In many ways this week I think will go down in history as an economic inflection point which revealed the US is now the Emperor wearing no clothes. Trump is like a drug addict who owes his dealers so much money, he’s prepared to throw 288 million Americans under the bus to pay his debt to the oligarchs.
Before I begin, it’s worth remembering that just 30% of eligible voters installed this fiscal terrorist in the White House as a king. This was the election where apathy killed representative democracy in America. Millions came out on the streets yesterday in the ‘Hands Off’ protests to make their voices heard. Cory Booker stood on the Senate floor and gave a passionate 25 hour speech condemning the damage being done by the reckless actions of Trump’s administration. The truth is, Trump doesn’t care and he’s got the Republican Party locked up and cowering in the attic, unwilling to act to stop the irreparable damage he’s doing to a once great nation.
In many ways, there is truth in the claims that Democrats can do little to effect political change in this moment. All they can do is to organise in an attempt to apply a tourniquet to a self inflicted arterial bleed on American democracy. Trump has eviscerated the normal rules of political discourse in a manner never seen in America before. Democracy is on her knees in the political Colosseum, hands tied behind her back, Trump with a sword on her neck as he looks up to Elon Musk sat in the Emperor’s box, looking for a thumbs up or down.
There are so many moving parts in this Shakespearean tragedy that it’s difficult to know where to start on a week that may have changed America forever. The only hope now is that enough Republicans can find a spine to politically dispatch Caesar, but as I write this there are no signs of a Richard Nixon moment. There’s no modern day Goldwater and Rhodes. Power is rarely without corruption, it’s the horse and carriage of American politics. There are always bigger more powerful men in the shadows pulling the strings and driving the real agenda. In this case, while Musk is the out front protagonist of this horror story, he represents a quiet kabal of men who see America as a vehicle to reimagine the global economic order. We are the unfortunates who happen to have been given front row seats to this audacious attempted global power grab.
I could write a book (and maybe I should), about all the moving parts in the shift to their new world. We need to imagine ourselves in Rome at the height of the mighty Roman Empire. We are sat in the cheap seats at the Colosseum as the Emperor is hosting a month of games to demonstrate to the world, just how powerful he and his Empire are. The gays, the trans the immigrants the poor and the disabled are being fed to the lions for entertainment. The people know their place, women have purely a domestic role. The Emperor holds court and bestows favour on those who do his bidding, while crushing anyone who dare challenge him. He sends his envoys to all the corners of the world to warn any potential enemy to fall into line or face economic destruction.
We are living in a moment where one man has upended the international rules based system created after World War 2 by the country now intent on burning it to the ground. Trump’s actions have left world now largely in a state of panic and disarray, not realising that they have much more power to stop him than they think. The coming month will determine whether he succeeds or America is cast out into the global wilderness as a broken forgotten former leader who pushed it’s luck a step too far.
The way I see it, Trump has two objectives;
He can see a huge looming debt crisis that America will be forced to face and he needs to get ahead of the curve. By 2026, the US will need to refinance $9 trillion of debt it originally took out when interest rates were close to 0%. The country has reached the same point many Americans on expiring lower fixed rate mortgages this year. Both are facing having to refinance and will struggle to pass the affordability test. In the next four years, the US will need to refinance $28 trillion. Trump is DESPERATE to reduce interest rates as is evidenced by his social media post just before Jerome Powell gave his statement on Friday. Rest assured, just as Trump has attacked judges he sees as an obstruction to his absolute power, Powell is now in his sights and you should expect Trump to make a power play to seize the ability to set interest rates very soon.
He has ambitions to be a global Emperor, not necessarily over territories, but over wealth. He wants to establish an international protection racket where he uses US power to extort money from trading partners and so called allies. He’s seeking protection money in return for not inflicting economic pain. He sees a path to using the office of the presidency to gain obscene personal wealth by skimming off the top of all US foreign and economic policy. He is the modern day Henry VIII, where no big domestic business deal, or foreign trade will take place without him first collecting his cut. The whole Project 2025 framework has been designed around EVERYTHING flowing through the Oval Office for Trump to cherry pick opportunities.
Courtesy of the New Yorker
America has a new king and it is his intention to embark on ‘prescribed burning’. For those unfamiliar with the term:
To encourage new growth by removing dead vegetation and promoting the germination of seeds and the sprouting of roots, while also reducing the risk of wildfires.
We can deny it all day long that America will never allow this to happen, but here we are. We have arrived at the ‘end of days’ for representative democracy as we know it, and 30% of voters are cheering themselves and everyone else on into economic slavery. As I have said before, America has a serious stupidity problem. The golden age of manufacturing in the US has long gone and is NOT coming back. Offshoring was a product of the American capitalist model. If you look at the roadmap of how it occured, you don’t have to look too hard. Manufacturing is always in search of cheap labor. In America, it shifted from northern more wealthy states, to southern states, to Mexico to China. The US was in constant search of cheap labor and low regulation to boost the economic bottom line.
Tomorrow I’ll explore how the shift in manufacturing to China was the beginning of the US sowing the seeds of their own economic decline. I’ll also look at why what Trump has done with his trade/yield war which is destined to fail, leaving millions of American families in poverty.
Jesus Christ. You really don't have any faith in the American people, do you? As an American who is pissed as shit about what Trump is doing and how his party is cowering like whipped dogs, I'm offended. You seriously think we're going to give up that easily? Yeah, way too many people were apathetic about the 2024 election. But you just assume that we're going to spiral down the toilet and LET that apathy continue? Did you even take note of the millions of Americans who protested yesterday in large cities and small towns across the United States??! We are mad. Very, very mad. We're reaching out to get more and more people involved in organizing against this tyrant who thinks he can juice the US and the world for all it's got. No f-ing way are we going to sit here and watch our country burn down.
Don't believe it? Keep watching. And if you insist on burying us before we're dead, I'll have to unsubscribe. There's telling the truth, and then there's being so cynical that you forget to look for the fast-growing resistance movement. Democrats don't have voting majorities, but we have the people's righteous anger. And we can bury this regime should we choose to.
Watch us.
Excellent. I would only ask you to please be more accurate and refer to the United States as United States versus America, which is an imperialist determination. We are not America. There are many countries in America. And it is an entitled notion to refer to us as such.