Derek Thompson
Something v profound here about the whole Trump experience. Trump stepping over Congress to punish Chinese manufacturers (his tariffs) while stepping over Congress to un-punish Chinese social media (his stay of the TikTok ban) is one of the clearer cases where I don’t think it’s possible to really articulate any coherent ex ante strategy for this administration. The best a Trump explainer or defender can do is watch what he does and explain after the fact that it’s brilliant. So you get a bunch of very (or mildly) clever ex post explanations but nobody can tell you what’s gonna happen next week. How’s this supposed to work for … four years? I don’t get how you run an economy with a bunch of priests standing around a lottery ball machine, explaining why each new number is the perfect expression of an infallible god.
Matthew Zeitlin
i'm a broken record about this but our failure to follow our own ban tiktok law while it's actively being used in a front of the supposedly existential trade war we're in with china is baffling
