Trump's Fake Strongman Act Has Completely Crumbled

The weakest president in history came into office pretending to be a strongman but his collapse on the trade war revealed who and what Donald Trump really is.

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Donald Trump has always been obsessed with strength because he has always been weak. It is difficult for anything to be strong when it has no core. When the basis for everything is shifting transactionalism, the result is chaos, contradiction, and hypocrisy.

All the talk of Trump being an authoritarian and setting up a regime remains frightening for many Americans, but Donald Trump is inching closer to the completion of his first 100 days in office, and there is no authoritarian regime.

Rachel Maddow, one of the biggest alarm sounders about the threat to democracy, has been using a different word to describe Trump and his administration. Maddow has been devoting more and more of her airtime to discussing Trump and his administration’s incompetence.

Presidential administrations take on the personality and values of the president. The Trump administration as a group is paranoid, conspiratorial, weak, callous, uncaring, lawless, and has shown itself to be incompetent.

A weak and incompetent president can't be a strongman, and the most recent sign of Trump's weakness came on Saturday when news broke that Trump is granting exemptions to his tariffs.

Bloomberg reported:

President Donald Trump’s administration exempted smartphones, computers and other electronics from its so-called reciprocal tariffs, representing a major reprieve for global technology manufacturers including Apple Inc. and Nvidia Corp. even if it proves a temporary one.

The exclusions, published late Friday by US Customs and Border Protection, narrow the scope of the levies by excluding the products from Trump’s 125% China tariff and his baseline 10% global tariff on nearly all other countries.

As with everything else surrounding the haphazard tariff policy, no one is sure what it really means beyond today, but it does tell us a great deal, as we will discuss below about Trump’s failed strongman fantasy.