The Mafia Don laid down the extortion — er, tariffs — though he still has zero understanding of what a tariff is or how it works. Not to worry, he has plenty of media cheerleaders who know… well, not much more. But they’re sure somehow that he’s doing the right thing. Never mind that the stock market immediately plunged into the toilet, and people started losing money right and left.

A few fellow Republicans are skeptical, however, and Dear Leader had some choice words for them: “Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Rand Paul, also of Kentucky, will hopefully get on the Republican bandwagon, for a change, and fight the Democrats [sic] wild and flagrant push to not penalize Canada for the sale of Fentanyl [sic], by Tariffing [sic] the value of this horrible and deadly drug, in order to make it more costly to distribute and buy.” So apparently, at his command, illegal drug traffickers are going to declare their transactions and pay tariffs on their product.

At Fox “News”, Sean Hannity said that he was “absolutely a thousand percent confident that things are going to work out in the end for everybody” on the tariff front. But later in the same program he said “My level of confidence is pretty near 100% that this is all going to work out fine.” The fact that his level of confidence nosedived like the DOW in a matter of minutes doesn’t seem to put a damper on his efforts to hawk the actions of Dear Leader.

Also at Fox, Jeanine Pirro said “I don’t really care about my 401(k) today… I believe in this man.” Hey, with only 6 bankruptcies including a casino and a disastrous performance in the first term, what’s not to believe in?

Folks at the New York Stock Exchange also seemed to believe in him. They had Rudy Giuliani and representatives of Newsmax ring the opening bell on the floor of the exchange. Later that day, the DOW plummeted 1700 points.

But leave it to MAGA commentator Benny Johnson to have the last word on the topic: “losing money costs you absolutely nothing.” So now you know.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick: “European Union won’t take chicken from America, they won’t take lobsters from America. They hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak.”

At the right-wing Daily Wire, a host declared that “100 percent of the successful business entrepreneurs are men.” The same host (we’re not going to name him, because these people make cheap stupid statements to draw attention to themselves, and they’re all interchangeable anyway) said “stop thinking about transphobia. It’s not a — that’s not the sort of thing that anyone should be punished for.Homophobia, what does that mean? Viewing aberrant sexual acts with moral opprobrium? What’s wrong with that?”

After Dear Leader dumped thousands of pages on the JFK assassination (without redacting sensitive information that might allow kooks to harass government officials), Congress thought it would be a nifty idea to hear from filmmaker Oliver Stone, who made an entertaining flick about the event that (surprise) managed to leave out a great deal of crucial information that would have deflated his conspiracy theories. The ever-dependable Lauren Boebert took the medal at this circus by confusing Oliver Stone with the even kookier Roger Stone.

Everyone’s favorite pillow pusher conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell: “I am looking at running for Governor of MN because right now I have a voice that could be big enough. I’m going to do my due diligence. We are going to be doing all kinds of polling. What are they going to do to – say Mike Lindell was a crack addict? Yeah I was, what else you got? I’m going to make some bigger announcements tomorrow. Hopefully, the polling will show that nobody wants Tim Walz. Everywhere I go they don’t.”

The Senate confirmed snake oil pusher Dr. Oz to be the official Fucker Upper of Medicare and Medicaid. Meanwhile the official Fucker Upper of HHS, RFK Jr., announced that he is rehiring thousands of the personnel he just fired, because they were fired accidentally. But not to worry. He assures us that it’s all just part of the plan. He intended all along to fire thousands of people by mistake. Don’t you feel better already?