I spent the day conducting a detailed, in-depth analysis of global economics, as it’s easy to focus solely on the US and the tangled web of information. It’s a particularly challenging time for those of us who are seeking the truth. The US administration has made it so difficult to apply a truth filter to the tsunami of half-truths, manipulated truths and outright lies.
Trump has learned that the best way to hide failure is to keep the narrative constantly moving he’s like political tuna, he must continuously change the narrative, because, unlike an honest leader, he has to pump out lies to stay alive politically; Just as tuna rely on "ram ventilation" by swimming with their mouths open, forcing water flow to extract oxygen to sustain life. Trump feeds an endless stream of lies, misinformation and misdirection to extract the political oxygen he needs to survive.
The level to which the narrative has descended has never been better highlighted than with ‘escalatorgate’ when Trump was outraged at the escalator at the UN stopping as he got on. It, along with an alleged broken teleprompter, became an international incident for the MAGA cult, as Trump clearly thought a trip assassin was at work. The blue touchpaper was well and truly lit as Karolyin’ Leavitt stated angrily:
"If we find that these were UN and staffers who were purposefully trying to trip up, literally trip up the president and the first lady of the United States, well, there better be accountability for those people. And I will personally see to it,"
Fox Entertainment academic giant Jesse Watters even went so far as to suggest the building should be "destroyed". I want to think that was a joke, but I honestly don’t know anymore. It turns out that his own videographer accidentally triggered the escalator stop mechanism at the top of the escalator, and the White House was responsible for operating the teleprompter, not the UN. However, let’s not let that get in the way of creating a diplomatic incident, though, for his base.
There is no question that Trump has mastered the art of taking a single grain of truth and wrapping it up in a big ball of lies, and it was on full display for his address to the UN General Assembly. He did rightly point out that Europe should stop buying oil from Russia. For me, this has long been hypocrisy on the part of the EU, which, by buying oil, is funding the war effort against Ukraine. I do, of course, understand that it takes time to re-source reliable supplies, etc., but it’s taking too long, and Europe, without question, needs to do much better.
The problem with a 27-nation trading block is that achieving unanimity on such matters is very difficult and very time-consuming. They don’t have the luxury of having a dictator like Trump. For example, Hungarian and Slovakian infrastructure is explicitly designed to refine Russian crude oil. They receive around 100,000 barrels of oil a day from Russia, and there is no indication that they intend to cut off that supply, particularly since they are receiving it at a discounted price. This allows Trump the cover not to apply the required additional sanctions on Russia.
He was also right in his first term when he accused European NATO allies of not paying their fair share of required defence spending. I applauded him for that at the time, and it did have the desired effect. To be clear, if Trump is correct in an assertion, I will always support him; however, unfortunately, as we saw yesterday, 95% of the time, he is entirely wrong and reverts to comedy politics, then follows the frankly ludicrous cries of ‘He’s right, he just tells it as it is, ’ when nothing could be further from the truth.
Patrick Wintour, in a piece in The Guardian today, made some excellent points. He opened with a pretty profound statement:
Such is the gravitational pull cast by Donald Trump and the US economy that the politics of the other 192 countries that make up the United Nations are rapidly being reduced to one long discussion about how to relate to, and challenge this ever darker and weirder presidency.
I sat and watched the address, peering through my fingers that covered my face, so cringe was the whole affair. From the effusive self-praise to the chastising of the UN to the lectures given to member states, I felt deeply embarrassed for the many Americans, who I know felt the same. It is a tragedy for me to see a convicted felon who so often struggles with basic sentence construction addressing a world audience with so little respect for the truth and, more importantly, his audience. He vomited a litany of lies and misinformation that was truly breathtaking.
He is a man so drunk on power that he genuinely believes he rules the world when nothing could be further from the truth. I certainly don’t intend to fact-check his speech, because I don’t have the patience to write that much today, but I have linked the CNN fact-check piece by the well-respected Daniel Dale. It’s easier to list the factual statements he made, like:
“Thank you very much, I really appreciate it. And I don’t mind making this speech with a teleprompter because the teleprompter is not working.”
You can find the full transcript of the lies and disinformation here. I don’t think anyone would dispute that he inherited the strongest economy in the world, and there is no question that when you start abducting people from the streets and shipping them off to foreign concentration camps, that is definitely going to prove a deterrent at the border, so there’s no argument on that front. Equally, there is nothing like mass deportation to make those seeking refuge in the US think again. I can agree that the US has the strongest military in the world, though it hasn’t been tested in recent times, aside from an air assault on Iran and blowing up some alleged drug boats. As for having the strongest friendships, I think there may need to be a rethink there, unless we are taking Stockholm syndrome into account.
If you want to waste an hour of your life listening to the tsunami of misrepresentations, half-truths, and outright lies, be my guest, but there is one clear takeaway from a speech that will go down in infamy: he impressed NOBODY with anything other than the US is a bully who will do nothing unless there is a buck in it for him. As for Marco Rubio’s claim that it was an ‘incredible speech’, it is a true testament to his sycophancy. He knows better, but when Trump says, ‘whose your daddy now, Marco?’ the answer is always ‘You, sir—no need to leave a tip on the nightstand’.
I think the Indonesian president, Prabowo Subianto, captured the mood best following Trump’s lecture when he stated:
“Might cannot be right; right must be right. No one country can bully the whole of the human family. We may be weak individually, but the sense of oppression and injustice will unite us into a strong force that will overcome this injustice.”
Before Trump spoke, the president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, made a pretty on-point statement when he said, without referring to the US:
“…..We are witnessing the constellation of an international order marked by repeated concessions to power play. Attacks on sovereignty, arbitrary sanctions and unilateral interventions are becoming the rule.
There is a clear parallel between multilateralism’s crisis and the weakening of democracy. Authoritarianism is strengthened when we fail to act in the face of arbitrary acts when international society falters in defending peace and sovereignty. Anti-democratic forces are trying to subjugate institutions and stifle freedoms. They worship finance. They praise ignorance, and act as physical and digital militias and restrict the press,”
UN Secretary General, António Guterres, soberingly stated:
“Multipolarity without effective multilateral institutions courts chaos – as Europe learned the hard way resulting in world war one,”
The reason that the international context is important is that the rest of the world has had to quickly come to the realisation that they put all their eggs in one basket when it came to crowning the US the leader of the free world decades ago. This leverage has not escaped Trump, because he knows that disconnecting from the longstanding reliance on US leadership takes a long time, and that is to his advantage. I suspect Trump would be happy to lead the world, but only on his terms.
Returning to Patrick Wintour’s piece in The Guardian, he correctly noted that any coordinated effort to resist Trump’s aggression presents a significant challenge. He notes in conclusion:
.. these global alliances are still in their infancy and ill-coordinated.
The greater danger is that each nation-state, driven by internal politics and assessments of their economic strength, will make their own decisions on how to combat, or bow to American power.
In making that decision, each country will know the strength of Trump’s shakedown diplomacy. By mixing trade, security, or immigration into one negotiation, Trump maximises his leverage – and however much he is reviled, it is a brave country that resists.
The bottom line is that the world lives in fear of Trump because he is using decades of encouraging reliance on the US as a weapon to extort them, and this is a shock to the global order. In my humble opinion, the world will be left with no choice but to submit to him or fight an economic war with the biggest economy in the world. As I have said many, many times, if a bully comes for your lunch money today and you give it to him, he’ll be back tomorrow for more. He reminds me so much of Idi Amin. Both mentally unstable narcissists
World leaders, excluding BRICS nations, must form a broader alliance with the sole purpose of addressing the economic threats emanating from the US. I think Mark Carney should take a lead role in bringing together a coalition of finance ministers from this alliance to coordinate a collective response to counter the threat posed by Trump’s economic assault on its once-trusted trading partners. He is convinced nobody dares take him on. Aside from this collective group, the one elephant in the room he’s underestimating is China.
His address at the UN was explicitly designed to shock. He wanted to seize the narrative from the start, so nobody would look behind the economic curtain, where all the real panic is currently unfolding. Some unusual developments are occurring that we should closely monitor. Not least of which is Nvidia investing $100 billion in OpenAI to finance the purchase of 4-5 million Nvidia AI chips. Is that not like your daughter marrying her brother?
As the Economist reported on September 22nd :
One thing is clear about the announcement on September 22nd that Nvidia may invest up to $100bn in OpenAI in order to help the maker of ChatGPT buy 4m-5m of Nvidia’s artificial-intelligence (AI) chips. Silicon Valley is becoming more incestuous than ever.
Does this not sound eerily like what the banks did in 2008 with credit default swaps? The report goes on:
… It makes today’s AI-driven stockmarket rally increasingly dependent on the intertwined fortunes of the world’s most valuable firm and America’s biggest private tech firm. For good measure, OpenAI is also deeply entangled with Microsoft, the world’s second-richest firm.
I have to tell you, something does not feel right to me. But only time will tell. Nvidia is now investing in both Intel and OpenAI to the tune of $115 billion in 2025. As things stand, a handful of tech companies are propping up the stock market, and the top 10% of earners are driving 49% of consumer spending. Now, call me old-fashioned, but if the AI bubble bursts, then what?
China has effectively banned the sale of Nvidia’s AI chips specifically designed for the Chinese market, which, of course, means that Nvidia can no longer rely on Chinese chip sales to bolster its bottom line. Amidst slowing job numbers, which are expected to worsen this month, and rising inflation, estimated to worsen in Q4 as the full impact of tariffs takes effect, a storm appears to be on the horizon. The problem is, Trump will do everything to hide the truth, and that is really dangerous.
The administration is busy looking for money down the back of the couch, which I believe is driving his change of heart on Ukraine. He now says they could take all their territory back, but he’s not going to donate any military aid; NATO will have to buy it from the US to hand it on to Ukraine. I’m sure Zelenskyy will be more than happy to get the weapons, but this is not just about weapons; it’s about manpower. It’s an impossible situation, all fueled by the global chaos Trump is sowing. I can tell you now, he has no intention of honouring Article 5 should it be invoked by one of the smaller NATO members.
Every day it’s the same, trying to find a path to the truth, it’s exhausting, and as soon as you think you have found an angle on something, Trump changes his mind, and you are back to square one. More moving parts are added to the puzzle each day. All I would say to you is that his magic act can’t go on forever, and my question is, where will it leave you if the whole deck of cards collapse?
Putting everything aside for a moment, you have to ask yourself, ‘Can I stand another 3 years of this?’ If not, then the only option open is to take a lead from the ABC boycott and use your spending power to effect change. There are those who say the boycott only partially worked because of Sinclair and Nexstar still refusing to air Jimmy Kimmel on 66 affiliates owned by these two media companies. This does not invalidate the boycott, as it clearly forced Disney to back down. What it does prove is the power that the right has over the media, and that should be a concern to everyone.
The boycott should merely serve to prove that economic disengagement DOES WORK. If this were to expand, I can guarantee that, were it widespread enough, it could bring the government to its knees if people only did it for a month. The problem is that there is no appetite to do this, so nothing will change, I’m afraid. There is no gain without pain. The American people have the power; they have proved that this week. If they stop spending on all but essentials, Trump becomes a passenger and is no longer able to exert his influence. It’s not a criminal offence to stop spending. It requires no banners, no risk of right-wing agitators or opportunistic looters providing Trump with an opportunity to deploy his bully boys. It is the perfect people-driven, bloodless coup.
I 100% agree with you about the economic power of the people. Sadly, we "lazy Americans" have become so spoiled that we can no longer distinguish WANT from NEED. So when we're urged to stick to buying only the "essentials", we think ALL of it is essential. We're getting to a place where many Americans will not be able to afford anything but the essentials and many more won't even be able to afford the basic essentials. And I often wonder what will the Oligarchs do when they can squeeze not one more drop from the American people. 🤔
Thank you so much for this excellent report! I appreciate the comments you put in from other world leaders.