March 23 Open Thread: Trump Wants Trade Wars and Hot Wars

Among all the distractions in the 24-hour news cycle, the most important story got buried amid the detritus: Trump slapped tariffs on a bunch of Chinese goods, and the American stock market took a dive the entire time he talked. Economists have an axiom that currency wars are followed by trade wars, which are followed by hot wars. I’m not worried only because Trump is such a coward that he’ll surrender before a shot is fired.

The chief distraction is that Douchebag Donnie is cleaning house. He already brought Wilmington-born windbag Joe diGenova on board; Gabriel Sherman of Vanity Fair says diGenova’s better other half, Victoria Toensing, is being hired next as Trump prepares to go to war with Robert Mueller.

The frustrating thing is that so many people in Washington already know how guilty Trump is. The members of the intelligence committees have been saying since before his inauguration that if the public knew what they did it would be shocked and outraged, but because so much of what they know is classified information they can’t talk about it. Still, bits of the real story occasionally slip through, like the fact that the hacker known as Guccifer 2.0 is actually a Russian intelligence officer.

Another big distraction is Facebook, where Zuckerberg’s “Who, me?” bullshit game is finally up. Josh Marshall nails it: This company “acts like a law unto itself.” Perhaps this will wake people up to the fact that this is precisely the goal of multinational corporations. They find having to obey different laws in different countries costly and therefore bad for business.

The folks at Cambridge Analytica have a lot to answer for, too, but its basic business — sorting people not by demographics but by psychographics — is here to stay. People might be outraged by it (I don’t know why, but they seem to be), but that part of its business it entirely legal, and other companies will copy what it does minus the Ukrainian-hooker blackmail and stolen material.

Of all the 16 dwarfs Trump defeated in the Republican primaries, none irked me more than Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. It’s something about his eyes — there’s a dimness in them highlights the fact that they’re misaligned on his face a la Alfred E. Neuman — that causes not just loathing but revulsion, the way most people feel about Ted Cruz. His basic stupidity came a-cropper over his refusal to hold special elections to replace legislators who joined his administration,
as a judge Walker appointed himself ordered him to call elections.