Getting back to my hypothesis that Trump is dumb as a bag of hammers, let’s look at something he said yesterday —

During a press briefing in the Oval Office, Trump downplayed concerns over job security sparked by a significant drop in cargo volumes as a result of his sweeping tariff policy and ongoing trade negotiations with China.

One reporter said that traffic at U.S. ports “has really slowed, and now thousands of dockworkers and truck drivers are worried about their jobs,” before being interrupted by the president.

“That means we lose less money, you know? When I see that, that means we lose less money,” Trump replied. He claimed that China had been making “over a trillion, 1.1 trillion, in my opinion.”

“And frankly if we didn’t do business, we would have been better off,” Trump continued. “So, when you say it slowed down, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.

Probably most of this is Trump refusing to acknowledge that his policies are hurting people. But what he’s actually saying here is that trade is bad. He’s saying the U.S. would be better off economically if we closed our borders to imports, according to Trump. We should just sell stuff to other countries, not buy stuff.  Maybe he doesn’t really believe it, but he’s sure as bleep dumb enough to say it. I guess he thinks that if all the dockworkers lose their jobs they can get those factory jobs “screwing in little screws” all day long, like Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick talked about recently.

Lutnick is another specimen that belongs in the Overprivileged Twit Museum.

Update: I missed this earlier. Steve Benen wrote on the Maddow Blog,

As the week got underway, NBC News aired Donald Trump’s latest appearance on “Meet the Press,” during which the president shared some odd claims about trade policy. “We were losing hundreds of billions of dollars with China,” he said. “Now we’re essentially not doing business with China. Therefore, we’re saving hundreds of billions of dollars.”

Of course, by that reasoning, if I stopped doing business with my local grocery stores, I could boast about all of the money I’m saving, which would be great except for the related fact that I wouldn’t have any food.

A couple of days later, Trump again said that he didn’t care about the collapse of economic activity between the U.S. and China. “You know, we lost a trillion dollars to China on trade … and by not trading, we’re losing nothing,” the Republican claimed. “So, we’re saving a trillion dollars. That’s a lot.”

So if we all stopped buying stuff we’d save a lot of money. However, I’m not sure how that’s going to increase federal revenue. The General Services Administration does buy some electronics and other technical stuff from China, but I doubt that such purchases add up to a trillion dollars.

In other news — retired Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter has died.

Trump has fired the Librarian of Congress for being an obstacle to President Trump’s agenda. I’m struggling to understand what the Librarian of Congress could possibly do that interferes with anyone’s agenda.

Update: Another perspective —