Thanks, Donald!

      You have a habit—as you should know better than anyone, Donald—of always screwing up.     

      You have admitted to declaring bankruptcy four times. That was—telling the truth also not being a strongpoint of yours—a lie, of course. You have declared bankruptcy six times.

      I know you like to pretend these bankruptcies were shrewd business strategy, but they were mostly, as most bankruptcies tend to be, just evidence of failed business strategies, of lots of screwing up. They also have demonstrated your usual willingness to rip people—your creditors in this case—off.

      And between terms as president, you had sure spent an awful lot of time sitting in courtrooms—hearing about your lies, transgressions and even, though you pretend to be a ladies’ man, an allegation of rape.

      The screw-up this past week, however, may be your grandest.

      To be sure, some of us were getting a bit worried that you might be able to hang on to some of the support you had somehow managed to convince people—working people in particular—to provide back in November.

      During the campaign you had done a better than usual job of hiding the selfish, lazy, rich-boy behind your big-man brashness, your tough-guy insolence and, now, a Joe Rogan-esque anti-establishment pose.

      Indeed, your approval rating, according to the Gallop poll, managed to reach 47 percent when you were being inaugurated in January. Why you almost had half of all American voters supporting you at the beginning of your second term! Of course, the only president in recent memory with a lower approval rating when inaugurated was you—at the start of your first term.

      But at that moment you had somehow managed to be only slightly unpopular.

      True, you then managed to appoint to important cabinet positions some of the least qualified individuals ever in the history of this country. But looked at from the right perspective maybe that could be seen as brash, tough, anti-establishment.

      Yeah, your underqualified defense secretary discussed details of an imminent military raid on an unsecure online site with your suspiciously tight-with-Russia national intelligence director and your surprisingly sort-of-qualified national security director and other officials—vaguely qualified or not. But they apparently did not get anyone killed. And you lied some—not big news at this point. And they lied some. And then everyone moved on.  Some of them even managed to maintain the pretense that they knew what they were doing.

      But then it was time for the granddaddy of all screw-ups: providing—Thanks, Donald!—conclusive evidence that you are in way, way over your head.

      You have said that “tariff” is your favorite word, Donald. But you don’t have to be an economist to realize that putting a tariff on a product makes it more expensive. Donald’s “beautiful” tariffs—which differ for different countries and different products, often for no good reason—are very, very large, way out of proportion with tariffs imposed by other major countries. And when things become more expensive people buy fewer things: fewer shirts, cellphones and cars. When lumber becomes more expensive, fewer people are able to buy a house. So the economy slows, and people lose their jobs.

      That’s why stock markets have been crashing and economists suggest we may very well go into a recession.

      Way to go, Donald! You have singlehandedly driven the global economy into a wall.

      This is probably a good point for me to make clear that I am a thinking, feeling human being—a thinking, feeling American human being, in fact.

      So, while I may seem to be taking some pleasure in your having—out in the open, so everyone who buys a banana or a scooter can see—wrecked the American economy and quite likely the global economy and while that certainly gives us lots to write about here at WritingAboutOurGeneration.com, I am not happy. This is a sad, sad time for the world and for Americans in particular. I and many, many more vulnerable Americans and people around the world will get hurt, if, as seems likely, much global trade grinds to halt.

      I am, however, taking pleasure in one thing: the fact that these idiotic tariffs will hurt you and members of your party, almost all of whom—all whom who have remained in the party—are now petrified of ever being seen as disagreeing with you.

      And at this point, Donald, the American democracy is more important to me than even the American economy. And I don’t trust you or your sycophants in the Republican Party to preserve the American democracy. You encouraged an insurrection once—rather than accept a clear and obvious defeat in an election. I don’t even have confidence that you would allow the midterm elections to proceed in 2026 if you thought they would cost you control of Congress.

      So thanks, Donald! You have made in your stubborn, stupid vanity a huge error.

      I believe it will help the country to correct the error it made in electing you.

      Keep up the bad work!

Mitchell Stephens, one of the editors of this site, is the author of nine books, including the rise of the image the fall of the word, A History of News, Imagine There’s No Heaven: How Atheism Helped Create the Modern World, Beyond News: The Future of Journalism, and The Voice of America: Lowell Thomas and the Invention of 20th Century Journalism. He is a professor emeritus of Journalism and Mass Communication at New York University, lives in New York City and spends a lot of time traveling and experimenting with video.