“Long-threatened tariffs from U.S. President Donald Trump have plunged the country into trade wars abroad, all while on-again, off-again new levies continue to escalate uncertainty.” — PBS, 4/10/25
We’ve all been there: You send a gang of plainclothes agents to abduct a woman from a city street in broad daylight for cowriting a relatively innocuous op-ed in a student newspaper, and everyone jumps down your throat.
But here’s a pro tip: If you want to continuously commit atrocities against humanity, it’s a good idea to make a secondary set of terrible decisions, ideally regarding the economy. Just be sure the economic choices are so bad that they completely absorb everyone’s attention. That way, everyone can look away from your human rights violations and instead refocus on your direct threats to their bank accounts.
If everyone’s busy denouncing your stupidity, they’re more likely to forget how vindictive, abusive, and cold-hearted you are.
And wow, it’s been a wild few weeks on the stock market, right? A lot of financial news to unpack all the time. It’s almost like the sheer volume of economic news is interfering with everyone’s ability to process the human rights news.
Are your citizens demanding you fund medical research and public health initiatives so future generations don’t die of preventable disease? Try constantly imposing and then rescinding tariffs, so they’ll instead have to spend all their energy calculating the likelihood of immediate economic armageddon.
Stuck with a bunch of cranky constituents who want free and equitable public education for all children? Distract them with the worry they’ll never be able to afford having children in your wrecked economy.
Does the public keep insisting you preserve the nation’s system of checks and balances? Redirect their gaze to the balance in their checkbook.
Are the masses indignant that any brown person with tattoos can be summarily shipped to an abusive foreign prison without due process and with no chance of being returned to their home, even if they’re found innocent? Try initiating a global economic freefall that threatens to affect everyone, even white people without tattoos.
Be sure to drag out the financial disaster you’re causing. Threaten tariffs, for example, then don’t impose them. Then levy the tariffs. Then pause the levied tariffs. Then cancel them. Then threaten new ones. Then impose some tariffs. Then backtrack on some of those. Then pause all tariffs. Then threaten them again. Then levy a lot more. Then cancel most of the big ones. But leave the small tariffs. And a couple of the big ones.
Repeat as necessary.
Remember, you need a lot of time to get through your entire atrocity to-do list. If you tank the economy once and quickly, people’s attention will surely return to your cruelty, no matter how effectively you’ve impoverished them. So take your time and do it right.
Or rather, do it extra wrong.
You don’t even need to keep your evil separate from your attention-grabbing, terrible economic decisions. Feel free to throw some baldly illegal self-enrichment into the mix. The courts will be so backed up attempting to force you to rehire wrongfully terminated federal employees, by the time they get to your financial malfeasance, you’ll probably be dead.
Unless you outlive everyone: the ultimate payoff for methodically, comprehensively sucking the life out of the entire populace.