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Tariffs and teachable moments

Last week, I wrote about how excited I was to buy the Nintendo Switch 2, which was supposed to go on sale for preorders. I said the launch of the video gaming console was “unrelated” to the ongoing political chaos. This week, the chaos came for gaming, as the uncertainty created by Donald Trump’s market-destroying tariffs pushed Nintendo to delay preorders for the Switch 2 in the US.

My eldest child, who is 12 years old, learned about the delay from his friends at school, and came home in distress. Would the tariffs make the Switch 2 “too expensive” for us to buy?, he asked.

I really didn’t know how to respond. I put basically every cent of disposable income I have into video gaming—so, while I drive a 16-year-old car and have holes in at least one out of every two socks in my drawer, I own every video game console as well as an expensive gaming PC with enough computing power that I could probably direct a mission to Neptune from my home office. We are going to get the Switch 2, whenever it becomes available, at whatever price gouging point Nintendo eventually lands on. However, I didn’t want to waste the “teachable moment” of showing my kid that Trump’s insane actions have real-world consequences.

I fobbed him off in real time with the parental standby of “we’ll have to see,” but later he came to me and said he was willing to “work harder” and “save money” to make sure we could still get the console. I hated that answer. I hated that he believed that he could overcome the slings and arrows of an outrageous government and rapacious capitalism with “hard work” and sound financial planning. That’s not how it works. I told him that there are plenty of people who work their asses off, delay gratification, and do all the right things, but still cannot withstand the irrational dictates of Republican policies to get what they need, much less things they merely want, like video games.

I ended up telling him that our family would be able to “overcome” Trump’s terrible economic policies, because we are lucky and privileged to have work that is valued and fairly compensated by society. I said that if he really wants to work harder, it should be in service of others who are not as lucky as we are, and that his parents will figure out how to direct our resources into our entertainment and comforts.

Then, his younger brother, aged 9, said, “Yeah. And anyway, we’ll be able to get the Switch 2 in four years, when Trump is no longer president.” I nodded. I didn’t have the heart to tell the little one that I wasn’t so sure about that last part.

The Bad and The Ugly

• Trump announced that he was pausing his tariffs against most countries, but not China, causing the stock market to rally on Wednesday, then crater again the next day. If you had known what Trump was about to do, as it seems some did, you could have made a lot of money in the market this week. In related news, Senator Adam Schiff has called for an investigation into whether Trump participated in insider trading or market manipulation. 
• Trump signed an entire executive order about shower heads. I look forward to this EO making an appearance in the documentary They Were Not Serious People, a straight-to-retina release in the year 2550, which will chronicle the decline and fall of 21st-century American hegemony.
• The Supreme Court overturned a lower-court order that required Trump to reinstate illegally fired federal workers.
• Conservative judges on two different courts can’t figure out if their holy Second Amendment requires that firearms be allowed to be sold to children under the age of 21. It should really tell you how completely insane the Republican interpretation of the Second Amendment is that these people can’t figure out whether or not the Constitution is a murder-suicide pact that demands that 18-year-olds be sold Uzis if they want them. The Supreme Court will decide next week whether to step in and resolve the dispute.
• I have to fly next week and I really, really don’t want to. If I die in some DOGE-induced airline disaster, please, for the love of God, politicize the hell out of my death.

Inspired Takes

• In The Nation, Alex Peter takes a deep dive into “assassination memes,” which are apparently spreading across social media. I don’t want to sound like the late Bill Paxton in every movie he ever made, but, guys, I don’t think we’re going to make it.
• Dr. Christina Greer writes what essentially every Black intellectual I know has been trying to tell white folks about the Trump administration: “Black Americans Are Not Surprised.” We have literally seen this white supremacist crap before, and we know we’ll see it again, because whiteness routinely devolves into oppression in this country. Physician, heal thy freaking self.

Worst Argument of the Week

The Supreme Court reversed a lower-court order barring the Trump administration from deporting noncitizens that it claims, without evidence, are part of a Venezuelan gang. The 5–4  ruling, issued via an unsigned opinion, allowed Trump to keep deporting people under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, even though the majority also said that the noncitizens had rights that they should be able to press in court. It may sound like a partial victory, but as everything with the Roberts court, it came with a catch. The court said that abducted migrants could press those rights only in Texas, home of the most bigoted judges MAGA can find, because that’s where they were shipped before being renditioned to El Salvador.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a 17-page dissent to the-four page, unsigned majority opinion, and I cannot explain the problem with the majority’s reasoning more eloquently than she did, so I’ll just quote her:

Critically, even the majority today agrees, and the Federal Government now admits, that individuals subject to removal under the Alien Enemies Act are entitled to adequate notice and judicial review before they can be removed. That should have been the end of the matter. Yet, with “barebones briefing, no argument, and scarce time for reflection,” the Court announces that legal challenges to an individual’s removal under the Alien Enemies Act must be brought in habeas petitions in the district where they are detained [Texas].

The Court’s legal conclusion is suspect. The Court intervenes anyway, granting the Government extraordinary relief and vacating the District Court’s order on that basis alone. It does so without mention of the grave harm Plaintiffs will face if they are erroneously removed to El Salvador or regard for the Government’s attempts to subvert the judicial process throughout this litigation. Because the Court should not reward the Government’s efforts to erode the rule of law with discretionary equitable relief, I respectfully dissent.

Translation: The Supreme Court’s capitulation to Trump’s mass deportations is bullshit—so obviously so that even the Republican justices acknowledge that Trump does not have the authority to do what he is doing. And yet, these same cowardly Republicans are letting him do it anyway.

What I Wrote

Hey, I wrote this week. A little! I took a 30,000-foot look at all the wins Trump has been racking up at the Supreme Court, including the mass deportation cases, and put them in the context of Chief Justice John Roberts’s feckless cowardice and complicity. A few hours after I wrote this, Roberts did precisely what I said he would do.

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

This week, I finished watching Season 2 of the Apple TV show Severance. It’s a difficult show to explain without spoilers, or if you haven’t perused the works of Karl Marx or Immanuel Kant recently. It’s generally a show about the alienation of labor, in a sci-fi, psychological horror kind of way.

I enjoyed Season 1 of the show, but it was incredibly white-coded. There were Black speaking characters, and an Asian one, but their race meant nothing. In the show’s version of dystopian corporate shenanigans, “racism” was apparently the only societal ill that had been completely solved. Bully for them.

Season 2 hits differently. One of the main characters in the show is named Seth Milchick, and my editor informs me that “milchick” not only sounds Jewish but can be read (and has been read by some Severance obsessives) as a play on the Yiddish word milchig, or dairy, in the kosher food system—a system, she notes, that is all about keeping things separate. Her theory is that this wordplay is deliberate, a comment not only about race but also on the character’s role as both an enforcer of severance and a victim of it. (For those wondering, yes, my editor and I text television show fan theories to each other while chronicling the end of democracy.)

I have a slightly different take (about the show). I have no problem believing that on paper, Milchick’s character was written as a Jewish man. But in the show, he’s played by actor Tramell Tillman, who happens to be Black. I also have no problem believing that Tillman walked into that audition, blew everyone away, and was cast in his role, racial intentions be damned.

Milchick is Black but isn’t played as a self-aware Black man in Season 1. He’s just a middle-manager, an overseer really, charged with keeping the workers on task and in the dark. However, in Season 2, the show starts to play with the stress and difficulty of being a Black man in a white company—one that is run more like a cult. There is an awesome scene where Milchick is “gifted” with portraits of the company-cult’s all-white founders, but the founders’ pictures have been painted Black to make him feel “included.” They gave this man essentially some portraits in Blackface, and expected to be happy about it, and Tillman conveys the offense and insult of the whole thing, while saying “thank you,” and smiling at the Candace Owens–like Black woman who excitedly gave him the portraits.

Later in the season, Milchick is reprimanded by his white superiors for being too well-spoken. They don’t like that he uses “big words.” When he finally pushes back, he tells his boss to “devour feculence.” I cheered at my television. For a more in-depth analysis of Milchick, check out this post on Contraband Camp.

Through it all, however, Milchick is still a company man, still an overseer, still a bad guy on the show. He makes decisions I would never make, in a situation I would never find myself in, and yet I found myself relating to his character. This white-ass show has tapped into the subtle forms of racial oppression and insult that take place all across corporate America, and I believe any Black person who has ever worked for “the Man” would find Milchick’s character instantly recognizable. It’s a testament to Tillman’s acting, for sure, but also shows a deft hand by the show’s creator (Dan Erickson), director (Ben Stiller), and other assorted showrunners to essentially Blackify a Jewish-ish-coded character in a way that doesn’t make me immediately recoil. Last time I saw a white team write a Black character with this level of depth and complexity, I was watching David Simon’s The Wire.

If you were, like me, inclined to give Severance a pass because you’re not particularly interested in white people’s dystopian fantasy problems, give it another look. And “hang in there” until Season 2.