Welcome back to the global theater of the absurd, where the script is written by ego-maniacs and the audience is too busy fighting over the last scrap of flavored cardboard to realize the theater is on fire. Today’s act features the return of the 'Tariff,' that magical word that makes the MAGA faithful swoon with visions of 1950s prosperity and makes the neoliberal ghouls at the World Bank weep into their artisanal sparkling water. The latest news, delivered with the breathless gravity usually reserved for royal funerals, is that foreign companies are currently 'sharing the load' of Trump’s trade levies. Oh, how quaint. How utterly, predictably delusional.

Let’s peel back the layers of this particular onion, though be warned: it only leads to more crying. The narrative being sold by the Right is one of heroic protectionism. They would have you believe that by slapping a tax on incoming goods, we are somehow extracting a tribute from our 'enemies' like a medieval king taxing a neighboring duchy. It is a masterful bit of linguistic gymnastics. In reality, a tariff is a tax on the importer—the domestic entity—which is then passed down to the consumer with the inevitable grace of a falling anvil. But wait! The reports say the foreigners are absorbing the cost! The media treats this like a victory for the American worker, when in fact it is merely a stay of execution.

These foreign corporations, whether they are churning out plastic junk in Shenzhen or over-engineered sedans in Stuttgart, are not 'sharing the pain' out of a sense of global camaraderie. They are doing it because they have spent decades building a dependency model that makes the illicit drug trade look like a neighborhood lemonade stand. They will eat their margins for a quarter, perhaps two, squeezing their own workers until their pips squeak, simply to maintain their foothold in the American landfill market. It is a game of chicken played with billion-dollar balance sheets, and the American consumer is the roadkill waiting to happen. The Right’s intellectual vacuum has successfully rebranded 'taxing our own citizens' as 'winning,' and the base, bless their hearts, is too distracted by the latest cultural grievance to check the price tag on their new toaster.

On the other side of the aisle, we have the Left, who remain perpetually shocked that a man who ran on a platform of 'I will break things' is, in fact, breaking things. Their outrage is as performative as it is ineffective. They wring their hands about the 'instability' of the global market, as if the pre-2016 era was some golden age of economic harmony. It wasn't. It was a slow-acting poison where we outsourced our entire industrial base to sweatshops and then wondered why the middle class was drowning in debt and despair. The Left’s solution is always a return to the 'normality' of polite exploitation—a system where the rich get richer, but they use the correct pronouns while doing it. They despise the tariff because it is crude, loud, and disrupts the smooth flow of capital to their donor class.

Historical parallels abound for those who haven't had their brains rotted by twenty-four-hour news cycles. We’ve seen this before, from the Smoot-Hawley disaster to the various trade skirmishes of the twentieth century. Each time, the result is the same: a brief spike in nationalistic fervor followed by a long, painful realization that the world is too interconnected to be governed by the whims of a man who views the economy as a series of zero-sum real estate deals. We are a species of goldfish with nuclear weapons and a penchant for buying things we don't need with money we don't have.

The 'pain' isn't being shared; it's being redistributed. It’s a hot potato made of debt and hubris. When the foreign companies eventually tire of subsidizing the American dream, they will hike their prices, and the very people cheering for the tariffs will be the ones wondering why their paycheck no longer covers the cost of a basic existence. But don't worry, by then the ringmasters will have moved on to a new distraction, perhaps a war or a particularly spicy celebrity divorce. In the end, it’s all theater. The elites on both sides will continue to feast while the rest of us argue over the crumbs, convinced that if we just tax the 'other guy' enough, our own misery will somehow vanish. It’s a tragic comedy where the only thing being manufactured is resentment, and business is booming.