Are You Tired of Winning?

Where things stand on immigration, economy, trade, and more.

Composite. Credit: 2windspa.

The biggest winners of Donald Trump’s presidency a hundred days in are those wealthy enough to buy access to power in D.C. and the entertainment industry masquerading as a political movement.

Let’s do a brief rundown, starting with the Department of Government Efficiency.

There has been a deafening amount of white noise around what DOGE has actually accomplished. But we don’t have to guess. An analysis of the Treasury Department’s daily financial reports found that the federal government spent approximately $220 billion more in the first 100 days compared to the same time period last year.

DOGE claims to have saved taxpayers $160 billion. In reality, there are, at best, receipts for just $60 billion in cuts on the office’s website. The much-discussed staff reductions—including the termination of Trump supporters—have essentially served as window dressing for this scam.

Combine that with Trump’s proposed $1 trillion defense budget, and DOGE becomes as much of a farce as “Liberation Day.”

As of this writing, Trump’s ill-conceived trade war has resulted in the worst U.S. stock market in decades. According to Financial Times calculations, the S&P 500, “which hit a record high in mid February, last fell further over the course of a president’s first 100 days in office in the second half of 1974, when Ford entered the White House following the resignation of Richard Nixon.”

Trump’s tariffs have already triggered layoffs in a variety of different sectors. UPS, for example, announced that it would cut 20,000 jobs this year.

“On a call with investors Tuesday, UPS’s chief executive, Carol Tomé, said Mr. Trump’s trade policies were particularly debilitating for small and midsize businesses that buy goods from China,” Wall Street Journal reported.

Similarly, Volvo Group and its subsidiary Mack Trucks confirmed layoffs for hundreds of employees at facilities on the East Coast.

There’s a way to fight back against China without causing this much needless damage domestically. Trump basically expected everyone to fall prostrate before him on Liberation Day. When that didn’t happen, the administration panicked and has been flailing since. There is a good chance that the pain we’re seeing is just the start, too.

Meanwhile, Trump’s trade war has pushed the European Union into considering a closer relationship with China, which has taken the opportunity to launch a “charm offensive.”

“After Trump’s return, the Chinese have been on a charm offensive to convince global actors that they should look to China for a reliable partner,” Varg Folkman, an analyst with the European Policy Centre, told Deutsche Welle. Beijing is considering removing sanctions on members of the European Parliament as a way to “pave the way for trade discussions with the EU.”

Even Japan has pushed back on Trump’s efforts to economically isolate China. That’s mainly because of the trade ties between Tokyo and Beijing. But I have to imagine that Japan also feels deeply disrespected by Trump’s behavior, given that they are one of our key allies. One of the clearest signals came from Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba.

“If Japan concedes everything, we won’t be able to secure our national interest,” he said of tariff talks with the U.S.

No doubt that one of the most frustrating aspects of this for countries like Japan is that Trump is actually railing against trade deals that he devised and struck as president in 2019.

So the stock market has taken a beating, the trade war is backfiring, and we aren’t meaningfully cutting spending, but what about immigration? It’s bad news there as well, I’m afraid—at least for those who voted for Trump believing that he would deliver them the largest enforcement operation in history.

For Scripps News, investigative reporter Patrick Terpstra writes.

The Trump administration has embraced a shock and awe approach to immigration enforcement designed for maximum publicity. The homeland security secretary has attended and posted video of early morning arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Trump has deployed more armed forces to the border and used military planes to ferry away immigrants. He has also sent alleged Venezuelan gang members to a terrorism prison in El Salvador before they could have a day in court.

But federal data shows there has not been a significant jump in immigrants deported since Trump took office. Mass deportations have not occurred. The numbers show removals are lagging behind levels during the Biden administration.

You may have noticed that as these numbers lagged, there was an aggressive effort to keep senior henchman Stephen Miller in the media, on top of more Studio Ghibli memes posted from the official Twitter account of the White House, all to the applause of right-wing influencers. That’s what we call cruelty theater.

As I’ve written before, the worst part of all this is the vice signaling, the encouraging people to be the worst versions of themselves, to revel in cruelty and blind obedience. It’s a dynamic that has thoroughly infected broad swaths of the right and crippled its ability to think independently about virtually any issue. Just look at what happened with Canada yesterday.

In an interview last week, Trump boasted to The Atlantic that he effectively sabotaged Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives in Canada. “You know, until I came along, remember that the Conservative was leading by 25 points,” he said. “Then I was disliked by enough of the Canadians that I’ve thrown the election into a close call, right?”

That “close call” turned into a surprise triumph for Canada’s Liberal Party. They were politically dead in the water until Trump began threatening to annex Canada. It was an electoral lifeline that allowed them to cast themselves as defenders of sovereignty, a steady pair of hands against an unruly neighbor to the south. This was apparently baffling to the smartest people on the right, who, though nationalistic themselves, struggled to understand how threatening to destroy another country might provoke nationalist sentiments there that shrewd politicians could easily exploit. To borrow from Churchill, this election was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma to them. Ironically, it was pretty straightforward to Trump.

The reactions from the right in the U.S. to his admitted kneecapping of Conservatives ranged from outright denial to glee. Notably, The American Conservative welcomed the victory of Canadian Liberals. Why? Because Trump said so, and as a proud herd of individualists, unlike those other collectivists, we don’t like to ask questions. And who is to say this was not all part of a grand quantum-dimensional game of chess occurring on several planes of existence that will end with us rolling tanks across the border to Canada? That sounds stupid because it is, and it is precisely because it is stupid that right-wing influencers with millions of followers are promoting it.

I’m not particularly invested in Canadian politics, nor do I feel strongly about Poilievre, and I do not feel that my destiny is tied to the success of conservative parties around the world. What bothered me about how the right understands what happened in Canada is the same thing that bothers me about our politics at home.

It’s the endless lying, the ceaseless torturing of reality, the tireless intellectual trapeze work, all occurring at once. That’s how you get the Executive Branch. No, I do not mean the part of the government that carries out and enforces the law. I mean the members-only club that Donald Trump Jr. just launched in Washington, D.C.

For a small annual fee of half a million dollars, you, too, can gain access to the White House. “Their goal, the people familiar with the plans say, is to create the highest-end private club that Washington has ever had, and cater to the business and tech moguls who are looking to nurture their relationships with the Trump administration,” Politico reported.

These people are doing everything they accused the Biden family of and far worse, and the right is rationalizing it by telling itself that, “Hey, at least the corruption is out in the open for once.” I’m told that this is called progress.

I am not a fan of the term “post-right” and don’t consider myself that. But as we hit the one-hundred-day mark, people should probably start thinking about what comes next because the way things are going, the right in America has a good chance of getting sabotaged the way Conservatives did in Canada and by the same person.

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