Donald Trump is not a Christian, whatever he says about himself, and his only real religion—other than the worship of money and the Baal-worshiper devotion to his own vanity—is Norman Vincent Peale-ism, the Power of Positive Thinking. Trump really does seem to have deeply imbibed the imbecilic, delusional, and, in the case of a man with access to nuclear weapons, fundamentally dangerous notion that if you just keep saying it—if you just keep pretending like it is true—then the lie will stop being a lie. Trump has tried to convince Americans that the new regime in Iran is more moderate than the old one, which is, depending on how you judge the state of the burlap bag full of rage-addled rattlesnakes Trump calls a brain, either a lie or bat-product delusional or, at best, wishful thinking. Indeed, it seems that all the negotiations in Iran are being conducted by the Secretary of Wishful Thinking, whoever that may be.
The Iranians, Trump insists, have agreed to all of his demands; the Iranians heap scorn on this claim and then demonstrate their contempt for it with bullets and rockets. Trump says the Strait of Hormuz will be open for business; the Iranians have just closed it again. Some of you will remember that in the early days of the COVID epidemic, Trump insisted that the virus was a little inconvenience that would simply vanish in the spring with the warm weather; it turned out to be a global catastrophe that the United States did not deal with as well as it should, with President Trump treating the matter at first as mainly an irritant to the stock market. When Trump insists the negotiations are going well, the Iranians answer that there are no negotiations at all and no date for undertaking them. Trump says the Iranians have agreed to hand over their enriched uranium. Iran: “Iran’s enriched uranium is not going to be transferred anywhere under any circumstances.”
(“It was clearly a human in a bear suit.”)
And as strange and shocking as it is to write this, the ayatollahs are, in this context, the more credible party. Donald Trump is a habitual liar, a fantasist, and delusional, and he is surrounded by sycophants who are habitual liars, fantasists, and delusional. The moral and ethical degradation of American government by Trump and his cronies is not only, or even mainly, a metaphysical matter, something to think about in terms of the afterlife and the last judgment—it is a problem, and a very expensive problem, in the here and now.
There is a strong argument, many of them, for U.S. action against Iran, but the United States is not engaged in this war (and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth will whine if you call it a war) because of any of the good arguments for it: The United States is engaged in this war because Donald Trump is a vain nitwit who is easily manipulated by his inner circle, some of whose members apparently convinced him that a series of wars, starting in Venezuela and moving on to Iran and possibly to Cuba, would be a good way to distract from Trump’s troubles in the Jeffrey Epstein matter. And—mission accomplished! Of course, Trump now has troubles much worse than those likely to have been presented by his longtime, intimate association with the sleazy trafficker of underage girls. Trump probably wasn’t messing around with teenagers on Epstein’s island, but what if he was? The members of his deranged little personality cult would forgive him a little recreational sexual abuse of teenaged girls the same way they have forgiven his adultery, his porn-star diddling, his own appearances in pornographic films, etc.
But $6.55 diesel would be another thing.
Kidnapping Nicolás Maduro was pretty easy—there were more than a few powerful people in Venezuela who were not sorry to see him go, and it is not impossible to imagine that some of them helped to make it happen. Massacring boatloads of unarmed civilians in the Caribbean on the idiotically transparent pretext that they were “narco-terrorists” was not too hard, either—but the Iranians shoot back, and they have the ability to do things such as close the Strait of Hormuz. Indeed, they are emboldened in their efforts for a good reason: They know that they are dealing with a weak, dumb, ignorant, lazy coward on the American side, and that the next presidential election is a long way down the road.
Trump is a con artist and always has been. But con artists really succeed only where the marks are willing to be conned and, in their way, enable the con—look at Bernie Madoff’s clients. But there are limits to how far that kind of thing goes in the real world, where gimlet-eyed critics might not be so easy to buffalo. Trump went to court to argue that his ghastly ballroom project should be free from the usual oversight process because it is a “national security” issue—you know: national security, like Marco Rubio’s sugar subsidies. You can probably sell that crap on talk radio, but you can’t sell it in federal court:
A federal judge has again ordered President Donald Trump to pause construction of a massive new ballroom at the White House, rejecting the president’s “disingenuous” bid to circumvent an earlier ruling against the project by claiming that it needed to proceed for national security reasons.
Never mind the interesting question of what kind of a brain it takes to come up with “My ballroom is a national-security priority!”—imagine what kind of brain it takes to believe you could get away with that nonsense in federal court.
It doesn’t have to be cocaine—there are all kinds of things that will make your brain take that turn: stupidity, anger, senility. You can choose your own adventure in moral degradation.
But everybody knows it’s a guy in a bear suit.
Economics for English Majors
When writing about taxes, you can be sure that outlets such as Politico will employ the following rhetorical strategy: “We know that this isn’t really a thing, but we’re going to pretend that it is a thing.” In this week’s example, Politico writes about Liberty Energy, a company previously run by Chris Wright, who is now secretary of energy. Liberty has no federal corporate income tax liability this year, though of course it is paying just shy of $50 million in other taxes. Politico writes:
No one has accused Liberty and the other companies of having done anything illegal. But Liberty and other companies having no tax liabilities while posting millions of dollars in profit comes as many Americans who filed their own tax returns have so far not reaped benefits as big as Republicans in Congress and the White House promised when they passed the One Beautiful Bill Act.
Voters are also coping with rising prices for gasoline and other goods because of the White House’s war with Iran. The price of a gallon of regular gasoline cost an average of $4.10 on Wednesday, according to AAA, nearly a dollar higher than the price last year.
“No one has accused Liberty and the other companies of having done anything illegal”—that’s pretty much the whole ballgame, right there. Liberty is complying with U.S. tax law. And U.S. tax law does include a lot of bananas stuff, some of it crazy and indefensible special-interest pandering. But the reason Liberty has no federal income tax bill this year isn’t some wild provision, and it isn’t even an obviously bad one: Liberty is benefiting from a provision in our tax laws that allows companies to expense big investments all at once, in the same tax year, rather than spreading them out over several years. So Liberty is, at most, moving up a tax-reducing benefit that it would have enjoyed over the course of several years’ worth of tax filings, taking the benefit all at once. It had a big federal tax bill last time around and probably will have one next time around.
Tax benefits like that are meant to encourage the kind of investments that Liberty has made—i.e., this is an example of the tax law working exactly as it was intended to, irrespective of whether you think that is a good policy or not. What that has to do with personal income tax rates or the price of a gallon of gasoline in Sheboygan is anybody’s guess. The story did break on April 15, the deadline for filing taxes—but only because that was the day Politico chose to publish the story, for obvious marketing reasons.
For a much fuller discussion of the underlying issue, you can read Scott Lincicome on the problems of “tax expenditures” here in our newly launched Dispatch Markets.
Words About Words
Donald Trump famously spoke of that imaginary book of the Bible, “Two Corinthians.” (Two Corinthians walk into a bar. One says to the bartender: “At this time your abundance may be a supply for their want, that their abundance also may be a supply for your want.” The bartender replies: “Cash only, fellas.”) Now, Trump is participating in a group reading of the Bible, his contribution being a few verses from Two Second Chronicles:
If My people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.
Turn from their wicked ways—it is an excellent verse.
You first, Mr. President.
Furthermore…
Thanks to Jay Nordlinger for pointing out this James Patterson article in Providence magazine:
When Vice President JD Vance was campaigning for Viktor Orbán earlier this month, he was also campaigning to preserve the Hungarian funding for the New Right organizations that would support his own future political ambitions. With Orbán defeated, that money is gone. The Hungarians, in their own way, helped decide the future of American conservatism.
How is that possible? How did this happen?
The answer is the ‘Grand Budapest Cartel.’ Orbán has spent the past decade engaging in a concerted influence campaign on American conservatism. The purpose of his efforts is not merely to familiarize conservative policymakers and think-tankers with Hungarian interests. Orbán wanted to remake American conservatism from the top down into an ideological movement that moves it away from limited government, religious pluralism, and a robust foreign presence, and toward right-wing social engineering, postliberalism, and an American retreat from foreign affairs. Orbán’s ambition is not his alone but also that of Orbán’s close friends in Russia and China. In short, the meaning of the future of American conservatism was also on the ballot in the recent Hungarian elections.
For ten or more years, the nationalist-populist Right, in various countries, made Orbán’s Hungary a focus of attention. His regime was the beau idéal of this Right.
In America, the nat-pop Right included the Heritage Foundation, CPAC, and so on. Donald Trump and the Republican Party boosted Orbán constantly.
All the while, the Kremlin did the same, of course.
Many people went to Budapest, in trips that were like pilgrimages. Some—including old friends of mine—went to work for Orbán.
This year, he tried for a sixth term in office. The international illiberal Right—“the whole global movement,” as Nigel Farage calls it—rallied ’round him.
President Trump campaigned for him, through social-media posts and videos. Secretary of State Marco Rubio showed up in person. “Our success is your success,” he told Orbán. “Especially as long as you’re the prime minister and the leader of this country, it’s in our national interest that Hungary be successful.”
Vice President JD Vance showed up in person, too, in the last days of the campaign.
From France, Marine Le Pen showed up. From Italy, Matteo Salvini showed up. From Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu planned to show up, but the Iran war kept him at home and he sent a video instead—a video in support of Orbán. He also sent his son, who rallied for Orbán in person.
In any event, a sixth term for Orbán—his perpetuation in power—was extremely important to “the whole global movement.” And when Orbán and his party lost, we heard this, from the “movement”:
“Hungary? Where’s that? Who cares about Hungary, what’s the big deal? Why are the libs making such a fuss? Hungary is a small, insignificant landlocked country, and the libs are all a-flutter. Silly libs!”
Elsewhere
You can buy my most recent book, Big White Ghetto, here.
You can buy my other books here.
Please subscribe to The Dispatch if you haven’t.
You can check out “How the World Works,” a series of interviews on work I’m doing for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, here.
In Closing
I know that I rely on what seem to be obvious, straightforward, right-in-front-of-our-noses explanations for what’s coming out of the White House. But I will concede that there are other possible explanations.