The big question is how in their panic no one noticed that our foreign foe has become Grampa Simpson

Plus! The Wall Street Journal is taking Donald Trump apart piece by piece. Why can't we do that instead of yip-yip-yipping?

Rewrite colleague Peter Menzies served up a rocket Monday over collective media failure to challenge Liberal leader Mark Carney’s breaches of traditional guidelines that constrain prime ministerial conduct during an election.

My eyes, ears, and aghast bafflement have been otherwise fixed on another question of seemingly self-inflicted media ignorance: Why is nobody pointing out how U.S. President Donald Trump has become Grampa Simpson?

It’s there for all to see on a routine basis, and never more vividly than during his opening remarks for his “I never promised you a rose garden” April 2 speech imposing terrifying tariffs on the world. As he spoke, he transformed into a living replica of Homer Simpson’s dementia adjacent dad.

Granted, Trump has made a career – several careers – of shouting at clouds. Now, though, he verbally tracks as a 78-year-old man who’s gone for a non-negotiable pee in the bushes and forgotten to come back.

Consider the opening sentences of the speech that will go down in history as the day the economic earth stood still. (Unless you’re an always Trumper, in which case it was the Big Bang with a chorus of “boom-boom-boom let’s go up to my room”: a seduction fantasy.)

“April 2nd, 2025 will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day

America’s destiny was reclaimed and the day that we began to make America wealthy again. We’re going to make it wealthy, good and wealthy,” he said.

The obvious rejoinder to “wealthy, good and wealthy” is that within four days stock markets were wiped out to the tune of seven trillion dollars – $7,000,000,000,000, that is.

But it wasn’t just the delusional claim that “good wealth” is created by vaporizing it. Rather, it was the unbridled hostility feeding a lust for pure vengeance to be rained down on all that have done America wrong, i.e., pretty much everyone on the planet.

“For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike. American steelworkers, auto workers, farmers and skilled craftsmen, we have a lot of them here with us today. They really suffered gravely.”

Read the words and ask, in all seriousness, whether you haven’t heard their echo in the encomiums to the past immortalized by Abraham Jebediah Simpson II.

“I miss the days when circuses had real elephants, and they stomped on people,” Abe once cried. “And don’t even get me started on Young Sheldon.”

Eh? Eh? Not exactly word for word plagiarism (we’ll leave that to Mark Carney), but does it not have the Trumpian ring of “harken back with me to happier days of amusing deadly chaos?” The killer, so speak, parallel is the slide-by non sequitur where what is being said has absolutely nothing to do with what it is being said about.

Granted, an obvious difference is that the long-running Simpsons show is a cartoon satire of every schtick Trump in his dotage is selling as the real thing, baby. Yet no journalists seem to have noticed that a successor to Abe Lincoln is himself such a living satire. Perhaps what’s needed is a media Lisa Simpson to blow the whistle – saxophone? – and wake everyone up.

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One fine candidate for such a role is the Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley, whose Life Science column for April 6 was headlined A Good Man for U.S. Manufacturing is Hard to Find. Finley asks the necessary and sufficient journalistic question: How are American employers going to find, much less train, all the employees for all the alleged factory jobs that the Trump administration insists will be created by punishing the rest of the world through tariffs?

“Forty percent of small business owners in March reported job openings they couldn’t fill, with larger shares in construction (56%), transportation (53%) and manufacturing (47%), according to last week’s National Federation of Independent Business survey,” she writes.

“The Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey of businesses tells a similar story. There are twice as many job openings in manufacturing than in the mid-2000s as a share of employment. Save for during the pandemic, America’s worker shortage is the worst in 50 years.”

This isn’t, she stresses, a passing cloud to be shouted at. It’s a deep cultural phenomenon that has developed over the last several decades. It’s specifically applicable to men 25-54 who once did the hard, heavy work of the manufacturing Trump waxes so nostalgically about.

“Decades ago, productivity-enhancing technology and, yes, inexpensive imports caused men who worked on shop floors to lose their jobs and drop out of the workforce. But this generation is sailing into the sunset, and there are many fewer young Americans who want to work in factories,” she notes. 

“The labor force participation rate among working-age men is now about five percentage points lower than in the early 1980s. As a result, there are about 3.5 million fewer men between the ages of 25 and 54 in the workforce, and 1.3 million between the ages of 25 and 34, than there would have been were it not for this decline.”

By contrast, American women recently hit a work force participation record but the bulk of them are in service industries where, as it happens, the U.S. leads the world. Why? Here’s Finley’s seven trillion dollar answer:

“Only 31% of blue-collar workers feel that their type of work is respected, according to a Pew Research Center survey last week…. The decline in work among young men is a far bigger problem for the nation’s economic and cultural vitality than the decline in manufacturing jobs. It can’t and won’t be solved with tariffs.”

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An April 4 column in the WSJ by Norbert Michel, of the centre-right Cato Institute, rolls out similar hard data to show why journalists should focus on debunking Trump’s factually wrong ideas rather than just running around scaring the beejayzus out of everyone about economic Armageddon.

In fact, Michel writes, the doomsday narrative about manufacturing’s demise is absolute piffle.

“The populist story of the death of U.S. manufacturing is nonsense… It’s true that the number of manufacturing jobs is lower than it was in 1970. But that’s because we can make so much more with fewer people. Blame technology, not trade,” he writes.

Michel notes that manufacturing as a share of total employment in the U.S. has been dropping since 1943. Yet manufacturing’s contribution to U.S. GDP reached a record in 2022. So much for decades of “looting, plundering, pillaging, and raping by countries near and far.” Blame the machines if you need a scapegoat.

It’s true factory work can pay well. Much of it can create camaraderie. Like all honest employment, it cultivates self-worth. Without question, the working-class people who do it deserve infinite thanks from those who can give it a miss. But on the darker side, it can be literally bone crushing and invariably has an element of the mind-numbing.

Which sets up Michel’s most critical point of all: “Americans don’t want their children to have to work punishing jobs in a steel mill, and it’s evident they don’t have to.”

Why not? Because: “Materially, Americans are much better off than they were in 1970. Over the past 40 years, 70 per cent of working-age Americans spent at least one year among the top 20 per cent of income earners. And 80 per cent never spent more than two consecutive years in the bottom 10,” Michel writes.

Journalists writing the micro experience of that material prosperity versus nostalgia as a substitute for economic policy might just be the thing to shred the cartoon romantic nonsense the Trumpers are peddling at the cost of untold macro-economic damage. So far media reports I’ve seen have been satisfied with ignoring the reality and instead running around in ever diminishing circles going yip-yip-yip. Of course, that plays right into Circus Master Trump’s greatest show on earth. Cue the real elephants that stomp on people.

(Peter Stockland is a former Editor-in-Chief of the Montreal Gazette)