Trump is changing reality, not policy

Reality always bites back

If you watch a single press briefing by Trump Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, you get a sense of what this season of the Trump Show is trying to accomplish. It’s a bold agenda, which includes remaking the world in the Boss’s image. Facts are thrown staccato at reporters, who struggle to fact-check even the most mundane items. Things that are taken to be “surely you’re joking” turn out to be serious, like Canada as the 51st state (Canadians are not laughing).

Photo by Donald Giannatti on Unsplash

Just yesterday (today in Japan), Leavitt showed a chart claiming Japan is charging a 700 percent tariff on rice imports. The Japanese are taking umbrage at the claim. The Japan Times reports:

“Look at Japan, tariffing rice 700%,” [Leavitt[ said on Tuesday. “President (Donald) Trump believes in reciprocity, and it is about dang time that we have a president who actually looks out for the interest of American business and workers.”

The reality: tariffs Japan charges for rice are not negotiated with the United States. They are part of an agreement with the World Trade Organization (WTO), and they fluctuate based on the market price of rice. Remember, rice is Japan’s staple food, in a way that cannot translate into American food consumption (maybe corn or wheat would be a useful stand-in, but not a perfect one). According to the JT article, Japan imports 770,000 metric tons of rice with no tariffs each year, as part of the WTO deal.

The U.S. exports between 300,000 and 400,000 tons to Japan annually, tariff-free, which represents the largest imports of rice by Japan. That’s not a Trump deal, it’s the WTO, which Trump despises. Outside the WTO framework, Japan does charge a tariff, which around 25 years ago was 778 percent—but the government doesn’t publicly disclose the numbers. Estimates from Nikkei have it currently around 400 percent, not 700. These rice imports represents about 0.03 percent of what Japan imports under the WTO framework—a minimal amount.

So the truth is that Japan cooperates with international agreements to import its single most important staple food, tariff free, with the United States exporting the largest share of that. But the Trump team doesn’t want to set policy based on this. It wants to alter the reality of how America trades with other nations.

Leavitt also said that Canada is letting a large quantity of fentanyl into the U.S. This might be a valid claim about Mexico—U.S. authorities seized nearly all of the 21,900 pounds of the drug in 2024 crossing the southern border—but it’s not true at all about Canada. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, “Canada plays virtually no role in the U.S. fentanyl influx, especially compared to the other countries. The country contributes less than 1 percent to its southern neighbor’s street fentanyl supply, as both the Canadian government and data from the DEA report.”

That’s the facts. But the reality Trump wants is Canada as the 51st U.S. state. Impossible would not begin to describe the chance of this happening. The Canadians would not go peacefully, and I cannot imagine any scenario where our armed forces would invade our neighbor to the north to take it by force. I suppose if Trump had, you know, policy, it would be a brilliant move to get Canada to close the border with the U.S. and relentlessly enforce it with military strength, out of fear of a U.S. invasion. But again, Trump doesn’t want policy. He wants to pretend the world is his to mold, and Canada is a state, like Montana, only north.

The problem is when policy is the result of warped reality, and people don’t buy the new reality, chaos occurs. So we had a tariff war of enormous proportions developing with Canada—Ontario in particular—involving electricity from Niagara Falls and other sources that supplies the U.S. grid in New York. In response, Trump said he would double the tariffs against our best ally in the world. The Canadians retreated, in disgust.

Honestly, I wish they hadn’t. But their thoughts were probably that they don’t want to harm their neighbors to the south (more than they have to). These showpieces have evolved over just days, so in reality, who knows what effects they have, beyond making the stock market look crazy. The reality there is also bent. As David Thornton noted, the market indexes have lost every bit of gains since the election. But that’s a long way from wiping out all the gains since the end of COVID, and the beginning of the Biden term of office. Trump will have to bend reality hard to achieve that level of destruction.

Maybe bankruptcies are the price of the new American “golden age.” Everyone has to do their part, by sacrificing their 401k, and watching their investments shrivel. Unless you’re Warren Buffett, who saw all this happening before it happened and is sitting on $300 billion in cash and treasuries.’

Trump’s reality includes ending the war in Ukraine, regardless of the outcome of that war for Ukrainians. He got the Ukrainians to accept a 30-day cease-fire, which will allow Russia to relieve and re-arm its beleaguered troops in the Kursk Oblast incursion by Ukraine, and prepare a proper spring offensive along the extended front in the Donbas. Of course, “the ball is now in Russia’s court,” says Trump, meaning that Russia has not agreed, nor has it promised anything.

I don’t see what Ukraine has to gain from the cease-fire, other than agreeing in principle in order to restore intelligence and military aid, which had been paused, from the U.S. And that intelligence, in real-time, is more valuable than the money, when swarms of Iranian-made Russian drones, along with salvos of missiles, are fired into their country every day. This was a pure bullying tactic, one that won’t work on Vladimir Putin, who has his own realty to bend. It seems where Putin’s reality meets Trump’s, Putin’s has been the one bending and Trump’s is the one bent.

“The best way I can describe it is sort of like hitting a mule with a 2x4 across the nose; it got [Ukraine’s] attention,” Keith Kellogg, the U.S. special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, said last week of the pauses.

Trump’s reality seeps into federal agencies, without legislative mandate or oversight. So the Department of Education, an organization I’d love to see shuttered (along with the EPA), isn’t being properly shut down, as that would require an act of Congress, but it’s being gutted from the inside.

“Today’s reduction in force reflects the Department of Education’s commitment to efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents, and teachers,” said Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. “I appreciate the work of the dedicated public servants and their contributions to the Department. This is a significant step toward restoring the greatness of the United States education system.”

So either the department was horrifically overstaffed, or there’s dark magic going on.

The Department of Education will continue to deliver on all statutory programs that fall under the agency’s purview, including formula funding, student loans, Pell Grants, funding for special needs students, and competitive grantmaking.

I don’t see how the department, at half staff, can deliver on all the things it does now, unless the words “all statutory programs” means something else. Again, it’s not policy that’s being formed, it’s reality that’s being altered.

Meanwhile, Congress has to live in its own reality, one of its own making, where Doomsday is always just a few months away, and the cans get kicked instead of doing the work they were elected to do. The budget was passed by the House, on party lines, to avoid another shutdown, which will occur Friday if the Senate doesn’t pass what the House threw to them. It will take eight Democrats to get that done, which I don’t know will happen, though it will if Democrats listen to my favorite Dem Senator, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who tweeted: “Never, never, never vote for a shutdown—ever.”

I could spend another 2,000 words going item by item through Trump’s daily reality benders and comparing them to facts in evidence, but there’s nothing to gain by doing it. We’re committed to either bending with the POTUS, and thereby turning our brains into receivers for his reality, or we are stuck with reconciling actual facts to his bent reality. The former might lead to a form of blissful acceptance, followed by a horrible bout of remorse when reality bites back. The latter is a constant migraine.

Choose your disorder. And visit North Montana. I hear the tropical beaches are great.

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