Laughing to the bank
Why it's good for us to admit that yesterday was deeply funny.
This is gabestein.com: the newsletter!, which is a completely irregular note primarily focused on the intersection of culture, media, politics, and technology written by me, vitalist technologist Gabriel Stein. Sometimes there’s random silly stuff. If you’re not yet a subscriber, you can sign up here. See the archives here, and polished blog versions of the best hits at, you guessed it, gabestein.com.
The ongoing trade war is objectively hilarious. The actual events themselves — from the scorecard to the bogus AI-generated formula to the hapless trade representative defending the indefensible tariffs in front of congress as they were reversed to the explanation for the pause that people were “getting yippy” — is the kind of stuff Veep’s writers wish they had dreamt up. But the backstory is the most hilarious part of it all: apparently, the reason we all have to go through this in the first place is that Trump literally thinks that maintaining a trade deficit with another country means we’re somehow “losing” (at what, exactly, is not clear).
At the same time, of course, the trade war is very serious. In a matter of days, America’s hard-earned credibility has been ruined, perhaps permanently, and trillions of dollars have been destroyed because of one man’s inability to comprehend basic economics. Which is, well, actually pretty hilarious when you take a step back from checking your portfolio. Take one step further back, though, and it’s actually pretty depressing that even the most powerful narcissist in the world can’t disrupt late capitalism for more than a week.
Back in November when I started this newsletter, I wrote about the metamodern nature of today’s political discourse, where seemingly opposed forces like sincerity and absurdity can co-exist and even begin to oscillate against each other, forming a solid substrate on which to construct a political movement. Yesterday’s about-face may be the best example yet of this phenomenon in action. And it might just offer an opportunity to advance the project of building the still-nascent opposition.
As a friend pointed out on a call yesterday, the way Trump will try to spin this is obvious: he’ll negotiate a few “deals” with China, Mexico, and Canada and then claim this was all part of the plan. “Art of the deal” and all that. His cronies are already starting to provide this cover while privately throwing their arms up and acknowledging what we all know: there is no plan, and Trump just lost a major battle between his planet-sized sense of entitlement and the global economic reality. With full acknowledgement of the pain this saga has already and will continue to cause, Trump being forced to walk away from his signature economic policy because it’s too dumb even for this timeline is deeply funny and should be relentlessly mocked, along with all the people applauding the emperor for his newly-discovered clothes.
I confess, I’m a little concerned that instead of mockery, we’ll mostly see more lectures from well intentioned people trying to reason through what’s happening and what it means as if it can be explained logically at all. For example, the Vox article I linked to above contains lines like (emphasis from the original): “Trump’s obsession with bilateral trade deficits — his idea that if the US has a trade deficit with any significant trading partner, it is somehow losing — is the really weird thing.”
In fairness, this was written before the reversal. But, I mean, is it really so weird to imagine that this guy — the “getting yippy” guy — just doesn’t understand any of this stuff? I’m not a political reporter, but I can pretty much guarantee you Donald Trump is not actually obsessed with bilateral trade deficits, because as the rest of the article makes clear, he doesn’t know what a trade deficit is to begin with. After the madness of the last decade of U.S. politics, why are we still determined to rationalize events that are so obviously, profoundly absurd?
Since the bad man’s address to congress last month, and aided by a string of lively conversations with friends and family, I’ve been playing around with a vague idea that the opposition’s response to Trump so far has been, in some ways, profoundly arrogant. If the 2024 election was anything, it was a cry for a real, dramatic break from a status quo that wasn’t working for a lot of people. And not just in our country — incumbents were rejected in elections around the world last year.
And yet, most of our oppositional responses have been rooted in trying to preserve as much of that rejected status quo as possible. Not just the policies and institutions, many of which, of course, should be preserved if possible, but also the norms, procedures, and discourse that it ran on, almost all of which have been so thoroughly trampled that there is likely no going back.
I suspect that’s why, for example, Elissa Slotkin’s traditional, sober Democratic response to Trump’s made-for-TV-and-TikTok fascistic circus last month felt so flat, even though its content was pretty good. And I’m positive that’s why Chuck Schumer’s ridiculous legislative head-fake on the continuing resolution felt like such a betrayal. In a world where, as I wrote in November, politics is increasingly downstream of the practice of culture, acting as if the ship isn’t sinking and on fire is worse than giving up: it’s refusing to acknowledge the problem at all.
So what do we do differently this time? Maybe it’s because I’m the son of a humorist, but I think this particular moment demands to be met with ridicule if it’s going to stick. It’s not a panacea, but effective use of humor has played a major role in almost every modern example of resisting autocrats. Humor works because it cuts through fear, the currency authoritarians trade on, and gives people a common narrative to rally around that’s hard to spin.
Trump, in particular, is famously allergic to humor, for precisely those reasons. It makes him feel vulnerable because it exposes his true nature and hinders his vaunted ability to spin almost any narrative to suit his purposes.
And he should feel vulnerable right now. He was just forced to retreat on his signature issue because the bond market almost collapsed, exposing him as both a dangerous fool and a coward. Of course we should be upset. Of course we should be worried that the bond market might still collapse. Of course we should be investigating his administration for insider trading.
But I hope we also acknowledge the inherent absurdity of what’s happening. I hope we also laugh and mock everyone, including ourselves. “Nice one, Don, you got us good.” “90-Day Pause” should become a standard way to avoid acknowledging mistakes. Someone needs to get rich making “Liberation Week“ t-shirts. And so on. As much as we should be taking this moment seriously, I hope we also seize on it to start practicing the kinds of metamodern discourse the modern world demands.
