Auchtoon!

I sat down to create a cartoon on the U.S. automotive industry. It is apparent to most Michiganders that underpriced, government-subsidized, high-quality Chinese EVs are an existential threat to our state’s economy. They are the dominant player. According to Rush Doshi, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, China has roughly twice the manufacturing capacity of the United States. It’s bigger than the next nine countries combined.

The best strategy would be to build a coalition of allies as trading partners, creating a bulwark against a powerful, overbuilt Chinese automotive industry desperate for new markets. Instead, we have an administration driven by ego and petty grievances that is doing the exact opposite with tariffs and trade wars. The likely result: As our (former) allies are enticed to open their markets, we will eventually be overwhelmed.

That’s a lot to fit into a cartoon. And as regular readers are fully aware, I’m not afraid to load you up on multiple panels thick with contextual setup. But this week, I just couldn’t seem to simplify to the point of it not seeming like a homework assignment. So I distilled my point to its essence.

I don’t think President Trump is stupid. He obviously has skills to manipulate and instinct to cultivate his cult of personality. But I do think he’s willfully ignorant, and that’s different from stupid. He has the capacity to make better decisions, but he chooses the short-term, self-interest option every time.

Editor’s note: John Auchter is a freelance political 

Abdul El-Sayed faces some pretty obvious challenges in his run for Senate. He’s a progressive Democrat keen to avoid the dreaded “socialist” label. He’s a brown-skin man trying his best not to be scary to voters conditioned to be scared. And he’s a Muslim, which presents all sorts of traps and landmines.

But Mike Rogers has his own tightrope to walk. Because of his traditional Republican pedigree, it has to be so counterintuitive for him line up with the MAGA folks.

I’m sure Rogers would be happy to describe the GOP as “the party of fiscal responsibility,” but the Trump administration has been gleefully blowing holes in the federal deficit, spending billions on war and vanity projects and pitching potential giveaways in the trillions.

I’m sure Rogers would be happy to describe the GOP as “the party of free-market economics,” but the Trump administration has over and over unapologetically smashed the invisible hand with arbitrary tariffs (taxes) and so-called deals.

I’m sure Rogers would be happy to describe the GOP as “the party that abhors the government picking winners and losers,” but the Trump administration has taken unprecedented opportunity for his government (and his own interests) to grab ownership stakes of private enterprises.

Still, it could be even more challenging for them — they could be women.

The Broadway play Come from Away takes place in Gander, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada starting on September 11, 2001. It is based on real-life events when 38 planes, carrying close to 7,000 passengers, were ordered to land unexpectedly at Gander International Airport. The characters in the musical are based on actual Gander residents and the stranded travelers they housed and fed in their small town.

The show is brilliant, funny, and moving. But one thing that it does particularly well is capture the enormous outpouring of goodwill the United States and the people of the United States received in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Our friends and allies rallied to our aid to support and, in some cases, sustain us.

And what have we done with that goodwill? Well, honestly, we certainly didn’t build on it. In fact, in the past 21 months, the current administration has actively set about destroying it. Don’t believe me? Ask our (possibly now former) friends and allies.

And here we are 25 years later — a cranky old barfly full of regrets but tragically incapable of recognizing how those regrets came to be. What was marketed as America First is in reality America Only.

Can we finally just admit that this cruel patchwork disaster that we call the American healthcare system is a failure? Not for everybody, of course. It works fine for the very, very rich. And for some of the perfectly healthy. But otherwise, for Americans as a whole, it’s terrible.

I submit for your consideration these latest examples:

Certain Michigan school districts are now offering insurance-free healthcare so employees can afford healthcare. So, bypassing health insurance because it’s both too expensive to buy and too expensive to use. This way, employees will hopefully be inclined to take better regular care of themselves. But if they make the mistake of getting hit by a car or developing the wrong cancer, too bad for them. They would need insurance to cover those costs. (Well, who really knows what it would actually cover?)

Some medical professionals are taking extraordinary steps to offer vaccine guidance directly to the American public because our federal government (specifically, the current administration) can no longer can be trusted to do so. Vaccine policy should never be subjected to the whims of a couple of nepo babies whose qualifications begin and end with what the latest social media influencer has whispered into their ears.

Sure, implementing Medicare-for-all will be disruptive. But it’s a real solution to a very real problem that’s getting worse and worse.