🔒 You Will Own Nothing, and You Will Be Miserable: Trump's Promise to America

Donald Trump did something frightening this month—stupid, absolutely, and breathtakingly irresponsible, but frightening. He gave a demonstration of the power that he unilaterally holds over the global economy. He doesn’t need weapons, just words. With an announcement on the White House lawn that he was applying absurdly high import tariffs across the board, to every nation on the planet (except Russia), effective almost immediately. The rest of the world had been ripping America off for too long, he insisted. Now America would have its revenge.

 This was a self-destruct button for the global economy. Triggering a major recession, on purpose. Managers and CEOs dragged into the office at midnight (the poor darlings) to re-analyse their entire financial strategy. Ships were already on the ocean waves, headed inexorably toward American ports laden with goods that American businesses had ostensibly already paid for. Overnight these ships turned into economic cruise missiles. 

After a week of economic chaos and a spiraling economic disaster likely to dwarf the Covid recession and the housing crash, Trump waved his hand again and made it all go away. Tariffs lifted, the market bounced back. Just like that.

 Now, Trump’s sycophants are of course insisting that this was all part of a plan, to spook the rest of the world into coming to the table. I’m not very good at economics so I defer to the alternative explanation preferred by the vast majority of financial experts—that he was forced to backtrack due to unexpected signs that the bond market was about to collapse.

 The global economic system, after all, isn’t just a bunch of puppet strings you can tug on to trigger precise and isolated effects. It’s more like that scene in Chernobyl where Jared Harris explains how the internal chemistry of a nuclear reactor works.

Clearly a bond market collapse, at least this quickly, wasn’t part of whatever Trump and his administration had in mind, so they pulled the plug. But until now, Trump, or his handlers, were more than willing  to set a time bomb under the US economy. I said just last week that I’m unsure to what degree Trump understands any of this or is actually in control of it, but somebody in the administration definitely understands that tariffs are a tax paid for by the consumer, not by the exporting country, no matter how hard the GOP have been trying to shove that lie down the American people’s throat.

 Tariffs do hurt their target countries, but in the shorter term and not to the same extent, and worldwide tariffs of the type that the Donald attempted to introduce harm Americans almost exclusively.

 Think of it like this: There’s a cupcake shop just down the street from you and you are, by a large margin, their best customer. Every week you pull out your collapsible beach trolley and wheel it down the block to stock up on delicious cupcakes. But then, suddenly, one morning you wake up to find that you’re allergic to cupcakes.

 You might be able to choke a few of them down without going into toxic shock and god damn you love those cupcakes enough to try, but you just can’t possibly stuff those sugary treats down your gullet at anywhere near the same scale anymore. 

The cupcake store suffers some financial damage. You were their star customer. But their damage is short term. They just need to put in the work to attract some new customers. You, on the other hand—your cupcake eating days are finished. It literally doesn’t matter where you source them from. Your allergy hits you no matter what.

 What bizarre motive could the president possibly have had to deliberately make America allergic to foreign goods?

 The reaction of many of the figures in MAGA world should give you a clue. As the Dow and the Nasdaq plummeted, they were thrilled. People were going to get hurt. But the excitement wasn’t about foreigners getting hurt—they wouldn’t. They were thrilled that Americans were going to get hurt.

For all of the frightening and genuine xenophobia of this administration, which is not uncommon among American regimes, it’s easy to look past what is uncommon, which is its hatred of Americans. The Trump administration and the elite influencers and pundits who view themselves as part of it and under its umbrella of protection view everyday Americans with disgust.

 A strong economy with its modern conveniences have made you fat, useless, lazy, and liberal. People of all races and creeds and sexualities and backgrounds are moving more and more effortlessly through society and across its economic divisions. Everyone has forgotten their place. Moving freely throughout a liberal democracy is teaching people empathy, which the far right sees as a serious and growing problem.

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