CSotD: A Hard Reign of Folly Is Gonna Fall
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There is such a thing has having too much good material, and while Pat Bagley was able to squeeze in seven examples of supremely unqualified Trump appointees, cartoonists strain to keep up.
Like a magician pulling rabbits from a hat, just when you think there can’t possibly be another in there and that there’s no way to top the last one, Dear Leader reaches in again and out pops …
… Herschel Walker, the nominee for ambassador to the Bahamas.
There’s no rule, as far as I know, setting qualifications for ambassadors, though I recall Saturday Night Live airing an ad for “Ambassador Training Institute” in which the phrase “Please pass the sweet and sour shrimp” is taught.
Now, here’s how to get your free booklet. Just send three hundred thousand dollars and the name of the country to which you’d like to be ambassador to: Illegal Campaign Contributions, Ambassador Training Institute, Mexico City, Mexico.
A minimum requirement should be the ability to find on a map the country to which you are being appointed and I would be surprised if Walker could pass the test, even if you erased Bermuda to avoid confusion.
This is not a joke about dumb jocks, although Walker is a dumb jock and the appointment seems like a bad joke.
But Alan Page made the NFL Hall of Fame and then served with distinction on the Minnesota Supreme Court, while Byron White played only for two years as a pro but had been class valedictorian and a Rhodes Scholar before his appointment to the US Supreme Court. There are some very smart athletes. Walker just isn’t one of them.
Herschel Walker’s professional football career included getting a massive contract to play in the USFL for a conniving wheeler-dealer who proceeded to crash the entire league.
Following his retirement from the NFL, Walker became something of a wheeler-dealer himself, overstating his success as a businessman and, in a Senate race marked by gaffes and falsehoods, flashing a toy badge as proof of his bogus claim to be in law enforcement.
Which may explain why Trump likes him: Walker also claimed to have graduated with honors though, unlike Dear Leader, he hadn’t graduated at all.
Still, it doesn’t bode well for the people of the Bahamas, who had better stock up on sweet and sour shrimp, because I’m not sure their new ambassador has any other qualifications.
This would be a lot funnier if Dear Leader were hiring staff for a donut shop. As it is, the whole world is watching and would be laughing if the prospects were not so frightening.
An executive of The Apprentice has admitted to having built up a bombastic egomaniac into a famous business tyro, and Maarten Wolterink (Cartoon Movement) shows him here demonstrating his utter lack of business sense as well as his refusal to take advice from those who know how things work.
Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, knows how the business world works, and, in his first Substack, explains in detail how Trump’s “invincible ignorance” is demonstrated by his bassackwards attitude towards our trade imbalances:
He wants America to be a winner, which means both attracting lots of foreign capital and running trade surpluses. And if anyone tried to tell him that this is arithmetically impossible, he’d probably denounce them as a deep state Marxist pedophile or something.
At least Ludwig the Mad of Bavaria understood the music of Richard Wagner.
Trump supposedly majored in business at Wharton and yet doesn’t understand international trade imbalances or even who pays for what in a tariff. His incapacity is stunning, given that he sat through classes on these topics and appears to have absorbed nothing.
A sane man would appoint people who knew things, in order to cover for the places in which he doesn’t, but, as Krugman writes
You’d like to think that when everything goes wrong — when his demands that foreigners both invest in America and stop running trade surpluses aren’t met, because that’s arithmetically impossible — he’ll back off and take advice from the adults in the room. But there won’t be any adults in the room.
Pedro X. Molina (Counterpoint) is not alone in noting that Trump campaigned on a pledge to bring down grocery prices and now, before even entering office, admits that he can’t do it. This might be considered an understandable failure for a first-time president, but Trump has been president and should have known what was within his power and what was not.
But then he also should have known that he didn’t graduate with honors. It is very difficult to tell when he is deliberately lying and when he is saying things he wishes were true but simply aren’t.
Matt Davies points out that he has acted as a huckster, now selling fragrance, which isn’t quite a conflict since he isn’t quite in office. But even if his selling of Bibles, sneakers, EFTs and other overpriced trinkets have taken place during the interregnum, he racked up profits while he was president, including by making the Secret Service pay for hotel rooms and golf carts, and running a hotel where diplomats felt compelled to stay in order to secure his favor.
Some of us remember when, at the start of his first administration, Trump held a news conference with his children in attendance, with stacks of looseleaf binders supposedly outlining policies to prevent conflicts of interest, but reportedly filled with blank pages.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Now he’s found a new hustle. Not only is he accepting largess from billionaires hoping to stay on his good side but his established habit of launching nuisance lawsuits has begun paying off. Disney may have stood firm against Ron DeSantis’s attempts at extortion, but, as Ohman notes, the Mouse folded in the face of a Trump lawsuit and paid him off.
Moreover, as Necessary points out, it wasn’t a lawsuit with real teeth. What Disney recognized, and future cowards and lackeys he sues may also acknowledge, is that it costs money to defend nuisance lawsuits and that paying protection is better than covering the damage that occurs when you don’t.
It’s a nice country we’ve got here. It would be a shame if something was to happen to it.
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