Nice Country, See. Shame if Something were to Happen to it

It’s not politics at all. Oh, there are people around Donald Trump using the power of politics to satisfy or pay off various political interests. But, no, not for Trump himself. For Trump, the United States government is just a business. And he’s CEO – with all the unchecked power that comes with it. The power, tops among other things, to expand the business: to buy assets, to intimidate, dominate and defeat competitors, to make more money. For Donald Trump, that’s what it’s all about.

Dominance and defeat of competitors is how you do business, isn’t it?  It’s the American way. Trump has just shockingly scaled it up.

As he says: Who the hell gave Panama the income from the canal? A defeat for the U.S. We’ll take over again and get the revenue back. Greenland? Valuable minerals. We’ll threaten to take over. Or, how about a deal? A deal for their minerals in exchange for defense – or something more wonderful than they’ve ever seen. Their current owner is not doing a good job. We have the money. Their lives will be richer than ever before, richer even than they can imagine.

Ukraine? Now there’s a mineral rich area. Place we can buy. Gotta be for sale, exchange for some defense dollars. They already owe us billions. We need to get something back for that. Peace deal? Cease fire? Whatever. Putin can have his share. We’ll have three fourths of the land and the minerals. That’s what our world class tech companies say they want. I’ll close the Ukraine deal. Musk and Peter Thiel and my tech bros, they’ll pay me and the Party and the family. I can make sure of that. It’s all business.

Now tariffs. It’s business. It’s a balance for Trump only if he sees money flowing into the U.S., not outbound to purchase goods from countries that “have been ripping us off for decades.” They have to buy more from the U.S., or we’ll raise tariffs to the point they can’t sell (or sell as much) to the U.S. because the tariffs (taxes) raise the price for consumers.

Huh? Does that make sense?

What’s the point? Actually, it’s not economics or even politics. It’s business. It’s personal. It’s dominance. Donald Trump wants to prove he’s the best, the guy who wins, and when he doesn’t, he files it away, flagged for future revenge. He’s into that. There’s extensive media on how much Trump is motivated by resentment, by grievance over past losses or even, disrespect, a failure to praise, to provide money or just a failure to kiss his ass, a request made to Zelensky. We all saw it.

So the tariffs are not about bringing manufacturing back to American shores or resetting the world economic order (though that looks like it’s happeniing) as Trump, his sycophants in the White House, media and think tanks claim. The tariffs are about dominance, to prove Trump’s dominance, show how smart he is, right? – and to get even.

There‘s a lot of reporting that Trump’s been a believer in tariffs for decades, back into the 1980s at least. Makes you wonder. In the 80s the Japanese economy was killer. Lots of money floating around, a lot of it buying New York real estate. Just the business our boy was in. Very likely they beat him out of some deals or raised market prices for property, and hurt his business.

So maybe that’s it. They had all this money from the U.S. trade deficit with Japan and here they were reinvesting it in the New York real estate market, “ripping us off.” (And they’re at it again.)

Sounds like a formative event. Donnie couldn’t be seen as a loser and Donald Trump, CEO of USA LLC (not President, that’s subject to those pesky elections) is now determined to get even, to show his dominance,  to prove that he’s always a winner. At a staggering cost to nearly everyone else.