The Gipper, the Grifter, and the Wrecking Ball

Ronald Reagan warns against tariffs from beyond the grave, Canada packs its bags, and Trump keeps demolishing America, one institution at a time.

Good morning! Donald Trump had another one of his nocturnal brain spasms last night and declared that all trade negotiations with Canada are hereby terminated. The reason? Ontario Premier Doug Ford is running a $75 million ad campaign across the U.S. featuring Ronald Reagan’s voice warning that tariffs wreck economies. In Trump’s mind, this is an act of foreign election interference, by a dead president.

Trump raged on Truth Social that Canada’s ad was “fake” and designed to “influence the Supreme Court,” because apparently Reagan has risen from the grave to sabotage his tariff policies. The ad in question is just a clip from Reagan’s 1987 Camp David address, a speech where the Gipper warned that tariffs cause “markets to shrink and collapse, businesses to shut down, and millions of people to lose their jobs.” Trump, ever the scholar of economic history, insists that’s “not real Reagan,” because in the MAGA cinematic universe, Reagan’s ghost is now a liberal deepfake.

The irony is richer than one of Trump’s cheeseburgers: Reagan’s speech was a full-throated sermon against protectionism, and Trump’s latest tantrum only guaranteed millions more Americans will now go hear it for themselves. Doug Ford’s media team should send him a fruit basket, nothing sells ad views like a presidential meltdown.

The Reagan Foundation, now under MAGA management, released a statement scolding Ontario for “selective editing” and threatening to sue. Never mind that the Reagan Library’s own website lists the speech as “unrestricted use.” Never mind that Reagan’s words could fit neatly on the headstone of Trump’s economic policy: “Beware the demagogues who would declare a trade war against our allies while cynically waving the American flag.”

Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney has clearly had enough. His recent Ottawa speech was less diplomacy and more divorce decree: the decades-long economic marriage between the U.S. and Canada “is now over.” Carney’s budget will prioritize buying Canadian steel, Canadian aluminum, Canadian everything, because, as he put it, “we can’t rely on one foreign partner.” Translation: after months of Trump’s tariff roulette, Canada is calling the movers and taking the couch.

Trump’s tantrum follows the same pattern as his East Wing demolition, no permits, no planning, no legal authority, just swing the wrecking ball and shout about “tremendous success.” The constitutional architecture of American governance is being treated like condemned real estate. Congress has ceded its powers, trade, tariffs, appropriations, all of it, to a man whose governing philosophy is “do it now, apologize never.”

And he’s applied that real-estate gospel to foreign policy too. The president’s idea of negotiation is threatening to conquer Canada for being “nasty” about tariffs and accusing the late Ronald Reagan of election interference. The only thing missing is a ribbon-cutting ceremony outside the smoking crater where NAFTA once stood.

On the home front, the “budgetary twister” at the White House continues. Trump’s OMB chief bragged on right-wing radio that they’ve been moving money around to pay “the people we want paid”, military and law enforcement, while the rest of the federal workforce waits in limbo. As we wrote earlier, that’s not clever accounting; it’s illegal. Congress holds the power of the purse, but the GOP-led House and Senate have long since pawned it for a seat at Trump’s banquet table.

If there’s a unifying theme to all of this, tariffs, shutdown, the East Wing crater, it’s demolition as governance. Trump doesn’t build; he extracts. He’s the only developer in history to bankrupt a casino, and now he’s doing the same with the Constitution. The man treats government authority like one of his old Atlantic City shells: strip the wiring, sell the marble, pocket the proceeds, and call it patriotism.

And he’s not doing it alone. The same corporations that once funded the Gilded Swam are still in the game, the contractors, crypto firms, and defense giants lining up to sponsor the new “Presidential Ballroom,” a monument to excess and self-dealing. These are the same donors who underwrite Trump’s deregulation rallies and sit on the boards of the very agencies he’s gutting. The construction firms behind the East Wing demolition were promised future contracts and tax breaks; the energy conglomerates, debt forgiveness and drilling rights. It’s less an administration than a syndicate of self-investment, a government run as an inside-trader’s Ponzi scheme, where political loyalty doubles as a building permit.

This is the final stage of plutocracy: when money no longer buys influence, it simply becomes government itself. The White House is literally being reshaped to suit its investors, gold trim and all. Trump isn’t defying institutions; he’s flipping them, one grift at a time, turning the people’s house into an equity offering.

Somewhere, amid the dust and the noise, Ronald Reagan’s ghost is rolling his eyes in black-and-white, muttering, “I told you so.” The old actor warned that demagogues would wave the flag while wrecking prosperity, and the encore is now playing live from the Oval Office. The set is gilded, the audience captive, and the only thing missing from the credits is a disclosure line: “Funded by the generous support of our nation’s top corporate looters.”

Here’s a little dose of reality for anyone who still believes Donald Trump’s claim that he has “killed inflation.” It’s payday in America, or it should be, and 1.4 million federal workers are instead staring at zeroes on their pay stubs. Half of them are furloughed; the other half are working without pay, officially labeled “essential” but treated as expendable.

In Prince George’s County, Maryland, the line for food boxes stretched around a parking lot, middle-class professionals, not the unemployed or destitute, waiting for pasta and bread because the federal government can’t pay its own. The Capital Area Food Bank started the day with 300 boxes. They ran out before Wanda Bright reached the front. Two hours she waited, only to be told there was nothing left. When the second truck finally arrived, she sighed with relief, clutching loaves of bread and canned goods to get her family through the week. “A lot of us are stressed,” she said. “Some people can handle this. A lot of people cannot.”

In Tampa, Social Security worker Tierra Carter still goes to work every day, answering calls for seniors who do get their checks, while she takes out loans and raids her 401(k) to feed her kids. “It’s like I’m swimming to the surface and keep getting knocked back down,” she said.

Using funds allocated for one purpose to pay for another is flatly illegal, a clear violation of Congress’s Article I power of the purse and yet another sign of how far this administration has drifted from even the pretense of legality. Trump, meanwhile, calls this chaos “strategic budgeting.” Last week at the White House, he bragged, “We got the people that we want paid, paid.”

The rest of the federal workforce? Collateral damage in a power game where every paycheck is a loyalty test. Appropriations law doesn’t bend for political theater, but Trump has never been one for rules when spectacle will do. He’s raiding unspent research funds and agency reserves like a slumlord siphoning rent money to finish his golden penthouse, all while insisting it’s “efficient governance.” It’s sabotage disguised as swagger, and Congress’s silence only confirms how thoroughly it has surrendered its most fundamental authority.

So yes, inflation looks flat, if you ignore the latest numbers showing it’s actually risen to 3%. But who’s counting, right? When you stop paying 1.4 million federal workers, prices tend to stabilize in the same way a patient’s pulse “stabilizes” after cardiac arrest. It’s the East Wing model of economics: bulldoze what you can’t balance, declare victory, and pose for the cameras amid the wreckage.

Across the country, credit unions are rushing to provide emergency loans to their own members, while community aid funds in D.C. and Virginia are running dry. Requests for help with rent and groceries are pouring in faster than volunteers can respond. “Our funds are dwindling quickly,” says one organizer.

This is how Trump “kills” inflation: not through policy or production, but paralysis. He starves the system until demand dies. It’s the same principle he applies to governance itself, declare something broken, break it harder, then demand credit for cleaning up the rubble.

And just as with the East Wing demolition, it’s all done without permission. No congressional authority for tariffs, no appropriations for paychecks, no permits for the wrecking ball. A nation running on “apologize later,” led by a man constitutionally incapable of apology.

The result? The grocery store next to the federal building loses its lunch rush. The daycare closes early. The middle class learns what it’s like to stand in line for food aid. Inflation may be “dead,” but so is the idea that work earns a living.

Each morning I wake up wondering if there will be anything newsworthy to write about, and every morning, without fail, I find myself tumbling down another dark corruption rabbit hole that makes the last one look quaint. Somewhere between the demolished East Wing, the ghost of Ronald Reagan warning about tariffs, and the federal workforce lining up for food, I start to wonder what new headline could possibly top yesterday’s. And then, somehow, it does.

Before I dive into the next descent, Marz always gets his romp on the trails. He doesn’t care about tariffs or trade wars or cognitive decline, only squirrels and sunshine. It’s a useful reminder that joy still exists in the margins, even when democracy is wheezing under a tarp of dust and debt.

One bit of good news: the legacy press has finally started to notice what we’ve all been seeing for months, the obvious signs of Trump’s mental decline. The word “dementia” is beginning to appear in polite company again, even if editors still whisper it like a secret. Maybe that’s progress.

More later.