Gazans.)

But, I hear the lowest-information crowd cry, there must be some empirically valid foundation undergirding the atavistic autocrat's Kierkegaardian faith in bankrupting U.S. consumers so that they are enriched beyond imaginative profligacy. So let's check it out.

In Trump's Fox News interview he reviewed the earlier success of it all, beginning with the prodigious lie that in 2018 his tariff "deal" with China forced it to "buy $50 billion worth of products" from Americans farmers — "$50 billion," he stressed, "from 15." With that, Miss B. dutifully followed up, sans following up: "Did they follow up and do it?" Trump: "They did it when I was president."

It seems China's amiable dictator, Xi Pinjing, did so as a "favor" to today's American dictator, said the latter. But wouldn't you just know it? Xi stopped when "there was nobody to call him," meaning, of course, Joe Biden, who had so ruthlessly stolen the future dictator's rightful throne.

There's more. The favor that Xi bestowed on Trump was that between mid-2018 and the end of 2019, U.S. agricultural exports to China amounted to losses of nearly $26 billion, a 76% decrease in such exports. The damage was so severe, Trump wound up subsidizing farmers to the tune of $28 billion, although "farmer advocates pointed out that the subsidizes were going to large farms predominantly, leaving smaller producers out in the rain."

Back then — you remember, America's first Golden Age — an Asia commodity analyst at a Shanghai brokerage firm said of Trump's $50 billion promise, "I think it's a meaningless big number, thrown out to get headlines, and won't happen."

Something quite meaningful will happen now, though. Trump devastated mostly American soybean farmers then, yet this year he's democratizing U.S. agricultural anhilationism by adding producers of wheat, corn, fruit, chicken, pork and beef. About this muttonheaded innovation in international trade, he says "it's going to be great ultimately for the farmer." He knows this, empirically.

He also plans on spreading the greatness around. More tariffs are on their way next month far beyond China, as well as our friendly neighbors of 2024. "April 2nd, it becomes all reciprocal," says Trump. "What they charge us, we charge them. You know, the tariffs could go up as time goes by."

His anti-Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — net worth, $2 billion — backed him up on that yesterday, saying on "Meet the Press" that even though our chummy tariffs on Canadian dairy and lumber are hereby postponed until next month, 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum will kick in Wednesday. And says the NY Times, "On Wall Street, it was a tough week with wild swings dominated by worries about the economy and uncertainty about what Trump's tariffs could bring."

Massive, massive financial pain domestically, one trusts. As ugly, hurtful and just plain stupid that would be, it appears there is no alternative to lifting the informationally lowest to at least midrange.