A Tyrant, a Narcissist, Horribly Confused or Simply Profoundly Insecure?

 

A Tyrant, a Narcissist, Horribly Confused or Simply Profoundly Insecure?

PETER ON THE WRITERS’ HANGOUT PODCAST!

At a moment where Donald Trump’s miscalculations seem to be mounting, Trump was still basking in the raw power he was accumulating through intimidation. He simply replaced a White House portrait of Barack Obama with the above portrait of himself depicting his post-assassination raised fist. That must have felt great… except for Trump’s incompetence, his failure to grasp the most essential arena of state credibility as a supplicant nation, constantly trying to place its deficit into the global bond market – where we effectively “borrow” (by selling our treasuries) to fund that shortfall. It’s about $36 trillion worth. We can’t force the big bad buyers to pick up those bonds, which are routinely put out for auction. And when the bond market senses chaos and growing risk, when a nation has pissed off its usual bond-buying nations steering towards isolationism, they often dump the older bonds they have or will go forward only if the interest return on those bonds rises.

So, Mr. Trump, advised by Harvard Economist and tariff-theory-outlier Peter Navarro, let me tell you how it works. As you intimidate universities, law firms, members of Congress, send shivers of fear across the global trading markets as you threaten to impose and then withdraw some of the highest tariff rates the United States has ever required, you get a lot of people and nations very angry with you. That volatility, that massive chaos you have spread, kills the market for the very bonds you need to sell to sustain your deficit. Hmmm. And then you have to offer higher interest to get the deal done… and that interest becomes a mandatory federal budget item.

Many Americans seem to buy what they are told. With DOGE, they are informed, we will eliminate waste, fraud and corruption from the federal budget. But as the Congressional Budget Office tells us, that’s not exactly what’s happening. We may have decimated federal agencies, but DOGE really has not pared much from the federal budget. I mean if you look at the budget outside of immutable social programs (like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which Republicans have sworn they will not touch), the sacred defense budget and the massive amount of interest we have to bear on those bonds we sold to cover our deficit, there’s about 13%-15% of discretionary spending where cuts are possible, but the amount is so small why do we bother. To make matters so much worse, Trump and his MAGA buddies in Congress have promised a massive deficit hit (that huge tax cut), in which over 95% benefits go to only very rich people.

But Trump and Musk are decimating the “deep state” as they promised, right? Not if you look at the specifics: they are attempting to replace the “enemy deep state” – which provides certainty and benefits for most Americans – with a MAGA cultural, oligarch-centric deep state, which has benefits only if you are a control freak and interesting in conforming everyone in the United States to MAGA “anti-woke” thinking and tilting the playing field massively towards the billionaire class. They use the words “Make America Great” to support those “beautiful” tariffs to punish the rest of the world from selling us too many bargain products. Huh? But everybody is lining up, terrified for Trump to do his bidding. You can see that. But the numbers say otherwise, and many of these changes do not get fixed any time soon. Prices will continue to rise. Companies, unable to compete, will go out of business. Americans will be laid off in record numbers.

First, the powerful foreign nations retaliate with vicious tariffs of their own. They may even resort to banning US companies from doing business in their states. Tourism to the US has dropped by double digits and is growing. Angry nations from places like Canada and Europe are pulling US products off their shelves, and the message to locals is clear: be patriotic; don’t buy US products or travel to the US. If this anti-Americanism continues, and it just might, who exactly is going to travel to the United States to attend the Olympics?

Second, sometimes the obvious isn’t what people what to see or hear. The other picture above is my impression of the Democratic Party meeting with the managing partners of the law firms intimidated by Donald Trump into total obsequious capitulation to “whatever you want, oh, anointed one.” I thought lawyers first made their reputations in significant part because they can stand fiercely against their opponents and fight the good fight. Of all enterprises, law firms know that if you reward a bully that you morally should defeat, that bully will always come back for more. After decimating their DEI practices and offering nine figures of legal services for free to fight Trump causes (including decent causes against antisemitism), post-surrender agreement, Trump wants now them to document his trade compromises with nations all around the world… for free, of course.

What’s really going on is a massive shift in underlying goals. The isolationist market that spawned the Great Depression in the 1930s decimated Americans’ quality of life. The new era, led by the make-work vectors of the New Deal, opened up the United States to the global marketplace and the resulting US growth exploded beyond anything the world had ever seen. In the post-WWII the GI Bill provided housing and educational benefits that accelerated our prosperity. Desegregation and expanded voting rights increased the number of Americans “doing well.” But those who lived in areas where rural values persisted, and where education was not cherished felt left behind. By oligarchs’ embracing the evangelical pulpit, this is where MAGA was born… a belief that that America was better off under Calvin Cooledge and Herbert Hoover (not remotely as “great” as people might hope). Urban success, and the personal freedoms that went with it, were now trashed. Billionaires used MAGA followers to lambast government regulations and federal taxes as evil… and grew very fat at everyone else’s expense.

But as we are witnessing right now, all those glorious promises, that exceptional economic miracle that isolationism and tariffs would bring only brought backlash and pushback. We shoved allied nations away, and they learned that the United States was not to be trusted. The rich demanded, and MAGA was ready to provide, those massive tax breaks… but the numbers only got worse. The only way the billionaires could hold on was to limit voting rights, lie about a future which never comes. Books are censored, people who do not have MAGA “right thinking” are purged, since autocracy is the only way to keep the billionaires rich and everybody else in line.

I’m Peter Dekom, if what Mr Trump is telling you that imposing massive tariffs will work, perhaps they may among smaller players who just do not matter. But when bully Trump comes up against big players who can push back even harder, the truth that his numbers do not work become painfully obvious… and very difficult to reverse.