was that really necessary?

I will concede that it was as necessary as the DH joke.

i know don makes himself an easy target, but not as easy as pie.

You deign to denigrate pie in such a fashion? Pfffffffffftt ;)

A sudden withdrawal oftens happens when the condom breaks, but by then it's usually too late.

Thank you for that spellbinding recitation of the genesis of your poor pathetic existence. #TMI

Well, there goes one.

Conversely, when you imported more than you exported, your national gold horde decreased, but you had more goods to consume than you would otherwise have had, which raises your standard of living.

These days, the traditional terminology still exists, but no gold ever changes hands. We now pay for the excess of imports over exports with little pieces of green paper (dollars), which cost nothing to produce, meaning we have all those low-cost Chinese manufactured goods to raise our standard of living damn near free.

It's hard to see why an import surplus is still considered "unfavorable", but the idiot-in-chief still thinks so.

I would say the problem is a lot more fundamental than that. Corporate executives' experience is to run a for-profit private enterprise. A president's job is to run a not-for-profit public service.

Everything this president has done since taking office shows that "running a not-for-profit public service" is a string of words he can't make head or tail of, being completely outside his worldview.

More than a few observers have noted that he sees every decision he makes as an entirely transactional one: if I do this, does the U.S. (or, it seems sometimes, the Trump operation) do better *financially* than the other side in the immediate future? I can't think of another president, of either party, who has taken this approach to his job.