Thursday, 13 March 2025

Trump is on a suicide mission

The New York Times has a good op-ed by one of their columnists, Thomas Friedman, about Trump and what we’re seeing right now in America: A Great Unraveling Is Underway.  It claims that "top officials of our oldest allies" are saying privately they fear the USA is becoming "not just unstable, but actually their enemy."  I suspect some of those top officials are British. The piece notes the only person who gets treated with kid gloves is Putin. But what takes up most space is the false idea planted by Trump that the American economy is "in ruins" and in need of "global tariff shock therapy." By any measure it was in pretty good shape when Trump took over.

There was an article in The Economist last October titled: The envy of the world, singing the praises of the US economy and saying it had "left other rich countries in the dust."

Friedman says: "If you are confused by President Trump’s zigzagging strategies on Ukraine, tariffs, microchips or a host of other issues, it is not your fault. It’s his. What you are seeing is a president who ran for re-election to avoid criminal prosecution and to get revenge on people he falsely accused of stealing the 2020 election. He never had a coherent theory of the biggest trends in the world today and how to best align America with them to thrive in the 21st century. That is not why he ran.

"And once he won, Trump brought back his old obsessions and grievances — with tariffs and Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky and Canada — and staffed his administration with an extraordinary number of fringe ideologues who met one overriding criterion: loyalty first and always to Trump and his whims over and above the Constitution, traditional values of American foreign policy or basic laws of economics.

"The result is what you are seeing today: a crazy cocktail of on-again-off-again tariffs, on-again-off-again assistance for Ukraine, on-again-off-again cuts in government departments and programs both domestic and foreign — conflicting edicts all carried out by cabinet secretaries and staff members who are united by a fear of being tweeted about by Elon Musk or Trump should they deviate from whatever policy line emerged unfiltered in the last five minutes from our Dear Leader’s social media feed."

And on this last point, his cabinet must spend inordinate amounts of time on Truth Social simply because he puts out so much rubbish and the only way of finding out what today’s thinking is in the Supreme Leader’s fevered brain, is to comb through his account. The day before yesterday, we counted 139 ‘Truths’ (as he calls tweets) in one 24-hour period! They come in bursts of 2-3 hours in between meetings, when he’s obviously flicking through Twitter and Truth Social, and sleeping. Think about that.

Most are retweets of others' postings praising him! Just in case you missed it. He follows his most slavish supporters and likes/retweets their effusive and usually stupid comments lavishing praise on him.  He clearly has a planet-sized narcissistic personality disorder and needs constant attention and the effusive admiration of the whole world. 

But the sheer uncertainty and unpredictable knee-jerk on-off-on-again policies that Trump announces hourly are having a profound impact on American businesses, quite apart from the punishing 25% tariffs he's slapped on steel and aluminium, with more on the horizon. This is where the unraveling is going to come. All the indicators like the Dow-Jones and the Nasdaq are now turning south

Abroad, Trump hasn't revealed any sign of a consistent foreign policy philosophy, and to the extend you can discern one at all, it isn't anything he ever campaigned on and it has "no parallel in history."  Freiedman quotes a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, Nahum Barnea, who says: “Trump is an isolationist-imperialist” someone who "wants all the benefits of imperialism, including your territory and your minerals, without sending any U.S. troops or paying any compensation."

It's just off-the-wall crazy.

Friedman includes a quotes from JFK during his inauguration speech in 1961:

 “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty." 

Trump's foreign policy is now the precise opposite. They won't pay anything or bear any burden at all and liberty can go to hell.

In the car industry, the CEO of Ford has said the steel and aluminium tariffs would "devastate the US auto industry." Don't forget that Ford donated $1 mn plus a fleet of trucks for Trump's inauguration and this is their reward. Ford's F150 pick-up, America's top-selling vehicle is said to the biggest potential victim.

It's impossible to figure out what Elon Musk is getting from it all, beyond feeding his own outsized ego.  Sales of Tesla are plummeting like a stone. Australia is the latest to see a massive 71% fall in sales, mirroring the slump in the share price. In November, after Trump’s win, the share price touched $480 now it’s $248, even after it enjoyed a 7.48% jump yesterday, as some misguided investors still think he's a winner. I really don't think he is.

The weird thing is, the huge cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other welfare programmes like SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) will mostly impact the red states in the south that voted most heavily for Trump.

Trump is on a suicide mission. He's damaging his supporters, his voters, his donors, his allies and even those closest to him like Elon Musk. It really is amazing.

And Friedman contrasts Kennedy’s inaugural speech with one from Abraham Lincoln in 1838 where he warned that "the only power that can destroy us is ourselves, by our abuse of our most cherished institutions, and by our abuse of one another."

“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected?” Lincoln asked. “I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.”

"If those words don’t haunt you too, you’re not paying attention."