Punisher
Plus: Chinese microdramas, Nixonmaxxing, and more...
Is Trump trying to punish Canada for the wildfires? Yesterday, the president signed an order imposing a 50 percent tariff on Canada, saying that our neighbor up north wrongly discriminated against three American industries: cars, dairy, and booze.
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This seems like not only a bad idea but possibly a fake justification. Wildfire smoke has recently migrated across much of the Midwest and Northeast of the United States, forcing us indoors during summertime. My hunch is that Trump is possibly trying to punish Canada for its poor wildfire management that's been pissing Americans off—for multiple summers in a row, now—and this tracks, given that Trump met with Canada's prime minister at the FIFA World Cup this past weekend and told him to get those fires under control. (Senior administration officials who spoke to Semafor claim these tariffs are not related to the fires.)
"The new 50% tariffs would exclude energy products, potash, fish and critical minerals, but they would include goods that had previously been protected from import taxes by the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA," reports NPR. "That 2020 trade pact was not renewed by the U.S., triggering a new set of negotiations that could run until 2036. The White House said in a fact sheet that the tariffs would go into effect in 30 days, meaning there is time for negotiations as Trump has not always followed through on his announced tax hikes on imports."
The tariffs would hit cement, dairy, furniture, paper, clothing, swimming pools, wine, and plywood. The president is using "Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, which permits a president to impose punitive tariffs of up to 50% against trading partners deemed to have discriminated against U.S. goods," reports Reuters. This is "the law's first known usage in nearly a century of existence."
The tariffs will almost certainly be challenged in court—like all the others Trump has tried to impose.
We're becoming more like China: "The phone is always right there, whenever and wherever, offering a perfect form of mindless entertainment when your mind is on so many other things," writes Xochitl Gonzalez for The Atlantic. "Enter: the micro-drama. These soapy shows are made up of minute-long episodes meant to be watched vertically on your phone. They're fast-moving and designed to hook viewers quickly. Relying heavily on tropes, they are more telenovela than Scorsese. Recently, one show titled Screen Time, from Issa Rae's production company, garnered 75 million views in a week—on TikTok and on TikTok's micro-drama app, PineDrama. The series, which has 57 parts, tells the story of two couples on a double date that descends into chaos after a mysterious figure hacks their personal devices and forces them to reveal their secrets to each other. An estimated 28 million people are watching shows on PineDrama, and it's one of many micro-drama platforms. Who are these viewers? Many are women, many are Gen Z, and many are people of color."
They've already caught on in China, Gonzalez reminds us, where producers have been even clearer about the degree to which they're making these mini-telenovelas to capture the attention of poor people. And they're pretty much nothing more than slop: "The rise of micro-dramas coincides with the rise of AI, and in China, more than 95 percent of the micro-dramas released early this year were AI-generated," writes Gonzalez. "Screen Time is a human-led affair—human actors filmed by camerapeople. But PineDrama offers AI shows too, and they may become the norm here as well."
It's true that we've always had garbage TV products. But, increasingly, we have mini TVs—and casinos, and porn machines, and shopping malls—in our pockets, and very little ability to self-regulate. Maybe I'm a little too Jonathan Haidt–pilled, but I fear what the future looks like when we fail to safeguard kids' attention spans and they are ushered into an adult world full of slop.
Scenes from New York: Checking in on my bougiest neighbors…
Unintentionally heartbreaking. Doing it *to this degree* is reserved for the ultra-wealthy, but *plenty* of upper-middle-class families in big cities like New York do a version of this. When so much of parenting & household-management is professionalized:
-the standards ratchet… pic.twitter.com/KtPfAlnAQf— Liz Wolfe (@LizWolfeReason) July 20, 2026
QUICK HITS
- Someone stop the kids, they're Nixonmaxxing! reports The Wall Street Journal: "Watergate has long been considered one of the biggest political scandals in American history. After five men were arrested breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in 1972, investigators uncovered links to Nixon's re-election campaign and an extensive effort by the White House to cover it up. The scandal led to Nixon's resignation, landed some of his closest advisers in jail and ushered in a far-reaching legislative crackdown on executive overreach. Now, Nixon is being recast as a forerunner of 'America First' by a new generation of conservatives: a combative president loathed by the press and besieged by investigators who was brought down by the same establishment they believe targeted President Trump."
- "Frank Bisignano, the head of the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration, sits atop two government organizations that store vast reams of sensitive financial data about every taxpayer," reports The Wall Street Journal. "More than a decade ago, he was co-chief operating officer at JPMorgan Chase, another perch that gave him visibility and authority over every part of a massive financial institution. At the bank, people familiar with the matter said, he spied on fellow executives—using his authority over the security department and position to access sensitive information and internal communications without an apparent business justification."
- "President Trump quietly denied nearly 6,000 clemency applications this month from people who mostly lacked political connections and had waited patiently in a queue while he awarded pardons and commutations to allies who had skipped the line," reports The New York Times.
