[ExI] Arithmetic suffers from Trump derangement syndrome

[John Clark]

*Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman wrote this today: *

"Trump announced that he was buying 300,000 tons of Russian diesel. *He’s
not allowed to do this*: Sanctions preventing purchase of Russian oil are
law, not a choice on Trump’s part. But under Trump laws are suggestions at
most, so it might happen anyway. In any case, the main lesson here, as Phillips
O’Brien
<https://substack.com/redirect/915b76ee-4743-4c3d-a32e-478055a267b6?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>
explains,
is that Trump isn’t even hiding the fact that he is supporting Putin’s war
of aggression against Ukraine.

But being a nerdy economist, my first printable reaction to the
announcement was, *300,000 tons??? *That’s a bit over 2 million barrels.
America consumes approximately 4 million barrels of distillates — diesel
(mostly) and heating oil — *every day*.

So Trump is betraying an embattled democracy, demonstrating our
faithlessness to the whole world, seriously damaging whatever is left of
America’s leadership in the world, *for the sake of maybe 12 hours’ worth
of diesel*. Really?

Of course, Trump and those around him don’t care about the national
interest. But I would strongly guess that they didn’t do the math, that
300,000 tons *sounded like a lot to them and that they had no idea that it
was trivial for an economy the size of America’s*. I might add that this is
a general issue with Trump: he often touts trivial policies as major
achievements, and it often seems obvious that he has no idea how big
America and the world are.

Arithmetic, I guess, suffers from Trump derangement syndrome."
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