Someone asked about the news, out of Punchbowl, that Amazon would soon add a line item at checkout that detailed the “import costs” of purchased goods. If Amazon did this it would join other retailers like Temu that are letting customers know why the cost of buying products from it has more than doubled in the past few weeks.
[…]
This short saga shows how the Trump administration plans to deal with the chaos that it has created: By attempting to bully companies into denying the reality that his tariffs are making it more expensive (or potentially impossible) to buy millions of different products. The strategy here—to the extent there is one at all—is to pressure companies into eating tariff costs, pretend that none of this is happening, or to add opacity into the process by having prices shoot up without retailers breaking out what portion of them is from Trump’s tariffs.
Tariffs? What tariffs? Nothing to see here. Move along.
And this is actually a very pointed verification this is a cult and religion and not politics as usual, and also why - to those not in the cult - Trump really is subjecting the entire country to captive narcissistic abuse.
He continues to demand loyalty to the dogma over the empirical facts, and that loyalty prioritizes himself over the cumulative well-being of 300 million people. Moments of cognitive dissonance, of competing realities, are - like in a religion - seen as a test of faith and loyalty.
And like in a narcissistic abuse scenario, we are locked in a continual boundary-pushing test and punishment cycle to cement his ability to determine reality for his victims. Similarly, those who the abuser favors and performs for - friends, family - think you’re all making it up and overreacting. I hope eventually someone treats this as a case study in mass narcissistic psychological abuse.