“Sometimes a man wants to be stupid, if it lets him do a thing that his cleverness forbids.”
- John Steinbeck, East of Eden
One of the reasons that the world is stuck in the current Age of Trump is that everything that could be said against him is already baked in. One might say it’s part of the appeal. When he does something, no matter how disastrous it appears even to Republicans, Trump just blows off his critics, says belligerently stupid things and makes goonish faces at the camera, ALMOST AS IF he were a total retard who can barely spell his own name.
Which begs the question of whether the performance skills that serve to be a clownboy for public amusement are sufficient to lead the largest government in the world. I mean, even Jerry Lewis knew how to direct movies.
The main example right now is “Liberation Day,” or the broad based global tariff program announced April 2 (because April 1 would have been too obvious). It was so popular and business friendly that Trump held his press conference to announce it after the markets closed. In the following days the markets loved the policy so much that it wiped out over 11 trillion dollars compared to the week before Trump was re-inaugurated.
On Wednesday morning, Trump declared he was putting most of the across-the-board tariffs on a 90-day “pause”, which caused the markets to rise 3000 points.
All bow down and serve our new Lord and Savior, who causes the grass to grow and the birds to sing. Who is the only reason the sun rises in the east every morning, by his allowance. Verily, let us all love and worship our new Lord and God, Donald John Trump. Cause he makes that Jehovah guy look like a fuckin’ pussy.
But then, His Majesty said the targeted tariffs on China would actually increase over 100 percent to 125 (it’s probably higher now) prompting the Communist government in Beijing to respond with equal tariffs on us. And that caused everything to crash on Thursday again. The Dow Jones industrial average is still a net -4 percent from April 1. Things picked up on Friday, but who knows how long that’s going to last? You just have to keep watching The Trump Show!
The general consensus was that Trump caved because the same financial class he was trying to impress told him the policy wasn’t working. It is also more evidence that he has less emotional stability than a teenage BTS fan. At the same time he wants to preserve the option of tariffs because that is his main economic agenda.
Several observers, like Senator Chris Murphy (D.-Connecticut) and right-winger Richard Hanania have a different take. Both of them came to the conclusion that Trump’s apparent fickleness on tariffs is actually a form of leverage on the population at large, where “every industry or company will have to pledge loyalty to Trump in order to get sanctions relief.” Hanania: “Trump has always believed in tariffs, but something that he appears to have discovered is that they are an excellent way to aggrandize his own power and sense of importance. Countries and businesses want exceptions, and you get them by deferring to and praising Trump. Politicians who are subject to pressures from private sector interests also must go hat in hand to the president. …This is not to say Trump has ever thought all of this out. Rather, the man has an instinctual understanding of how to manipulate and control others.”
This theory makes a lot of sense, not least in that it tracks with Trump’s desire to see himself as a Mafia boss, and his already demonstrated moves to turn his ‘administration’ into a patronage outfit. There’s just one problem with the theory: This is Trump we’re dealing with.
The US borrows money by selling Treasury bonds. Those bonds are in the hands of rich guys and in the hands of other countries. Like China. The value of these bonds is based on concepts like “the full faith and credit of the US government”, which is no longer guaranteed. Normally in a stock market crash the bond market would stay secure, the problem was that everyone knew that the crash was artificially created and arbitrary, meaning, other assets like bonds are not secure because government (Trump) policy is not secure. After “Liberation Day” there was a spike in creditors dumping US bonds. Jake Broe: “And when bond yields go up, all other asset classes go down, your real estate, your crypto, your gold, because this is the risk-free rate that every investor has to weigh against. ..This is something any individual or nation can do. Why risk your money in stocks or equities, when you can put it in bonds?”
In other words, by directly undermining securities (not just threatening them), Our Lord and Savior was undermining the leverage he needed to control the elites.
Truly, Our Lord is all-good, all-powerful, and all-wise.
But while tariffs may not work as long-term scheme to control the country, the on-again/off-again was a great scheme for insider trading, as Trump twitted “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!” as stocks were down, just before announcing the tariff pause. NASDAQ call volume went up 10k volume minutes before the pause was announced.
Which is another reason that when (or if) this colon cancer of a political party is removed from power we need to child-proof the whole process of government.
But in the short term, one might reasonably argue that we depend too much on foreign trade or that our manufacturing sector is too dependent on China in particular. I honestly think that is a national security issue. But clearly the ‘administration’ that put Pete ‘Whiskyleaks’ Hegseth in charge of the Pentagon doesn’t care about national security. If rebuilding the manufacturing sector is a priority then you make it a government priority by incentivizing American businesses to build here (since it was they, not China, that decided to outsource American industry). And you do that BEFORE starting a trade war that does more to undermine American businesses than the Chinese government. Just as Trump clearly seeks to establish not mere self-sufficiency but economic autarky – or as North Korea would call it, Juche – not in the interest of workers, but because he seeks to invade his neighbors (like Canada and Greenland) and minimize the consequences of blockade. Like Germany did.
But when Nazi Germany re-armed, they actually did rebuild both domestic and military industries with economic policies that were dodgy but actually did work in the short term. One thing the Nazis didn’t do was immediately alienate all of their trading partners in the first three months of the regime so that they would start blockading or working around them before the Nazis started their expansion in earnest. They also didn’t alienate the vast majority of the population before starting a war, including the people who voted for them. Clearly the 2024 election demonstrated that a critical mass of Americans don’t think that fascism – excuse me, ‘post-liberalism’ – is a danger and may even see it as attractive. But Trump and his cult are both so high on their own supply that they think they can piss off every American who isn’t them before they attain absolute power, when their margin of popular victory was 1.62 percent in an election where a lot of Trump voters didn’t choose a candidate for Senate, which is why a lot of the swing states that went for Trump still elected Democratic Senators. As a result, Republicans are getting massive protests even in Idaho.
That’s the problem with the Trump Party: They can’t even do fascism right.