Morning Memo: Sell Those Tariffs!

Fox News’ latest pump-and-dumb

JESSE WATTERS ON FOX NEWS: Cowboys. Construction workers. Policemen. These aren’t just members of the Village People — they’re also archetypes of American masculinity. The masculinity that beat the British, plowed the plains, and owned the libs. And now this influencer says thanks to tariffs there’ll soon be a new extra-masc job for guys that’ll pay off in testosterone and respect, and have the ladies swooning —iPhone constructioneer!

[CUT TO video of Howard Lutnick talking about how instead of China’s “army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America [and] it’s going to be automated…”]

When Commerce Secretary Lutnick said America would soon start building its own iPhones, Instagram patriot Daisy O’Tradwife had this to say:

[Split screen of a FOX BLONDE nodding as O’TRADWIFE, wearing a pinafore without a blouse to reveal her ample cleavage, speaks.]

O’TRADWIFE: I absolutely adore and have sex with my husband, don’t get me wrong — running a great big, butch think tank in Washington is very manly job! But real women like us enjoy our little fantasies, and gosh, I would just be in heaven if Colin chucked it all to go to work in one of the big, beautiful factories that are coming home to America thanks to the Trump tariffs!

[O’TRADWIFE massages her breasts as FOX BLONDE nods. CUT TO a simpy looking young guy, very much in the mode of DOGE’s Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, standing in an empty warehouse, playing with his iPhone.]

WATTERS’ VOICE: Ambitious young American males are straining at the leash to take on the man-mantle of iPhone contructioneering. Men like Palantir Zephyr, who recently dropped out of college to join Andreessen Horowitz as a senior consultant, but who is strongly considering a job on the new Apple shop floor.

[CLOSE-UP of ZEPHYR, who sounds like Steven Crowder but with even less of a personality and more of a lisp.]

ZEPHYR: It’s pretty cool I guess working as like a senior consultant, and Mr. Andreessen is like a really great man and I get to work with Daniel Penny and that’s pretty great. But you know all my life I just feel like I just never had the chance to be like the real man that I was born to be, because of like the wokeness.

[Silent footage of ZEPHYR from another angle, playing with his iPhone again.]

WATTERS V.O.: Palantir wanted to play sports in high school, but the woke DEI academy his parents made him attend didn’t have a mixed martial arts team, and he couldn’t play lacrosse because of a wood allergy. When he got to college, he was told it was “inappropriate” and “politically incorrect” to tell women they were sitting in his seat and that they should get up and give to him, even though due to nearsightedness and a psychological inability to be seen in public wearing glasses like a nerd he needed to be close to the front but also not so close that he would feel threatened by the body heat of his woke teachers.

[NEW ANGLE: Some guy comes up to ZEPHYR and hands him a VR headset. ZEPHYR is so busy with his iPhone he doesn’t notice and the guy has to tap him on the shoulder several times to get him to take the headset and put it on.]

But in the new age of Trump tariffs, there’s a place for young men like Palantir. We gave him a virtual reality test drive of this exciting new job.

[We switch to a VR view, in ludicrous Meta style, of what looks like a child’s idea of a factory floor — large windows looking onto nothing, a couple of conveyor belts running, men riding forklifts in the background and walking around in the foreground, wearing hard hats, trousers and wife-beaters, chewing on cigars, and flexing their muscles. In VR view we move to an area with a conveyor belt faced by three enormous industrial robot arms.]

Palantir enters a world of real work for real men. He can almost smell the Towmotor exhaust, and the sweat and cigars of his fellow working men.

[In VR our attention is directed to a small desk in front of the robot arms. The desk is shiny and black and ornamented with a gold silhouette portrait on Donald Trump. On the desk are two buttons: One says MAKE iPHONE, the other says NEXT.]

Though Palantir has had only a few days’ training, he feels confident he can perform the task or, as we say on the shop floor, “do the job.”

[We see a POV shot of a cartoon hand pushing the MAKE iPHONE button; a factory whistle sounds; a small black oblong appears on the conveyor belt in front of the robot arms, the tips of which press into the oblong and whirr and clatter noisily for a few seconds, then withdraw, revealing that the oblong has been fashioned into an iPhone.]

Palantir takes in the situation — and realizes what he must do!

[The cartoon hand pushes the NEXT button; the iPhone is whisked away. Another black oblong appears, and a cartoon hand hits the MAKE iPHONE button, repeating the process.]

Misson accomplished! Once you get started it’s like riding a Peloton — you just can’t lose the hang of it!

[One of the worker-avatars juts into frame, grins and gives ZEPHYR a thumbs-up. CUT TO ZEPHYR wearing the headset, shaking his fists in front of him and going “Grrrrr! Grrrr! I’m a man!”]

Now Palantir has a purpose and direction in life. He will be respected, like the manly assembly line auto workers of olden days. In fact, thanks to tariffs, iPhones will soon cost as much as cars. Within weeks Palantir will have his own apartment, a new car, a cool nickname and a girlfriend. And he owes it all to Donald Trump’s tariffs, which are a man-tax on other nations, not our own.

[ZEPHYR pulls off the headset, drops it on the ground, takes out his iPhone and plays with it.]

ZEPHYR: So that’s like, what is it called, quitting time?

VOICE OFFSCREEN: Drop the g.

ZEPHYR: What?

VOICE OFFSCREEN: Drop the g. “Quittin’.” Not “Quitting,” “Quittin’.”

ZEPHYR: Quit tin. Huh huh. Awesome.

[BACK to WATTERS.]

WATTERS: Awesome indeed. We’ll be back after this word from the new manliness supplement for men, Tariffon.