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-analyze 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.

Elon Musk, for one, is very open about his objection to empathy. He quite literally refers to it as a “suicidal” inclination. This is a feature that made him ideal as Trump’s highest ranking civilian general in his war against American society.

 You could see much of the same effort to reshape culture on a much smaller scale in Musk’s hostile takeover and demolition of Twitter. One of Twitter’s biggest selling points as a platform was its relatively egalitarian nature. The social elites like politicians, thought leaders, and celebrities weren’t locked behind a TV screen or a book. They were interactive. You could reply to Stephen King or Mark Hamill or AOC and there was a chance they would respond back or at least see you. Even just the impression or possibility of that was a drawing point.

 This was, to Elon Musk, wholly unacceptable. It was an elite system, to be clear, and the blue checkmark gimmick did cleanly define who was considered notable. Musk used that as a justification for abolishing it. What he replaced it with was not more egalitarian, as he promised, but even more elite. Your caste on “X” is now defined predominantly by social class and ideology. The people at the top are unreachable and the people on the bottom untouchable. The white nationalists and ideologues who now serve as the platform’s most visible users never debase themselves by responding to commoners and most choose to switch off the option of even seeing their tweets.

 The majority of users, the lower castes, rabble among themselves pointlessly down on the shitfloor. Their only purpose is to consume ads and generate wealth for the people on top, chiefly Musk himself. The re-engineering of Twitter was simply Musk’s way of saying break’s over, get back on the assembly line.

 The entire purpose of anything, to the MAGA-brained opponent of empathy, is to generate wealth for those who belong on top of society. All institutions in society are machines that serve that one explicit purpose, and the engine that runs that machine is the masses who belong at the bottom of society. If those masses are enjoying themselves or even just living in relative comfort then they are off-task. It makes them slow. The machine of which they are the engine becomes inefficient.

 Hence why Trump refers to the economic disaster he’s engineering as “medicine.”

 Tariffs do serve a purpose beyond preventing people from being able to afford stuff or else nations wouldn’t use them. Generally they work as an incentive for industry growth. If it’s more difficult to get things from overseas then it’s incentive to produce those things domestically. They’re a surgical economic tool that many countries choose to implement to some extent. The Trump administration’s motives go beyond job creation—it’s full scale cultural revolution.

 The message of the plutocrats is clear: You need to get back on the factory floor. If wiping out the economy is what it takes to get you away from your Netflix and back to your primary task of generating wealth for the one percent of the one percent, that’s the medicine we’ll make you take.

 It’s fascinating how much it mirrors the rhetoric of the historical authoritarian communist regimes they claim so passionately to oppose. Maybe there is something to be said about the so-called horseshoe theory here, in this Great American Leap Forward. This Khmer Orange.

 The elite propagandists, in this timeline primarily wretched reactionary shut-ins who made their wealth podcasting and streaming video games, need you to understand that your video games are a bourgeois luxury that you will need to sacrifice if you want to make America great again for the people who deserve to enjoy the fruits of that wealth (people who are not you). 

It’s no coincidence that one of the primary focuses of this administration has been to dismantle education. To quote JD Vance, “The professors are the enemy.” Per Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, one of the architects of the tariff war, the future of America is the trades. High school educated at most. Armies of patriotic Americans in factories screwing in tiny screws.

The intended effect is docility and servitude, but they are selling it to the American people as masculinity. Building things with your bare hands the way men were intended to work, not wasting time doing worthless tasks like scientific research. All of the male scientists unceremoniously Musked from their cancer-curing jobs at the NIH will be reassigned to patriotic new roles involving tiny screws. The women, presumably, will return to their primary role of homemakers and breeding stock.

Notice the little exposure of Jesse Watters’ hypocrisy at the end of that clip. He knows that he is exempt from this call to the factory. Cushy propaganda roles are going to be needed in this new regime as surely as tiny screw fiddlers. Walmart Tucker Carlson isn’t in any danger of developing empathy, but the same can’t be said for humanitarian workers and disease researchers.

 Benny Johnson has famously never created a single thing in his entire life. He built his entire career on plagiarism. But he wants you to know that your poverty is going to be character-building.

If this all sounds uncomfortably arbeit macht frei, it’s quite fitting that Neo-Nazi Andrew Torba has wiped the tears from his eyes and sketched out his own vision for this miserable post-decadence factory shitfloor America.

This is why the people’s capacity for empathy is their greatest hurdle and why sociopaths like Elon Musk, who don’t understand it, see it as a kind of poison in the system, a disease, a “mind virus” to be eradicated. This bleak factory vision of America is a hard sell, and the only way to make it appealing is to enhance people’s bigotry to the point where the tiny screws are viewed as preferable to the alternative.

 It's this grim fact that explains everything. The purpose of “mass deportations” is to create a vacuum in the low-skilled, low-paying manual jobs that desperate immigrants gravitate toward, a vacuum that will be filled by the mass layoffs that inevitably come with the planned economic crash to usher in Trump and Musk’s caste-structured America.

 And the necessity of the tiny screws will be sold to men primarily with the fear of this:

I’m writing a book about the toxic masculinity crisis in the internet age and how it has led to the current surge of reactionary culture and far-right populist politics across the western world. I’m going to be releasing chapters through this very newsletter approximately once a month, but the full chapters will be for paid subscribers only. Check it out here: