It is a rare and terrifying day when the universe provides a punchline so exquisite that it requires no setup, but here we are. Donald Trump, a man whose entire public persona is a neon-lit monument to excessive consumption, has looked out across the American wasteland and concluded that the problem is—wait for it—too much consumption. This is like being lectured on the virtues of silence by a man shouting into a megaphone inside a wind tunnel. It is the peak of human cognitive dissonance, and frankly, it is exhausting to witness.

The central premise, extracted from the fever dreams of Mar-a-Lago, is that Americans are buying too much stuff from people who aren't Americans. To the MAGA faithful, who treat every utterance from their leader as a dispatch from Mount Sinai, this sounds like a bold return to 'common sense.' They ignore the fact that they are currently reading these 'common sense' truths on smartphones manufactured in Shenzhen while wearing hats stitched together in Vietnam. The Right is perfectly happy to embrace the rhetoric of economic isolationism until the price of a generic toaster rises by forty percent, at which point they will inevitably blame the 'deep state' for the disappearance of their cheap plastic trinkets.

But let us not allow the Left to escape into their usual cloud of performative smugness. The coastal elite, who spend their weekends debating the ethics of 'de-growth' while ordering organic avocados flown in from drought-stricken regions of South America, are horrified. Not because the idea of curbing consumption is inherently bad—they love that word when it’s applied to the 'unwashed masses'—but because the suggestion came from the Wrong Person. They will write endless op-eds about the dangers of protectionism, all while supporting regulatory frameworks that ensure nothing can actually be built in the United States without a twenty-year environmental impact study. They want the moral high ground of austerity without any of the actual discomfort.

Trump’s 'discovery' that the trade deficit is a scoreboard of national shame is, of course, a fundamental misunderstanding of how reality functions. He views the global economy as a zero-sum game played by two guys in a deli, rather than a complex web of capital flows and shifting incentives. He wants Americans to consume less foreign goods, but he wants to achieve this by slapping tariffs on everything that crosses a border. This is the economic equivalent of trying to cure a fever by smashing the thermometer. A tariff is not a magic tax on a foreign entity; it is a tax on the domestic consumer. It is a way to make the poor feel the 'patriotism' of paying more for a pair of socks so that a few industrial barons can feel like it’s 1954 again.

The real comedy, however, lies in the 'remedy' that the economists suggest. If you actually want to fix a trade deficit and curb consumption, the solution is not a series of angry tweets or a trade war that leaves everyone poorer. The remedy is structural. It involves raising domestic savings, reducing the gargantuan federal deficit, and perhaps—dare I say it—increasing taxes to dampen the insatiable thirst of the American consumerist beast. Does anyone honestly believe Donald Trump, or for that matter, any member of the spineless jellyfish collective we call Congress, has the stomach for that?

To tell the American public that they need to save more and spend less is political suicide. Our entire culture is a Ponzi scheme built on the foundation of buying things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like. We are a nation of toddlers in a candy store, and Trump is the parent who has just realized the kid is vibrating from a sugar high, yet his only solution is to throw more candy at the problem while yelling at the shopkeeper.

Reducing consumption would require a fundamental shift in the American soul. It would mean accepting a slower growth rate, a more modest lifestyle, and the terrifying realization that you cannot borrow your way into eternal prosperity. But neither side of the aisle wants that truth. The Right wants the fantasy of a 1950s factory town without the unions or the high tax rates, and the Left wants a green utopia without giving up their two-day shipping.

So we are left with this: a hollow man advocating for a hollow policy to a hollowed-out electorate. Trump is right that the current model is unsustainable, but he is the last person on Earth capable of fixing it because he is the ultimate product of that very model. He is the physical manifestation of American excess. Watching him preach against consumption is like watching a bonfire complain about the heat. It’s a farce, it’s a tragedy, and it’s exactly what this country deserves. We will continue to consume until there is nothing left but the dust of our own credit card statements, and we will do it while arguing about which geriatric narcissist is better suited to lead us into the abyss.