Looking at the various manifestations of Trump’s two weeks in office, his core policies can be roughly boiled down to three do’s and three don’ts To have tariffs, to repatriate capital and manufacturing, to build the Great Wall of the United States, to not have an income tax, to not have deep government, and to not have a color revolution.
There seems to be a Trumpian logic of three wants, three don’ts, America great again.
Trump has already imposed tariffs of 25 25 and 10 on Canada, Mexico, and China, respectively, and is expected to soon add tariffs of 25 each on Europe, Japan, and South Korea, and tariffs of 100 each on China, Taiwan, and the Netherlands.
Trump wants tariffs, not income taxes, and his goal is of course to attract global capital and businesses to the United States. Except that tariffs can be completely offset by changes in exchange rates, and the tariff trade wars of the past few years should give a clear answer as to whether Trump can succeed. Trump can’t possibly not understand this, but he is still obsessively confident about tariffs, and by all rights should have other spares, such as the ability to effectively control the exchange rate, or else he can now be declared a certain failure.
The world is not the only market in the United States, and the fear that tariffs may destroy the pattern of globalization is actually unfounded. If the United States is a global manufacturing center, perhaps the role of comprehensive tariffs will be non-trivial, but unfortunately the United States is not. In this case, if you the United States to engage in comprehensive tariffs, and other countries do not engage in tariffs, or even engage in zero tariffs, capital and manufacturing will return to the United States? I’m afraid the possibility is close to zero.
Therefore, how countries around the world respond to Trump’s tariff stick is very important. To further globalization to deal with anti-globalization, to mutual zero tariffs to deal with the United States of America’s high tariffs, in order to strengthen the layout of the global industrial chain to deal with the United States of America’s decoupling chain, which may be the winning strategy to defeat the United States.
The bottom line reason why Trump wants to remove the deep government is that the deep government is the biggest promoter of globalization. American finance capital and multinational corporations live within the structure of globalization, fattening themselves but shorting the United States, which is clearly in conflict with Trump’s America Great Again line. Trump wants the American greatness of the McKinley era, i.e., a manufacturing and physical powerhouse rather than all financial exploitation. Looking at things from America’s perspective, Trump may be right, but whether he can succeed or not depends on the fortunes of the country. The late dynastic zeitgeist has never been able to actually save the dynasty, will America be an exception?
Trump’s desire to build the Great Wall of the United States does not refer solely to his desire to strengthen the construction of the border wall, but to Trump’s overall national security strategy. The Trump team has already begun purging the CIA and FBI, and is abolishing USAID, the agency dedicated to orchestrating color revolutions. To that end, it has gone so far as to publicize the inside story of the U.S. plotting of the 2014 coup in Ukraine USAID is a front for the CIA. It used $5 billion in 2014 to ignite a color revolution in Ukraine. Nuland Victoria Nuland privately selected the new Ukrainian government a month before the legitimate government was overthrown.
This shows at least one thing, Trump doesn’t want any more color revolutions.
Not having a color revolution is clearly the clearest signal that Trump wants to strategically contract. The main purpose of the so-called color revolutions was, of course, to weaken the influence of Russia and China. Now to give up, of course, also means that Trump does not want to directly confront China and Russia. Trump is smarter than Biden in that Trump knows how strong the U.S. is today and whether it can win against China and Russia. So Trump just want to shrink the front, retreat to the United States mainland and its surrounding, set their sights on Greenland, Panama, Canada and Mexico. In this, Trump is wise.
The official website of the White House has just withdrawn all all information about Taiwan, including policy decrees and various news announcements, leaving only one message The United States abides by the one-China principle.
This should also be expressing some kind of strong signal. Trump wants to prepare leverage for his negotiations with mainland China and also create conditions. Rubio’s latest speech is also interesting, saying China is rising and the U.S. is declining, which is already the consensus of all Chinese people, and the U.S. should face this reality calmly and correctly.
In Trump’s shrinking strategic architecture, Panama has already surrendered, and I guess there may be tacit approval or tacit agreement from the Chinese side, and the relevant quid pro quo may have already taken shape. Greenland is expected to surrender as well, and Canada and Mexico are not expected to be hardened for long, after all, they only have the United States behind them and no other allies, it’s too pathetic. Behind them, Taiwan, especially Taiwan independence will be even more pathetic. Only Taiwan still has the motherland behind it, and there is still a way out.
As I predicted in yesterday’s article, U.S. stocks opened with a big drop, and Nvidia fell especially hard. Perhaps Wall Street can still use the power of capital to defend the back end of the market, but the market’s panic has been proven. Trump doesn’t seem to care much about how the U.S. stock market is doing; he certainly knows that U.S. stocks can’t float in the sky forever, and instead of crashing during his own administration, he’d rather let them plummet at the start of his term, which would at least put the blame on the Biden administration. On the other hand, also like the last term to attract the return of dollar capital into the stock market rather than investing in real manufacturing, which should not be what Trump wants.
Trump himself said that the tariff policy would be very difficult for the United States, but for the sake of the United States, it has to be so. This may indicate that Trump is well aware that he has a tough road ahead of him. By wanting to release the files on the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. he is also clearly preparing himself for an unpredictable future fate.
During Trump’s last term, I always called him out on his disorganized trumping, this time it feels very different, he seems to be very set in his ways. In particular, it’s admirable to be able to confront and expose the staggering corruption of the US government, its unconscionable moral bankruptcy, and all its nefarious political machinations. Trump may not really be able to change America, but he can obviously contribute to change in the world in a big way, and that seems to be just fine.
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