Rick Wilson writes in the New York Daily News:
“Our great American companies are hereby ordered…”
The subtle meter in Americans’ brains that tracks the degree to which the universe seems off its axis has been in a state of constant flux since Donald
Trump’s election in 2016, but this week the needle slammed hard into the peg on the right side of the gauge. Red warning lights are flashing across Washington as even the now-typical levels of uncertainty and political chaos reach epic proportions.
It’s almost as if we need a recalibration of the insanity of the Trump era, a new set of definitions about what comprises normal presidential behavior.
Because what’s happening now left normal five towns back, stopped for smokes and brown liquor, and tossed the GPS out the window. This week wasn’t normal, and no amount of whistling past the graveyard will make it any different.
This is the week in which Trump had wanted to buy Greenland, and insulted Denmark’s PM. He proclaimed himself ‘King of Israel’ and the ‘Chosen One’ (to deal with China, but is that not blasphemy?). He proposed on-again, off-again payroll tax cuts & capital gains tax indexing. Compared the Fed Chairman to Xi Jinping as an ‘enemy of the state’. The craziest one of all came on Friday: a tweet that ‘ordered’ – ordered? say whaaat? – all American companies to retreat out of China immediately. So now the USA is a command economy, run the way the dictators of Cuba and North Korea run theirs?
