Stalin
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- Joined
- Apr 4, 2008
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President Donald Trump brought the stock market to the edge of a bear market (i.e., a sustained 20 percent drop) by imposing ridiculously high tariffs indiscriminately around the globe. That was so much fun that on Friday he shared a video on Truth Social titled “Trump is PURPOSELY Crashing the Market.” Then, on Wednesday, Trump put those tariffs on hold for 90 days for those countries willing to negotiate over trade barriers real or imagined (though Trump’s 10 percent “everybody tariff” will remain, and China will be punished for its defiance by raising its tariff to 125 percent). After Trump announced the tariff suspension on Truth Social, the S&P 500 recorded its third-biggest gain since World War II. Trump must have felt like Moses parting the Red Sea.
We can all be grateful that Trump was willing to undo, at least temporarily, the worst of the damage he inflicted. But it would be wrong to conclude, as Wall Street likely will, that there’s a “Trump put” after all. The “Trump put” is a fancy way of saying that whenever Trump does something that inadvertently sends stock prices down he can be counted on to reverse course and push them back up. (A put is an options contract that limits losses in a down market to a fixed amount.) The long-standing presumption of a Trump put is why 52 billionaires, including Timothy Mellon, Steve Wynn, and the Winklevoss twins, backed Trump in 2024.
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What Trump demonstrates here is not a strategy but a mental illness. I’m not the first to observe the striking resemblance between Trump’s governing style, particularly on tariffs, and Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another, more commonly known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy. It involves either pretending that a child is sick or inducing sickness so that you can luxuriate in restoring the child to health. (A wife who delights in sickening her husband with poisonous mushrooms, and then nursing him back to health, is an FDIA plot element in the 2017 film Phantom Thread.) According to the Cleveland Clinic, a common cause of FDIA is “wanting attention from others,” which of course fits Trump’s malignant narcissism like a glove. A shaky understanding of cause and effect, which the child psychologist Jean Piaget identified as transductive reasoning, would also seem consistent, and I’ve written previously that Trump has got that even though most people grow out of it at age 7.*
The only difficulty with diagnosing Trump with FDIA (apart from my not being, ahem, a psychologist) is that typically it’s motivated by love—or some deranged conception of love—and no malignant narcissist can ever love anyone but himself. In Trump’s case gratification comes from experiencing not a feeling of closeness in another person’s dependency but rather a feeling of schadenfreude in another person’s humiliation and surrender. Being Trump, our president said this out loud earlier this week at the Republican Congressional Committee Dinner. “I’m telling you, these countries are calling us up kissing my ass,” he said. “They are. They are dying to make a deal.”
The day before Trump let up on tariffs, he met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump’s foreign policy regarding Israel can be summed up as “Whatever Bibi wants, Bibi gets.” But not on tariffs. Netanyahu told Trump that in response to the 17 percent tariff Trump slapped on Israel he would eliminate “very quickly” all tariffs and trade deficits. But asked later whether he would lift the tariff against Israel, Trump replied: “Maybe not, maybe not.” This isn’t diplomacy. It’s pleasure in witnessing others grovel.
newrepublic.com
Add the narcissism, sociopathy, loose grip on reality and massively overcooked ego and you have a candidate for a long stretch in the bin...
comrade stalin
moscow
We can all be grateful that Trump was willing to undo, at least temporarily, the worst of the damage he inflicted. But it would be wrong to conclude, as Wall Street likely will, that there’s a “Trump put” after all. The “Trump put” is a fancy way of saying that whenever Trump does something that inadvertently sends stock prices down he can be counted on to reverse course and push them back up. (A put is an options contract that limits losses in a down market to a fixed amount.) The long-standing presumption of a Trump put is why 52 billionaires, including Timothy Mellon, Steve Wynn, and the Winklevoss twins, backed Trump in 2024.
..
What Trump demonstrates here is not a strategy but a mental illness. I’m not the first to observe the striking resemblance between Trump’s governing style, particularly on tariffs, and Factitious Disorder Imposed on Another, more commonly known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy. It involves either pretending that a child is sick or inducing sickness so that you can luxuriate in restoring the child to health. (A wife who delights in sickening her husband with poisonous mushrooms, and then nursing him back to health, is an FDIA plot element in the 2017 film Phantom Thread.) According to the Cleveland Clinic, a common cause of FDIA is “wanting attention from others,” which of course fits Trump’s malignant narcissism like a glove. A shaky understanding of cause and effect, which the child psychologist Jean Piaget identified as transductive reasoning, would also seem consistent, and I’ve written previously that Trump has got that even though most people grow out of it at age 7.*
The only difficulty with diagnosing Trump with FDIA (apart from my not being, ahem, a psychologist) is that typically it’s motivated by love—or some deranged conception of love—and no malignant narcissist can ever love anyone but himself. In Trump’s case gratification comes from experiencing not a feeling of closeness in another person’s dependency but rather a feeling of schadenfreude in another person’s humiliation and surrender. Being Trump, our president said this out loud earlier this week at the Republican Congressional Committee Dinner. “I’m telling you, these countries are calling us up kissing my ass,” he said. “They are. They are dying to make a deal.”
The day before Trump let up on tariffs, he met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump’s foreign policy regarding Israel can be summed up as “Whatever Bibi wants, Bibi gets.” But not on tariffs. Netanyahu told Trump that in response to the 17 percent tariff Trump slapped on Israel he would eliminate “very quickly” all tariffs and trade deficits. But asked later whether he would lift the tariff against Israel, Trump replied: “Maybe not, maybe not.” This isn’t diplomacy. It’s pleasure in witnessing others grovel.

The Sick Psychology Behind Trump’s Tariff Chaos
This isn’t trade strategy. It’s Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

Add the narcissism, sociopathy, loose grip on reality and massively overcooked ego and you have a candidate for a long stretch in the bin...
comrade stalin
moscow