As part of our protest, we should march in the millions with signs that say two things:
a) 10 Republican Senators need to Impeach the clown for violating U.S. laws
b) التعريفة Tariff is an Arabic Word
I think this will piss Trump off as he has claimed that Tariffs are his favourite word in the English language… and when he founds out it is Arabic he will be mighty upset and maybe decide he doesn’t like them as much anymore.
As any Middle East expert can tell you the word Tariff derives from the Arabic root ‘, R, F — which means to know.
Essentially, the tax on goods needed to be known and consistent and announced and universally known. You can read more about this here.
In short they don’t work if they are up for constant negotiation/riggering.
So for more orientalist/Mustashriq fun. I say:
Lil-tarifu al-Tariff
You know Ghazali’s Tahafut al-Falasifa… (a 11th century Islamic philosophical work whose title means the Incoherence of the Philosophers and arguing that rationalistic knowledge especially of the Greek kind is worthless)
Well Peter Navarro has just authored Lil-tarifu al-Tahafut al-Ta’riffa! (essentially saying that rationalistic knowledge of the economy proves the incoherence of Tarrifs and that you can’t try to both be reshoring manufacturing and renegotiating better deals for america to claw back value as the first requires the tariff regime to be known and consistent for years or decades and the later requires flexibility for negotiations… so on their own face they can’t work:
the point being even within Trumpian logic about tarrifs the concept can't work as he hasn't committed to either long term stability of the regime to motivate reshoring... or full negotiation only to 'claw back value' from Canada/China... either approach might achieve results (but still not be good for the world or the US economy) but this muddle btw the two approaches is inherently going to achieve neither... it is like using two contradictory monetary mechanisms... printing money to cause inflation while raising interest rates to promote deflation... when the two would be done together the only implication can be to fuck the economy...
For more on this check out the following sources:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/trump-negotiation-tariff/682300/
https://www.aei.org/economics/president-trumps-tariff-formula-makes-no-economic-sense-its-also-based-on-an-error/
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/04/trump-fires-nsa-cyber-command-timothy-haugh-00273859
And now time for a laugh that requires less knowledge of Medieval Arabic (FusHaa):
