You wrote this with exactly the vitriol the admin deserves. Especially in the call-out of Samuel Hammond, who should be laughed out of wonk circles for his pompous sanewashing of Trump's obvious buffoonery.
I think you’re right that the man himself has no plan. But the people around him? I think you’re wrong. It’s a really clear ideology. The “plan” is to restore a time when men worked in factories and supported families. (It won’t work, but plans in service of ideology usually don’t, on the left either — see “defund the police”.)
The Silicon Valley faction is belatedly realizing that their influence in the mad king’s court is low compared to the Vance wing of Catholic integrationalists / Dark Enlightenment / “based” 8chan males under 35 years old. Balaji (the Network State extreme libertarian guy) on Twitter was bemoaning that MAGA thinks they can turn the clock back to 1953 (or 1910) socially by twisting a knob called “tariffs” back to the value it had back then. But just like how IBM could set their prices to what they were in 1960, it wouldn’t restore their market dominance. US social fragmentation is driven by bigger factors than trade (see: the internet consuming all of everything socially, ie this blog).
But that’s it. They think they’re going to restore a time when women were in the kitchen and men were on an assembly line building B-24 Liberators or whatever. The “economics” are just window dressing, just like how science and theory was used as a fig leaf cover on the left when implementing extreme social justice policies for their real goal which is a sort of levelling or communism.
There’s tons more to say about horseshoe theory on this ideology. The left and the right both rightly are horrified as to what the American heartland has become in terms of social ties. But turning back clocks is hard. Doing it while half their party (the Tech Right) are trying to accelerate ever faster toward an AI takeover makes it even more bizarre when the Catholic-integrationalist wing of MAGA thinks they can do it.
>The “plan” is to restore a time when men worked in factories and supported families.
I'm sure there are people who think this way, but there's no evidence it's how Trump or his team thinks. If the goal is factory jobs, why are they putting tariffs on vanilla beans that literally cannot be grown in the United States? Why did they increase tariffs to 10% even on countries that we have a trade surplus with?
More generally, they seem to flit from explanation to explanation - the tariffs are just a bluff, a negotiating tactic. No, wait, they're about bringing back factories. No, hold on, it's about fentanyl at the border. The actual communication from the administration is a different reasoning every day. In the end the only constant is how dumb they are.
Fair! And maybe my view on this is too shaped by what the Algorithms choose to show me. I read Jon Haidt and his intellectual community a lot, and they lean toward a sort of religious-social-conservative view for how to deal with the Bowling Alone problem.
I still think the Vance Catholic-integrationalist wing is the dominant ideology in the MAGA court though.
How bad have things gotten when I actually read Jeremiah’s post as copium (I mean, I really hope his read is the right one) because the alternative explanation—dark enlightenment or whatever we call it—is so much more terrifying to contemplate 😭
> First, the goal is to revitalize American manufacturing, our capacity to build at home and export to the world. The global free trade system that took shape in the late 20th century served the American empire and American G.D.P. but at the expense of America’s earlier role as a manufacturing powerhouse — and because manufacturing jobs were such an important source of blue-collar male employment, at the expense of the working-class social fabric.
> Meanwhile, over time, our manufacturing base didn’t just move overseas, it moved into the territory of our greatest rival, the People’s Republic of China. So rebuilding industry in America has two potential benefits even if it sacrifices some of the efficiencies offered by global trade. Factory jobs fill a particular socioeconomic niche that’s been filled instead by drugs, decline, despair. And having a real manufacturing base is essential if we’re going to be locked into great power competition for decades to come.
…
> Now for my own view. I think trying to reshore some manufacturing and decouple more from China makes sense from a national security standpoint, even if it costs something to G.D.P. and the stock market. Using revenue from such a limited, China-focused tariff regime to pay down the deficit seems entirely reasonable.
> I am more skeptical that such reshoring will alleviate specific male blue-collar social ills, because automation has changed the industries so much that I suspect you would need some sort of social restoration first to make the current millions of male work force dropouts more employable.
Douthat has no idea. If you're someone who spent his entire career being a conservative-adjacent reactionary centrist, it's extremely bad for your brand that Trump (and his allies in the administration) are idiots.
Nobody competent is left in the Trump administration. He's purged from his inner circle anybody who might have original thoughts. Some exceptions definitely exist, like maybe Marco Rubio. But he'll be out within a few months.
This is a colossal tragedy unfolding before our eyes. As a non-US writer, I just keep asking how America has fallen so far, so fast. I just don't understand.
And the impact of this on developing countries is unconscionable. The US has just pulled out of both the aid game and the trade game. There's going to be truly serious pain as developing countries realign their economies elsewhere. That in turn will only benefit America's competition. And what if the USD loses reserve currency status? The "exorbitant privilege" would surely end and America will have a huge and sudden debt financing crisis.
All because of a ChatGPT search?! I can't keep reading this stuff. Where is the red line for these guys? For their voters? What policy would ever be beyond the pale for MAGA? Should I ask ChatGPT?
China can hardly believe their good fortune. They’re about to capture the hearts and minds (and wallets) of the entire developing world because MAGA thinks it can restore American social ties by getting men working in T-shirt factories again. Absolutely wild. History is weird.
I keep hearing rumours that the EU is thinking about some sort of cloud/Internet services tax or tariff as a reprisal. Which would be similarly stupid to tariffs.
In a 2017 Substack concerning Trump's Muslim immigration edicts, I wrote this: "I don’t know if Trump himself hates Muslims or not. What I do know is that there are no moral constraints on the depths to which Trump might descend to bolster his power and flatter his own vanity. "
Today, I think I grossly understated the problem. Yes, he is a con man. But increasingly, I think the only way to explain Trump and his actions is pure sadism. I am no psychologist, but I believe that he derives visceral, dare I say sexual enjoyment from causing other people to suffer and destroying their lives. If he can also destroy the institutions that made their lives livable, so much the better. Forget James A. Garfield, our president is the new Ted Bundy.
Trump has always been this way. He learned at the feet of the masters - his father and Roy Cohn. In 1991 I testified before the House Financial Services Committee regarding Trump's real estate loans. That's when I learned about his delight in stiffing small contractors, tying them up in litigation, and driving them out of business. Everyone I knew at Goldman Sachs and Lehman considered him a pathetic joke. The problem is that half our country is too stupid to tell the difference between a complete fraud and their personal savior.
It’s so wild I’m seeing “we use Greek letter to make it look fancy” in this stupidity.
I suspect those Trump sycophants “intellects” are in the deep psychological need to be seen as serious intellects while rejecting expertise - can’t stand those pathetic psychos… please just see therapists for your mental health issues instead of involving the entire economy 🤦♂️
I am a big believer in the reckless incompetence theory of the Trump admin but there is one alternative theory I think is worth considering, or look into further, which is just corrupt insider trading. Maybe that’s conspiratorial but Trump and co have proven they’re not above scamming their supporters so I don’t think they’re above creating some chaos to short the market (and then reverse the decisions, according to this theory)
While my emotional brain does appreciate the vitriol, my rational brain wants to push back a little:
Progressives tend to get too easily caught up in this "if I don't agree with something, it's stupid" narrative. The idea here is that something being dumb is not even worth interrogating.
This, I think, is a category error for problem-solving in the progressive mind.
Progressives (and rationalists alike) should really try to avoid determining things are dumb/stupid/moronic for the basic reason of using it as an excuse to stop exploring alternatives.
With this discipline in mind, I refuse to allow myself to think of anything happening here as "dumb" or moronic or the like. What is epistemically defensible is that it's all poorly executed.
While I don't think DJT has a mind or style of communication that will satiate the level-headed, he always had a deeply instinctual mind that "just knows" certain things that remain true despite all the superstructures society has built up to protect us from:
Most of us live in societies defined by civility as the norm. DJT and his ilk do not. They (and the New Right) live in an alternative reality where the superstructures we've built up to create a civil society actually are mass-hallucinations -- ready to be evaporated by the slightly tug at the progressive power line.
Given their shared, alternative reality, I can absolutely see the wisdom in thinking purely transactionally. Which is all this gambit is: it's trying to undo complexity designed by smart people who see long-term gains outstripping short-term pain and replace it with simplicity (which also requires believing in long-term gains [as they view them] in exchange for short-term pain.
So, it's really the same thing thing, just re-wired via a different operating system.
It's just that the New Right/MAGA operating system (MAGA OS!) is as self-limiting as it is easily explainable. It's an economic luddite movement -- the equivalent of a brigade of computer scientists who rejected object-oriented programming because it got too complex and forced everyone to go back to writing code in BASIC because, ultimately, virtually anyone had the cognitive ability to debug it.
Is BASIC "moronic" compared to C++? No; it's not moronic. It just makes different trade-offs.
So what we're looking at here isn't moronic - it's a principled belief that more people should be able to understand how the world works, and that this wiring is better for everyone. The alternative (the universe we live in currently) is that only a select few elites have the capacity to understand and manage the global economy, which can certainly feel "riggable" if you don't trust the class of people who have the capacity to run things.
Stupid indeed. Trump is too fucking lazy to figure out that losses (like, what Trump casino experienced) and trade deficits are not the same thing.
The world's largest economy buys more from the rest of the world than they buy from us---so? Isn't that what it means to be the wealthiest economy?
Sure, there's some whining about how trade has 'hollowed out' manufacturing and maybe some red-hat guy in a Midwest diner will complain that everything used to be great. Fine--then the government should subsidize new investments in factories. Tariffing the entire rest of the world is just, let's say it, stupid.
Yeah. I was slightly optimistic about Trump II, even though worried about his views on Ukraine and about his willingness to give up US world leadership and the inevitable loss of soft power. But this is just 100% moronic, whether you are left or right.
Revealed preferences vs. post hoc rationalizations.
One could theoretically conceive of a tariff plan which aims to reshore manufacturing and end Chinese domination but whatever it is, it's diametrically opposed to whatever they're doing on several dimensions.
I see many arguing about what rationales and justifications may exist for these actions and many others disputing what is smart vs stupid and yet others talking about ways in which pockets are being lined. I can’t even be bothered to agree or disagree with any of it because of the visceral and profound sense none of that matters to this administration and its lockstep admirers. They literally just want to hurt people. That’s it. It’s one giant spite festival — the long and various list of human rights violations, destruction of science, of the economy, of the American global reputation, all of it arises from the same malign and vengeful impulse to hurt and punish “the libs” with less than no concern for anyone else.
For being a bunch of smart boys, the people here sure are dumb.
This is Trump's classic Art of the Deal.
Announce starting position of X.
Negotiate back and forth and settle for Y.
Y is what he wanted to begin with but you can't start with that as your stated goal because you have to leave room to make concessions during the negotiations.
Trump sounds like he speaks plainly and openly but he actually speaks with lots of rhetoric.
Metaphorically he plays with two decks of cards. He shows one hand but keeps the real one close to his vest and doesn't play it until later in the game.
Once you notice his patterns it's easier to grasp why he seems to flail about like a kid with ADHD.
I don't know. I don't pretend to know what he's thinking. I just understand his style of doing one thing to distract and cause uproar then negotiating down to a lesser thing which is what he really wanted.
Rumor I read regarding those islands was to prevent them from being used as a waystation for shipping to avoid tariffs. No idea if that's correct but it's the only reasonable thing I've heard about them.
I don't understand this need that some people have to believe he secretly has a clever plan & to cook up explanations for the madness.
Nothing he's ever said or done points towards that conclusion. He sounds very dumb every time he speaks.
On this issue alone he has dozens of contradictory stated motivations, incoherent expectations for the impacts, the misleading label for the "tariffs" being retaliated-against, and staffers who don't even understand the formula they applied.
It’s not hard to understand. They believe what they want to believe. They want to believe they are supporting someone who is smarter than they are, someone who is adept at business in ways they can’t comprehend, someone who is shrewd and clever and able to outwit any adversary. Having decided that’s what Trump is, they interpret every action he takes through that lens.
I've said I don't know what he's thinking so how would I be fooled if he declares he got what he wanted? I don't know what he really wants and neither do you.
You wrote this with exactly the vitriol the admin deserves. Especially in the call-out of Samuel Hammond, who should be laughed out of wonk circles for his pompous sanewashing of Trump's obvious buffoonery.
I think you’re right that the man himself has no plan. But the people around him? I think you’re wrong. It’s a really clear ideology. The “plan” is to restore a time when men worked in factories and supported families. (It won’t work, but plans in service of ideology usually don’t, on the left either — see “defund the police”.)
The Silicon Valley faction is belatedly realizing that their influence in the mad king’s court is low compared to the Vance wing of Catholic integrationalists / Dark Enlightenment / “based” 8chan males under 35 years old. Balaji (the Network State extreme libertarian guy) on Twitter was bemoaning that MAGA thinks they can turn the clock back to 1953 (or 1910) socially by twisting a knob called “tariffs” back to the value it had back then. But just like how IBM could set their prices to what they were in 1960, it wouldn’t restore their market dominance. US social fragmentation is driven by bigger factors than trade (see: the internet consuming all of everything socially, ie this blog).
But that’s it. They think they’re going to restore a time when women were in the kitchen and men were on an assembly line building B-24 Liberators or whatever. The “economics” are just window dressing, just like how science and theory was used as a fig leaf cover on the left when implementing extreme social justice policies for their real goal which is a sort of levelling or communism.
There’s tons more to say about horseshoe theory on this ideology. The left and the right both rightly are horrified as to what the American heartland has become in terms of social ties. But turning back clocks is hard. Doing it while half their party (the Tech Right) are trying to accelerate ever faster toward an AI takeover makes it even more bizarre when the Catholic-integrationalist wing of MAGA thinks they can do it.
(This post partly based on this great recent post from Henry Farrell here: https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-reactionary-right-is-not-a-monolith )
>The “plan” is to restore a time when men worked in factories and supported families.
I'm sure there are people who think this way, but there's no evidence it's how Trump or his team thinks. If the goal is factory jobs, why are they putting tariffs on vanilla beans that literally cannot be grown in the United States? Why did they increase tariffs to 10% even on countries that we have a trade surplus with?
More generally, they seem to flit from explanation to explanation - the tariffs are just a bluff, a negotiating tactic. No, wait, they're about bringing back factories. No, hold on, it's about fentanyl at the border. The actual communication from the administration is a different reasoning every day. In the end the only constant is how dumb they are.
Fair! And maybe my view on this is too shaped by what the Algorithms choose to show me. I read Jon Haidt and his intellectual community a lot, and they lean toward a sort of religious-social-conservative view for how to deal with the Bowling Alone problem.
I still think the Vance Catholic-integrationalist wing is the dominant ideology in the MAGA court though.
How bad have things gotten when I actually read Jeremiah’s post as copium (I mean, I really hope his read is the right one) because the alternative explanation—dark enlightenment or whatever we call it—is so much more terrifying to contemplate 😭
Douthat at NYTimes agrees that my theory is one of the two main ideologies in trumpland
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/05/opinion/trump-tariffs-theories.html
> First, the goal is to revitalize American manufacturing, our capacity to build at home and export to the world. The global free trade system that took shape in the late 20th century served the American empire and American G.D.P. but at the expense of America’s earlier role as a manufacturing powerhouse — and because manufacturing jobs were such an important source of blue-collar male employment, at the expense of the working-class social fabric.
> Meanwhile, over time, our manufacturing base didn’t just move overseas, it moved into the territory of our greatest rival, the People’s Republic of China. So rebuilding industry in America has two potential benefits even if it sacrifices some of the efficiencies offered by global trade. Factory jobs fill a particular socioeconomic niche that’s been filled instead by drugs, decline, despair. And having a real manufacturing base is essential if we’re going to be locked into great power competition for decades to come.
…
> Now for my own view. I think trying to reshore some manufacturing and decouple more from China makes sense from a national security standpoint, even if it costs something to G.D.P. and the stock market. Using revenue from such a limited, China-focused tariff regime to pay down the deficit seems entirely reasonable.
> I am more skeptical that such reshoring will alleviate specific male blue-collar social ills, because automation has changed the industries so much that I suspect you would need some sort of social restoration first to make the current millions of male work force dropouts more employable.
Douthat has no idea. If you're someone who spent his entire career being a conservative-adjacent reactionary centrist, it's extremely bad for your brand that Trump (and his allies in the administration) are idiots.
Nobody competent is left in the Trump administration. He's purged from his inner circle anybody who might have original thoughts. Some exceptions definitely exist, like maybe Marco Rubio. But he'll be out within a few months.
This is a colossal tragedy unfolding before our eyes. As a non-US writer, I just keep asking how America has fallen so far, so fast. I just don't understand.
And the impact of this on developing countries is unconscionable. The US has just pulled out of both the aid game and the trade game. There's going to be truly serious pain as developing countries realign their economies elsewhere. That in turn will only benefit America's competition. And what if the USD loses reserve currency status? The "exorbitant privilege" would surely end and America will have a huge and sudden debt financing crisis.
All because of a ChatGPT search?! I can't keep reading this stuff. Where is the red line for these guys? For their voters? What policy would ever be beyond the pale for MAGA? Should I ask ChatGPT?
China can hardly believe their good fortune. They’re about to capture the hearts and minds (and wallets) of the entire developing world because MAGA thinks it can restore American social ties by getting men working in T-shirt factories again. Absolutely wild. History is weird.
Please delete the footnote about services. Let’s keep that one quiet, eh? Your barber will appreciate it, as well as SubStack
God what am I gonna do if non-US readers have to pay a Substack tariff. Please tell me that's not going to be a thing?
I keep hearing rumours that the EU is thinking about some sort of cloud/Internet services tax or tariff as a reprisal. Which would be similarly stupid to tariffs.
Brb waiting for the US dollar to implode so I can subscribe for cheaper
In a 2017 Substack concerning Trump's Muslim immigration edicts, I wrote this: "I don’t know if Trump himself hates Muslims or not. What I do know is that there are no moral constraints on the depths to which Trump might descend to bolster his power and flatter his own vanity. "
Today, I think I grossly understated the problem. Yes, he is a con man. But increasingly, I think the only way to explain Trump and his actions is pure sadism. I am no psychologist, but I believe that he derives visceral, dare I say sexual enjoyment from causing other people to suffer and destroying their lives. If he can also destroy the institutions that made their lives livable, so much the better. Forget James A. Garfield, our president is the new Ted Bundy.
Trump has always been this way. He learned at the feet of the masters - his father and Roy Cohn. In 1991 I testified before the House Financial Services Committee regarding Trump's real estate loans. That's when I learned about his delight in stiffing small contractors, tying them up in litigation, and driving them out of business. Everyone I knew at Goldman Sachs and Lehman considered him a pathetic joke. The problem is that half our country is too stupid to tell the difference between a complete fraud and their personal savior.
It’s so wild I’m seeing “we use Greek letter to make it look fancy” in this stupidity.
I suspect those Trump sycophants “intellects” are in the deep psychological need to be seen as serious intellects while rejecting expertise - can’t stand those pathetic psychos… please just see therapists for your mental health issues instead of involving the entire economy 🤦♂️
Will children go hungry? Seems unlikely - anyone in the USA who can't afford to feed kids is eligible for SNAP.
At least until Elon decides it’s “waste and fraud”
I am a big believer in the reckless incompetence theory of the Trump admin but there is one alternative theory I think is worth considering, or look into further, which is just corrupt insider trading. Maybe that’s conspiratorial but Trump and co have proven they’re not above scamming their supporters so I don’t think they’re above creating some chaos to short the market (and then reverse the decisions, according to this theory)
While my emotional brain does appreciate the vitriol, my rational brain wants to push back a little:
Progressives tend to get too easily caught up in this "if I don't agree with something, it's stupid" narrative. The idea here is that something being dumb is not even worth interrogating.
This, I think, is a category error for problem-solving in the progressive mind.
Progressives (and rationalists alike) should really try to avoid determining things are dumb/stupid/moronic for the basic reason of using it as an excuse to stop exploring alternatives.
With this discipline in mind, I refuse to allow myself to think of anything happening here as "dumb" or moronic or the like. What is epistemically defensible is that it's all poorly executed.
While I don't think DJT has a mind or style of communication that will satiate the level-headed, he always had a deeply instinctual mind that "just knows" certain things that remain true despite all the superstructures society has built up to protect us from:
Most of us live in societies defined by civility as the norm. DJT and his ilk do not. They (and the New Right) live in an alternative reality where the superstructures we've built up to create a civil society actually are mass-hallucinations -- ready to be evaporated by the slightly tug at the progressive power line.
Given their shared, alternative reality, I can absolutely see the wisdom in thinking purely transactionally. Which is all this gambit is: it's trying to undo complexity designed by smart people who see long-term gains outstripping short-term pain and replace it with simplicity (which also requires believing in long-term gains [as they view them] in exchange for short-term pain.
So, it's really the same thing thing, just re-wired via a different operating system.
It's just that the New Right/MAGA operating system (MAGA OS!) is as self-limiting as it is easily explainable. It's an economic luddite movement -- the equivalent of a brigade of computer scientists who rejected object-oriented programming because it got too complex and forced everyone to go back to writing code in BASIC because, ultimately, virtually anyone had the cognitive ability to debug it.
Is BASIC "moronic" compared to C++? No; it's not moronic. It just makes different trade-offs.
So what we're looking at here isn't moronic - it's a principled belief that more people should be able to understand how the world works, and that this wiring is better for everyone. The alternative (the universe we live in currently) is that only a select few elites have the capacity to understand and manage the global economy, which can certainly feel "riggable" if you don't trust the class of people who have the capacity to run things.
Stupid indeed. Trump is too fucking lazy to figure out that losses (like, what Trump casino experienced) and trade deficits are not the same thing.
The world's largest economy buys more from the rest of the world than they buy from us---so? Isn't that what it means to be the wealthiest economy?
Sure, there's some whining about how trade has 'hollowed out' manufacturing and maybe some red-hat guy in a Midwest diner will complain that everything used to be great. Fine--then the government should subsidize new investments in factories. Tariffing the entire rest of the world is just, let's say it, stupid.
And Trump will double down next. Always does.
Yeah. I was slightly optimistic about Trump II, even though worried about his views on Ukraine and about his willingness to give up US world leadership and the inevitable loss of soft power. But this is just 100% moronic, whether you are left or right.
Revealed preferences vs. post hoc rationalizations.
One could theoretically conceive of a tariff plan which aims to reshore manufacturing and end Chinese domination but whatever it is, it's diametrically opposed to whatever they're doing on several dimensions.
I see many arguing about what rationales and justifications may exist for these actions and many others disputing what is smart vs stupid and yet others talking about ways in which pockets are being lined. I can’t even be bothered to agree or disagree with any of it because of the visceral and profound sense none of that matters to this administration and its lockstep admirers. They literally just want to hurt people. That’s it. It’s one giant spite festival — the long and various list of human rights violations, destruction of science, of the economy, of the American global reputation, all of it arises from the same malign and vengeful impulse to hurt and punish “the libs” with less than no concern for anyone else.
There is a great read on our daily roundup about the Jerome Powell comments on the Economy, post Tariff day. https://thistleandmoss.com/p/friday-roundup-from-russia-with-love
For being a bunch of smart boys, the people here sure are dumb.
This is Trump's classic Art of the Deal.
Announce starting position of X.
Negotiate back and forth and settle for Y.
Y is what he wanted to begin with but you can't start with that as your stated goal because you have to leave room to make concessions during the negotiations.
Trump sounds like he speaks plainly and openly but he actually speaks with lots of rhetoric.
Metaphorically he plays with two decks of cards. He shows one hand but keeps the real one close to his vest and doesn't play it until later in the game.
Once you notice his patterns it's easier to grasp why he seems to flail about like a kid with ADHD.
What concessions do you think Trump is looking for from the Heard & McDonald Islands?
I don't know. I don't pretend to know what he's thinking. I just understand his style of doing one thing to distract and cause uproar then negotiating down to a lesser thing which is what he really wanted.
Rumor I read regarding those islands was to prevent them from being used as a waystation for shipping to avoid tariffs. No idea if that's correct but it's the only reasonable thing I've heard about them.
I don't understand this need that some people have to believe he secretly has a clever plan & to cook up explanations for the madness.
Nothing he's ever said or done points towards that conclusion. He sounds very dumb every time he speaks.
On this issue alone he has dozens of contradictory stated motivations, incoherent expectations for the impacts, the misleading label for the "tariffs" being retaliated-against, and staffers who don't even understand the formula they applied.
It’s not hard to understand. They believe what they want to believe. They want to believe they are supporting someone who is smarter than they are, someone who is adept at business in ways they can’t comprehend, someone who is shrewd and clever and able to outwit any adversary. Having decided that’s what Trump is, they interpret every action he takes through that lens.
You're under the mistaken impression that he acts rationally. He doesn't have a set goal beyond displaying power.
The "rumour" regarding H&M islands has no basis in reality.
How do you know what his goals are? Are you a mind reader?
I've watched him flail around on these tariffs for the past 5-6 months. On off on off at a whim.
Don't be fooled if something gets resolved and he says that's what he wanted all along. You need to reread the column.
How would I be fooled?
I've said I don't know what he's thinking so how would I be fooled if he declares he got what he wanted? I don't know what he really wants and neither do you.
FYI, I banned this commenter for resorting to personal insults.