The Trumpch Who Tariffed Christmas
You'll get 1/15th of Biden Christmas and like it, America
May 1: Trump tells America their kids will get two dolls instead of 30 this year because he has no idea of what kids get for Christmas … Walmart, too, says suck it up America oh and also we won’t tell you how much the tariffs cost, either … Supreme Court hears arguments for religious public schools — you heard me … Trump loses human shield as Elon Musk leaves White House …
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Americans may get 1/15th of their usual Christmas this year, and they’ll fucking like it, Christian Pres. Donald Trump said yesterday.
Trump didn’t mention Christmas specifically when he was asked about talks with China’s President Xi Jinping, which Trump has said are already under way but aren’t. But it was pretty clear Trump was referring to Christmas 2025 in these remarks, unless there’s some other holiday where kids get one and a half score of dolls:
They [China] made $1 trillion with Biden, $1 trillion — even $1.1 trillion with Biden — selling us stuff. Much of it we don't need. You know, somebody said, oh, the shelves are going to be open [he means empty]. Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know. And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally. But we're not talking about something that we have to go out of our way [never explains what that means].
Noting but not dwelling on Trump’s inability to stay with, let alone explain, a single “thought,” your occasionally highlighting TFN wants to highlight that Trump’s prediction that Americans may not be able to afford the Christmases they had under Pres. Joe Biden was a remarkable concession from the guy seen by far-right Christians as the savior of performative Christianity and also humanity.
And Trump’s astonishing prediction of his yuletide failure looked a lot less Scrooge and more Scrooge McFuck. If only because who the fuck gives kids 30 dolls?
Remember that time you got 30 dolls for Christmas, Newsfucker, and asked your parents what the fuck’s the matter with you? Can you imagine young Barron opening his 29th GI Joe With Kung Fu Grip and staring with mounting horror at his final, unopened present?
When all he wanted was a new suitcase.
And even Trump’s 1/15th-assed Christmas assumes that Santa isn’t shot down at the U.S. border or detained at customs, strip-searched, and sent to a chimney in El Salvador.
Trump actually has a history of ruining Christmas for everyone. First he started shaming people who say “Happy Holidays” out of consideration for non-celebrants. Then in 2018 he shut down the government because he didn’t get what he wanted for Christmas: $5 billion to build a wall that, if finished, would have kept out the undocumented workers who later saved the U.S. economy and supply chains during Covid.
Trump resumed his war on Christmas last year, OG Newsfuckers may recall. That’s when the very first tariff shots were fired, and a handful of companies were said to be stocking up on imported inventory — spending cash reserves they were gonna use for Christmas bonuses.
If you’ve forgotten that already, it’s because TFN was one of the few places telling you about it — it was ignored by the leftie media that control the national conversation because we don’t have a leftie media that control the national conversation. (Note to Wall Street bros who control corporate media: If your corporate media had obsessed over this in December, maybe today you wouldn’t be in this overpriced imported pickle from Mexico, Peru, or India.)
And it’s not just Trump fucking Christmas. His army of elves (selves?) include Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, who said last month, “If there are higher price points, and you want to rethink its quantity, maybe that makes sense.”
Y’know, just cut back on Christmas lights.
McMillon is also helping out, like Amazon, by not breaking out the price of Trump’s tariffs for imported Walmart items. So maybe we cut back on shopping at Walmart?
After all, Trump wants tariffs to boost local business, so this would be a great time to switch to locally owned business! Because this fucking time it’s not just Christmas Trump’s fucking.
Thanks to fireworks shortages, maybe the children will have One-Fourth of July. Fireworks shows are already being impacted for next year’s celebrations of America’s 250th birthday and for this year’s depressing 249th (which honestly isn’t the worst thing for people who cherish fingers, pets, and people with PTSD).
And what about Memorial Day barbecues? Maybe the children will have pigs in a blanket. Halloween? Maybe the kids will have costumes like “plainclothes cop” or “undercover cop posing as a kid.”
In fact the only holidays unfucked by Trump’s tariffs appear to be Lent, Yom Kippur and Ramadan.
And to you MAGA folks whining that you didn’t sign up for this, Trump has an au contraire for you. ABC’s Terry Moran spoke up for you in an interview that aired Tuesday:
Moran: People are worried — even some people who voted for you, saying “I didn’t sign up for this” — so how do you address those concerns?
Trump: They did sign up for it, actually, and this is what I campaigned on.
Fact-check: True. MAGA dumb-check: You.
Bush Supreme Court Justices Solemnly Consider Swapping First Amendment for Jesus
The Supreme Court yesterday heard oral arguments in a case concerning whether Oklahoma and therefore all of us will have to pay for religious public schools.
If the phrase “religious public school” made your eyes bleed and your sphincter cry, you have successfully grasped the problem.
The state’s board for charter schools wants to approve a proposed Catholic school as a public school, funded by taxpayers. Republican state Attorney General Gentner Drummond — now running for governor despite having a name from Dickensian London — to his credit is not only challenging the proposal but has a record of saying pretty spot-on shit:
“There are believers that are confusing true religion — and religious liberty, and faith in God — with political power. And this Christian nationalism is the movement that is giving oxygen to this attempt to eviscerate the Establishment Clause.”
The case is Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board of Theocratic Fucking Jackholes, et al., v. Gentner Drummond, Surprisingly Spot-On Attorney General of Oklahoma. Meanwhile, allegedly godless corporate media are getting this wrong. NBC wrote:
“The dispute … highlights tensions within the Constitution's First Amendment. While the Establishment Clause prohibits state endorsement of religion or preference for one religion over another, the Free Exercise Clause outlaws religious discrimination.”
The First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause doesn’t outlaw religious discrimination, it bars laws from prohibiting the free exercise of religion.
And it’s not in tension with the Establishment Clause. Me preventing you from having my money does not infringe on your free exercise of anything except your my-money-having. (Note: I don’t care how many lawyers tell me I’m wrong or how many theocrats tell me that not caring how many lawyers tell me I’m wrong just proves that atheism is just another religion which it’s not1.)
Not giving you tax dollars ≠ prohibiting the free exercise of religion! Go ahead, Oklahoma Catholics, exercise freely!
You news-junkie Newsfuckers may have seen headlines suggesting the court is leaning toward okaying this shit despite 250 years of America not. There was Trump-appointed Justice Brett Kavanaugh saying yesterday that denying a Catholic school taxpayer funding would be “rank discrimination,” the way he’d find a way to argue it’s not rank discrimination if the case were Kavanaugh v. Satan’s Fun-Time Pre-K.
Justice Samuel Alito — nominated not by Trump but by Pres. George W. Bush so don’t tell me the GOP’s problems started with Trump — said Drummond was “motivated by hostility toward particular religions,” because Drummond pointed out that the same Oklahoma charter-school officials would never in a thousand years of Jesus’s post-Rapture2 reign approve an Islamic school.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from the case, and it’s not clear where Chief Justice John Roberts — another Bush appointee — stands. If the eight ruling justices split evenly, the school will lose, because Oklahoma’s Supreme Court ruled that way, and their ruling will stand if not overturned by a Supreme Court majority.
MORE READING SCOTUSBlog, Vox.
SOME RUMINATIONS The question in Oklahoma Dumbshits v. Surprisingly Spot-On Attorney General is, ultimately, what direction are we going in? Because Trump’s presidency has revealed incontrovertibly that merit and logic and reason have no invisible hand. We either have people championing sanity or we do not.
And the greatest impediment to having those champions is the existence of parallel belief systems, socially enforcing fortifications against logic and reason. Religion is one of these systems. Some religions survive by lowering those walls — in some magisteria, e.g., most science — to co-exist with rationality.
Some belief systems survive by toughening their walls. Asking people to believe crazy things can look suicidal from the outside, but works quite well keeping in adherents from birth and inspiring new zealots. (This is why frats require stupidity — hazing — to join; rejecting reason to demonstrate fealty to the reasonless.)
All of which is my long-winded way of saying that it’s very very bad if the Supreme Court says it would be swell for government to use your tax dollars to teach children that: Reality was created by a magic dude, the Earth part of reality only took six days to whip up, and the entire planetary land mass was once covered by water despite Earth not having enough water to do that even if you and Exxon teamed up to melt every single piece of ice on Earth including every single piece of ice owned by Ice Capades even though Ice Capades doesn’t exist anymore.
Stupid isn’t isolated to religion. It’s in secular thought, too, of every political stripe. But if we let stupid beliefs in the door in the name of religion, well, then, Katy bar the door because all the stupid will follow, no matter how secular Katy might be.
Here’s an example of how stupid we already are, a Rachel Maddow clip posted on Substack last month that drove this all home for me.
In the clip, Maddow reverse engineers our current tariff stupidity to reveal the stupidity in its DNA. In the pre-Trumpean era, Trump asked son-in-law Jared Kushner to find him an economic advisor — because even Trump knew that he hadn’t learned shit at Wharton and/or pretending to run his “business.” So Kushner browsed Amazon book listings and found a cool-sounding book called “Death by China.”
Author Peter Navarro based his tariffilia on the work of an expert named Ron Vara, a made-up dude who’s so poorly made up he’s an anagram of “Navarro,” according to brilliant Nobel Prize-winning Substack writer Lars Ne.
And so, the global economy was eviscerated last month because years ago a dumb guy quoted a fictional dumb guy saying dumb things, another dumb guy thought the real dumb guy sounded cool, recommended the real dumb guy to his father-in-dumb, who last month acted on the dumb advice of the real dumb guy because after all, the fictional dumb guy wouldn’t lie.
This is the danger of dumb. Funding religious schools increases that danger. The dumb judges inclined to do it are religious zealots differing only in degree.
And we’re seeing an encroachment of stupidification — popular credulity toward claims that turn out to be bullshit if you research fucking think about them for one fucking second.
Remember Trump’s directive telling the Justice Department to investigate ActBlue3, the clearinghouse for Democratic campaign donations? Mother Jones just wrote up how the bullshit claims that are the predicate for Trump’s Justice weaponization turn out to be bullshit apparently squoze out of a bull with the help of a dark-money vice dark-funded by Elon Musk. (h/t)
Your own Fucking News last month revealed how a Tea Party immigrantophobe has been feeding the Trump administration ammunition for its pretend war against the pretend army pretend-invading at the pretend-behest of Venezuelan Pres. Nicolás Maduro.
This is the real threat. Dumb schools churn out dumb people who work at dumb think tanks and become dumb lawyers and create dumb alternate realities — which even ostensibly not-dumb media and politicians then treat as worthy of respect and a seat at the table.
It’s not enough to have real think tanks and lawyers and reality. We have to reject the dumb. Speaking of which…
Elon Has Left the Building
The good news for Pres. Donald Trump is that his historically low approval numbers won’t be historic for long. The bad news for Trump is that that’s because he’s going to have newly historic newly low approval numbers. For lots of reasons. To wit…
Serial CEO Elon Musk reportedly is no longer working in the White House. And science tells us that when your house loses its lightning rod, you get hit by lightning!
Musk and Trump have agreed that Musk will continue his government “work” remotely, just as they have barred thousands of actual government actual-workers from doing. And just as Musk’s been doing for months at (but not literally at) Tesla, X, the Boring Company, Neuralink, SpaceX, and MySperm.
It’s worth noting that by Musk’s own standards, his government work has been an abysmal failure. He said he’d find $2 trillion in waste and fraud. He now claims to have found $160 billion in savings, almost all of it not actual savings, let alone waste or fraud.
TESLA REJECTS SELF-DRIVING Turns out the board of Tesla didn’t like having no one at its own steering wheel. The Wall Street Journal reports that they started looking for someone to replace Musk, once he stopped showing up for work. The way you or I would be fired in a second (if I could find a job, that is).
The threat to replace Musk may or may not have had something to do with his vow last month that he was gonna be “allocating far more of my time to Tesla” in May.
Of course, Musk being more involved could be even worse for Tesla, given how politically toxic Musk has become, and given how much we’ve learned about how the insane gravitational forces of billions of dollars can crush a human brain to the size of an imported pea.
One option still open to Musk that would benefit Tesla and Earth: Calculate a path back to the old Musk who championed fighting climate change and figure out a way to bring Trump with him. Hey, he’s done crazier.
TCB
MISSING INACTION I know, I know, there’s a ton of stories I haven’t covered. I haven’t missed them, I’ve just had some birthday stuff — not only mine! — this week (and, okay, okay, I let myself sleep in a couple days), but I harvested those stories and I’m working to catch up...
FUNNY STORY Yesterday I didn’t do my usual shpiel for upgrading to a paid subscription because I also mentioned that it was my birthday and I figured that alone would prompt a ton of you sentimental Newsfuckers to upgrade. Dear Newsfuckers, it was the worst weekday TFN has had in forever.
So I just want to remind you magnificent and unsentimental newsbastards that despite trumping Trump tariff genius Peter Navarro on the Substack leaderboard, TFN is still not financially sustainable. We are on track to get there this year, but only if we can sustain the pace of Newsfuckers upgrading to paid subscriptions. Unlike some other Substacks, I don’t put TFN behind a paywall and only on occasion do I even have an upgrade pitch up high.
I save the upgrade ask for way down here because I don’t expect casual readers to support TFN. But if you’re a regular, if you routinely make it this far in your daily TFN, then I want you know that I love doing this and I love hearing from you Newsfuckers who love it, too, so I hope we can keep it going and secure its existence as A Thing That Exists. Thank you for getting us so far already!
ELECTIONS
June 10 — New Jersey Democratic gubernatorial primary.
TAKING ACTION
Today, May 1: May Day (you can also search for local rallies here). (h/t)
Today-The Second Coming: Tesla boycott.
Target boycott: The boycott is back on until Target reverses course on DEI and Black-owned suppliers.
Boycott El Salvador products (you can find a list of potential products here) (h/t).
Sept. 21: Climate-action events for Sun Day.
The unknown future: Find upcoming events near you here. (h/t)
RESOURCES
Mental reassurance that at least lawyers are fighting back on fill-in-the-blank.
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TFN creator and writer Jonathan Larsen co-created Up w/ Chris Hayes and wrote for Countdown with Keith Olbermann at MSNBC, helped launch CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° and Air America Radio, and has also worked at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Young Turks.
I know The Rapture isn’t in The Bible. Don’t get me started on this!
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“Trump: They did sign up for it, actually, and this is what I campaigned on.”
Is this the very first true thing 2Doll Don ever said? Ever?
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