Trump’s permanent devastation
The Covid-19 pandemic and its attendant shutdowns devastated the world economy. Tens of thousands of small businesses, especially the public-facing kind such as restaurants, barbers, small grocery stores and the like, closed their doors forever. Supermarket shelves quickly emptied out due to the twin ravages of panic buying and supply chain depredations. Inflation demolished savings and plunged millions into credit card debt.
Then along came the vaccines in November of 2020. Vaccinated people created a ring of resistance around the world against Covid. Covid itself evolved into less pernicious strains. To be sure, people continued to die of Covid, but the overwhelming majority of deaths occurred among the unvaccinated, helping evolution in its presumed quest to rid the planet of morons. We watched with grim amusement as anti-vaccination “activists” choked to death, one by one, hooked up to respirators in hospitals around the world.
But who remembers how, when everything began to recover, when the supply chain returned to normal and Covid faded into the background with cold, flu and other common ailments, that in the spirit of humanitarian cooperation retailers eased prices back down to their pre-Covid levels? Me neither. In fact, the billionaires and trillionaire-hopefuls became so addicted to these new, wider profit margins that mild inflation continues to this very day.
That’s because, like the loss of all those businesses, sometimes economic problems become permanent. Covid created problems for us that we will probably never see the end of in our lifetime. Loved ones who died due to Covid aren’t coming back, and today we are paying higher prices than we would if Covid had never happened in the first place. As they say, them’s the breaks.
The Covid-19 pandemic wasn’t anybody’s fault, as far as we know. Trump’s disastrous handling of it, his encouragement of the blithering idiots who joined the anti-vaccination movement, WAS his fault. So you can thank Trump and assholes like him for the fix we are in today. We don’t think about it much anymore, but the prices we pay at the grocery store would be lower today if Trump and shit-brains like him hadn’t politicised the Covid-19 pandemic.
Now Trump is working on another set of permanent problems for us. I’m sorry to report that the inflated prices his stupid tariffs are creating for the American economy in general and the world in particular will soon be ossified into everyday prices. Get ready to pay more for less, including dolls for little girls. Get ready to pay those higher prices permanently. And everybody can thank Trump and the sycophants and leeches who populate his hosanna-screeching claque.
This time around the economic problems we are heading for could easily have been prevented. This time around there will be one — AND ONLY ONE — person to blame. Trump, the dumbest goddamn asshole on the planet.
If Trump had done absolutely nothing, if he had spent the last hundred plus days playing golf, we would be fine. We would still be basking in President Joe Biden’s splendid economy. But because Trump’s perpetually famished ego won’t let him leave things alone, because he has to touch everything with his short-fingered Midas-touch-in-reverse, we are about to be permanently cursed by the economic devastation to come.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.