Trump is tanking your 401k. You’re welcome!

“To anyone on Wall Street this morning, I would say ‘Trust in President Trump,‘” said his press secretary Karoline Leavitt, appearing on CNN on Thursday morning, as stocks took a defiant nosedive.

Exactly! The president is a famously successful businessman and an economic genius. For example, did anybody really appreciate the old-fashioned but beautiful term “groceries,” before he brought it to our attention on Wednesday?

“Groceries,” proffered our poetic potentate. “It says a bag with different things in it.”

That is exactly what it says! This is a guy who knows his stuff. He’s so brilliant, he decided on this plan just three hours before his Rose Garden announcement, according to The Washington Post. The naysayers claimed his numbers made no sense — why was he levying tariffs on remote islands populated only by penguins, for example? — but he used bona fide math to calculate them. The formula had Greek letters and everything!

So you must believe the president over the many experts who say tariffs will cost families thousands more each year, lead to massive job losses, and torch the global economy.

“I think it’s going very well — The MARKETS are going to BOOM,” Trump posted on Thursday. And sure enough, the markets did go BOOM!

Tariffs won’t give American workers “any pain,” Leavitt said.

Well, not in the ordinary sense of that word. The president said there will be pain, but it will hurt so good, like it does after life-saving surgery. Which he has just performed, on America. “THE PATIENT LIVED, AND IS HEALING,” he posted.

Sacrifices must be made for the common good, say the pundits who lost their minds over not being allowed to eat onion rings indoors during the pandemic. Fox News personality Harris Faulkner, paid millions for her wisdom, said “the 401k people” should follow the heroic example Americans set during the Second World War, when “people in this country would support the war effort with their materials at home and making things for weaponry and all that. We gotta do 100% buy-in over this bumpy period.”

Why aren’t you buying in? Republican Congressman Riley Moore from West Virginia says we’re no longer going to barter the dreams and aspirations of American families “for cheap goods made in China.”

C U TEMU! America can make its own crappy, almost-free stuff. As soon as we get hundreds of new factories built. It will of course take years for those plants to come online, provided investors — who famously love volatility — are willing to put bazillions into building them. To make those factories feasible, we’ll also need to grow a labor force of American-born Americans (no immigrants, please) willing to do dirty, difficult, manual work for lousy wages. We’re already on our way, with the president trying to gut universities and labor unions.

How can we possibly fail?

And when we don’t, America will enter another Gilded Age, those glorious years from 1870 to 1913 when this nation was truly Great — “a tariff country” the president says, ruled over by President William McKinley, his hero.

Lord, what a glorious time, especially if your name was Rockefeller, Carnegie, or Vanderbilt. Back then, there were no rules for men like them: You could buy off the government, run monopolies, and build and drill to your heart’s content.

Sure, workers — millions of them immigrants — lived in grinding poverty and worked in deplorable and sometimes deadly conditions, with no help from the government (Yay, self-reliance!).

But as McKinley knew then, and our glorious president can tell you now, that is but the price of Greatness. To make a big, beautiful omelette, you have to break a few eggs.

You are the eggs. You’re welcome!

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Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yvonne.abraham@globe.com.