Of Tariffs, Tantrums, and Starving Children

Trump plays emperor on the world stage while Gaza’s infants waste away and foreign leaders rehearse for meetings like it’s amateur night at a nursing home.

While Trump’s legal team was in court this week defending his unilateral power to ignite global trade wars with a wave of his tiny, ketchup-stained hand, the fallout from his so-called “Liberation Day” tariff regime is already reshaping the world economy, and not for the better.

At the center of the legal showdown is the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a law designed for narrow, targeted sanctions that Trump has repurposed into a blunt-force weapon for reshaping the world economy. In May, the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that Trump’s sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs were illegal. Now, the full 11-judge panel of the Federal Circuit is hearing the case on an accelerated timeline, with the Supreme Court looming as the likely final stop.

If Trump wins, he gets unprecedented power to tax, reward, punish, and rewrite trade policy unilaterally, bypassing Congress, and in effect, the Constitution. If he loses, the fragile web of trade deals he’s struck under threat of tariffs could unravel overnight. Countries could walk away, claiming they negotiated under duress. And the veneer of Trump’s economic “successes” would dissolve into the chaos they always were.

Case in point: the absurd energy deal with the EU, part of the Liberation Day fallout, in which European nations have pledged to buy $750 billion in U.S. energy over the next three years. That includes oil, LNG, and nuclear fuel, products the EU was actively trying to phase out to meet climate targets. Now, the European Commission is scrambling to pool private sector demand through its AggregateEU platform in a desperate effort to hit Trump’s numbers, even though experts say the volume is “unrealistically high” and fundamentally incompatible with the bloc’s emissions goals.

The Commission swears this won’t derail its climate targets. Then again, it also quietly released a factsheet suggesting these LNG deals might run all the way through 2050. Because nothing says “clean energy transition” like a quarter-century lock-in to American fracked gas.

Call it climate sabotage by tariff. Trump’s trade war isn’t just a legal battleground, it’s a tool to strong-arm allies into propping up dying U.S. fossil fuel industries, all while branding it as “fair trade.” It’s economic coercion with a climate price tag, and it’s being underwritten by a legal theory so unhinged that no president in history has dared attempt it until now.

And if the courts bless this power grab? Get ready for a second-term president who doesn’t need Congress, doesn’t care about climate, and sees every international relationship as a transaction to be settled in gas shipments and tariff threats.

Still, this little gem confirms in painful detail what so many already suspect: foreign governments don’t just view Donald Trump as unpredictable or egotistical, they view him as incompetent, manipulable, and mentally unwell. The Korean trade team literally trained for their meeting with him like it was a bad improv comedy sketch, practicing how to speak in “simple words” and rotating through roles to pretend to be Trump. Their strategy? Flatter him, smile, speak slowly, and for God’s sake, keep the slides idiot-proof. Call it crisis babysitting.

One Korean observer summed it up: “We know he’s an idiot, but we have to think of a different way to say it.” That’s the guiding principle of international relations now, build entire foreign policy strategies around managing one man’s fragile ego and short attention span.

And while the Korean team was meticulously preparing slide decks featuring photos of farmers protesting mad cow beef to keep Trump from derailing talks, the U.S. side was reportedly underqualified, understaffed, and unprepared. One official is described as giggling on television while mocking Korean officials for taking their jobs seriously. Others are dismissed as script-reading actors spewing party lines on cable news. The Americans, they say, don’t even understand the culture they’re negotiating with and don’t seem to care.

Meanwhile, Trump is tweeting economic gibberish (“tariffs are making America great and rich again”) and floating a fantasy of redistributing tariff revenue like a mob boss offering “protection”, but without the protection. As one Korean observer put it, it’s like listening to a mafioso say, “Wouldn’t it be a shame if your economy got hurt?”

In Gaza, hunger has become a weapon, and its most defenseless victims are infants who cannot speak for themselves. With infant formula nearly extinct and breastfeeding impossible for many malnourished mothers, families are left improvising with desperation and dread. In one tent on a bomb-scarred beach, a grandmother feeds her three-month-old granddaughter Muntaha a syringe filled with mashed chickpeas knowing it causes her pain, knowing it makes her sick, but having no other choice. “If the baby could speak,” her aunt said, “she would scream.”

Muntaha’s mother died shortly after giving birth while unconscious from a bullet wound. The baby now weighs barely half what she should and suffers from constant vomiting and diarrhea. She’s not alone. Across Gaza, infants are being fed tahini mixed with water, boiled herbs, even animal feed, anything remotely edible, none of it safe for children under six months old. Doctors are blunt: if babies like Muntaha don’t receive milk in the next few days, they will die. UNICEF calls it a desperate gamble. The World Food Programme says famine is unfolding before our eyes. And yet, aid is still being blocked, permissions still delayed, the systems of power still spinning their excuses while babies starve in silence.

It all adds up to global embarrassment. Trump’s erratic style, his mental confusion, his compulsive lying, these aren’t just problems for domestic policy. They’re now institutionalized liabilities in international affairs, forcing allies to navigate a diplomatic minefield where the biggest threat isn’t war or trade imbalance, it’s Trump himself.

But while world leaders run simulations to manage the man-child in the White House, real emergencies are being ignored. In Gaza, babies like Muntaha are starving, fed mashed chickpeas and boiled herbs from syringes because formula is gone, mothers are dead or malnourished, and the world’s most powerful governments are too busy shifting blame to unblock aid. The silence of the international community is no less deafening than the screams these children are too weak to make.

On that somber note, your humble narrator will be retiring a different kind of frail, overburdened system: my thirteen-year-old computer, which, after a decade of honorable service and ten reboots per session, is finally succumbing to the sands of time. A new machine is on the way, which means I may finally be able to make videos again, ones that don’t crash every time I blink. Until then, may your power cords be untangled and your politicians less so.