A sad and twisted man is Donald Trump. And an idiot. President idiot, okay. Heir to his father’s real estate empire, the man surrounds himself with idiots and yes-men. Degreed, ass-kissing idiots. Connected idiots. Rich idiots. But idiots.

The pathologically insecure Trump has complained for decades that “they” are laughing at “us” (meaning him). They are ripping off the United States (meaning him), says the man convicted of falsifying business records, stripped of his fraudulent charity, and assessed $25 million in penalties for cheating students of his fraudulent university. The man has spent a lifetime trying to prove to the world and to himself that he is the smartest person in any room, not an idiot, and not laughable.

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Trump slapped tariffs on “virtually the entire world,” including Australia’s volcanic Heard and McDonald Islands inhabited by seals and penguins, and on other tiny islands with no exports. His list includes the British Indian Ocean Territory of Diego Garcia, the island home of a highly restricted UK-US military base. (Trump likely thinks Diego Garcia belongs to Tren de Aragua (TdA) and should be disappeared to El Salvador.)

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Of course, it will not be any of those nations and uninhabited islands filling the U.S. treasury. It will be you. Paul Krugman dismantled Trump’s tariff incoherence on Wednesday at his substack. Analyses are pointless, he writes, “because there’s nothing to explain. I’m not saying that the Trump team’s thinking is unsound. I don’t see any thinking at all.”

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