Why the plan behind Trump's Tyranny By Trade War matters
The bankers can't believe it. Nope, neither can the CEOs nor their jesters at CNBC.
They assumed President Businessman From TV™ loves bragging about his Dow Size too much to set fire to just about every equities exchange on earth. He'd never grin, roast marshmallows with his putter, and collect more cash from the Saudis as everything you spent your life working for burns to a dank crisp. No way. He's just coming for the college presidents, the students, the federal employees, the cancer researchers, the trans kids, the immigrants, the foreign tourists, the few decent lawyers left at the DOJ, the generals who won't shoot Americans, and Sesame Street. Let him have fun. He'll never come for your precious stonks! Until he did.
All the disbelief and confusion reveal precisely how we got into this mess: People still underestimate Donald Trump.
What Trump has learned since January 6th
In the year 2025, people still assume Trump's a bumbling fool who can't possibly have a plan. Or worse, they believe he's too addled even to enact a plan, even one delivered with a bow, by Republicans who've been searching for a Spiteful God Emperor their entire miserable lives. Or if he does have said plan, he couldn't ever stick to it—no, not that orange freak. He's too busy posting and putting.
That sentiment that Donald Trump is merely a hateful clown remains his greatest asset. It's why disaffected Democrats and swing voters who hated Project 2025 were still willing to vote for him. They thought, "Sure! He may have 800 pages of details others gave him, but he'll never have the discipline to implement it." And that's what the CEOs and everyone else on Wall Street must have thought, too.
That's why everyone interested in saving this country needs to understand that Trump's Team has a plan with these tariffs. And it's deadly serious and one he's unlikely to give up without extraordinary efforts.
It's a plan that shows how much more effective he's become at building coalitions with other malign actors since January 6th. It's a plan showing how he dedicated himself to implementing the kind of shocks to the system that anyone concerned about traditional electoral politics would never dare consider. It's a plan that shows that he's willing to wring out every drop of power he has accumulated with his successful defeat and absorption of the Republican Party, America's business leaders, and vast swaths of the establishment of every sector of our economy who are lining up to bow down to him.
Foremost, it's a plan that shows how effectively he has aligned his life's passions—material gain, avoidance of consequences, and domination for domination's sake.
Ok, here's the plan
Racism and tariffs are Donald Trump's most consistent obsession, even though from the way he talks about tariffs, you could easily assume he has no idea how they work. But even that is part of the strategy.
Trump talks about tariffs and trade deficits the way he talks about NATO dues or Hannibal Lecter. He messes up the facts while making his point in a way that delights his fans and tricks his opponents into spreading his message. He doesn't care about the truth. He doesn't lie to be believed. He lies to be repeated.
The fundamental theory he expresses is that America is being screwed, and tariffs are how he—and only he—can fix that.
If you've read this far, you probably agree with me that Trump doesn't give a shit about America and only uses patriotism as a sleight of hand in his cons. If you think a patriot tries to overthrow our constitution, turns on our allies, and aims to resuscitate the power of the greatest enemy of democracy alive, you're going to love Trump's plan. So read on.
Senator Chris Murphy succinctly explained why Trump loves tariffs as a tool of domestic domination:
When I shared this clip, an anonymous user on Bluesky said it was "too simplistic" and "America-centric," which I took as a compliment because that's the only kind of message that can break through to Americans—the only people who can stop this.
However, the user referred me to a podcast presenting a broader view. It's a view from Europe's left, from Yanis Varoufakis, a former Greek finance minister who refuses to "dismiss Trump as a madman or Trump's team as madmen."
You can listen to the whole podcast yourself:
Or here's what I believe are the key points:
Trump is trying to trigger “a controlled disintegration of the world economy" on par with the Nixon shock that led to globalization and, after the fall of the Soviets, America's hegemony.
And because he's propped up by Tech Fascists who have their own lust for a “controlled disintegration of the global economy," no one in Trump's core group of allies seems that alarmed.
And here's why Trump Deux is so much more dangerous than Trump One
If you buy Varoufakis' argument that Trump wants to use tariffs as "a weapon that inflicts more pain on European and Asian capitalists than it does on American ones," you could make an argument that his aim is ultimately patriotic. Go USA!
However, the picture becomes too transparent when you see the entire project, as Senator Murphy does.
"It’s about exercising crude, coercive power abroad just like the Trump-Musk Payments crisis has been doing domestically," Nathan Tankus explained.
Why is Trump bludgeoning our democratic allies? Is it to get a leg up on China?
Or is it to have a fearsome tool to take on democracy abroad in the same way he's doing so at home—going country by country the way he's going to university by university and law firm by law firm and demanding loyalty?
And loyalty to Trump is, by definition, a betrayal of democracy.
Meanwhile, if this shock to the system that aims to rapidly devalue the dollar while keeping it the world's reserve currency succeeds, the American economy could be reshaped painfully and erratically. This is why UAW president Shawn Fain—who I once saw as a leading light of the left—is all in on Trump's tariffs.
Trump Deux has figured out how to assimilate establishment allies and opponents alike, using fear and short-sighted greed tinged with fantasies of replacing reality with your own personal fan fiction.
This is why we must oppose all of Trump
If you work from the assumption that Donald Trump knows what he's doing and all he's doing is trying to break democracy to maximize his domination of America and the free world, everything becomes much more straightforward.
You recognize that trying to pass his border bill over his objections isn't just a bad electoral policy that hollows out your argument that he's a fascist; it's enabling tyranny itself. You see how giving him more power to round up people through shameless shams like the Laken Riley Act gives him more power to round up you and people like you. It will hit you that everything he's doing, every policy he loudly embraces, is not about anything other than breaking anyone who refuses to bow to him so he can break democracy.
The terror of knowing what Donald Trump is all about doesn't require you to accept that he's a genius—though if he's a giant fool who is on the verge of ending democracy and installing himself as a dictator, what does that say about us? But it does require understanding that this time, he has a plan, just as he had a plan—that even I mocked at the time—to win by targeting disaffected young white males in a way no major party ever had. And a ruthless, relentless, and resourced maniac with a plan will beat "smart with no real plan" every time.
The only answer is to oppose all of Trump and stop him in any ethical way we can. Any compromise will ultimately become a chance for Trump to impose some loyalty test that will either taint the leaders we need or result in broken policies that enable his march against your freedom.
The only people who seem to get this are the people. Five million of us were in the streets last weekend. And, as Lizz Winstead said, that was just the starting line.
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