This wasn’t the piece I had originally planned for today; I’m pushing that to tomorrow. This piece began as a short-form thought based on having read so many ludicrous regime victim posts on X, desperately seeking to shift blame in an attempt to justify the actions of a delusional madman.
Despite the outward denial, Republicans are now off in search of opportunities to shift blame for what they know to be the failure of Trump to address the affordability crisis he created and is in denial about. They are looking at the polls, none of which have moved an inch since the bedtime fairy tale he tried to sell to the American people. I’m afraid we are now living in a world where few in the media are brave enough to speak truth to power.
Those of us who have lived a little, have borne witness to the decline of the ability to speak truth in a media held hostage; we do so with a sad sense of resignation. Thankfully, for now at least, there are spaces like this where telling the uncomfortable truth is not a crime. My fear is that the owners of this platform are on the same team as those moderating the wider media narrative.
When the US became the world's manufacturing powerhouse, becoming exponentially richer each year, it did so by providing Europe with the materials and loans it needed to rebuild bombed nations after WWII. The wealthy elite deemed themselves not to be getting richer fast enough. Annoyingly, they were being forced to share the spoils of their good fortune with a workforce whose cost was perceived to be an impediment to their wealth expansion.
Human labour was their highest overhead and, as such, was inhibiting their bottom line. Under the greed-permissive environment of Reagan, corporate manufacturers decided to throw American workers under the bus and ship their jobs and, in some cases, whole manufacturing plants to China. That was a conscious and deliberate decision by Corporate America in pure pursuit of profit.
This wasn’t a Republican thing; it accelerated under Clinton, too, and marked the advent of organised corporate control of US politics. American corporations became focused solely on profit at the expense of a workforce that had put them in the very position they now held to destroy communities across what became the Rust Belt. They took the position that they were happy to take a flamethrower to US manufacturing to make more money, and Reagan gave them tax cuts to help them on their way.
China’s response was simple. They said ‘Thanks very much’ and used American money to lift 850 million Chinese out of absolute poverty, while building the world's most advanced cities and infrastructure. They were able to do this because they didn’t have greedy shareholders to answer to, and plenty of cheap labour, which the US was exploiting. As a result, China now has the most advanced automated manufacturing systems on the planet and is the world's manufacturing capital. US Politicians didn’t make America great; they simply lit the blue touchpaper on runaway wealth inequality, which has delivered a broken American society that serves the few at the expense of the many. A side effect of this was to make China great again and hook US consumers on cheap Chinese goods. Is China a choirboy in this geopolitical shift? Absolutely not, but that’s for another day.
The American response to China’s exploitation of its economic stupidity? Play the victim and blame the Chinese for their own political failure. They branded them peasants, unable to innovate. Imitators who were flooding the US with cheap copies of their allegedly far better-quality, overpriced goods. American arrogance blinded them to cultural differences in economic thinking. The Chinese were happy to play the oppressed, helpless colonial slaves, while quietly learning from their corporate economic overlords, all the while using their money to build the most advanced manufacturing juggernaut in history.
In Xi Jinping's eyes, no one is more arrogant than Donald J. Trump, and he used Trump’s first term to understand how he operates as president. Xi intimately understood corruption in government, having spent years tackling it in China. When Trump was elected again, China was ready; it had already gamed out what he might try, and, true to form, Trump did exactly as anticipated. He attempted to crush the Chinese economy by making access to the US market prohibitively expensive.
He attempted to use tariffs to choke off Chinese progress and innovation, as had presidents before him. This was not alien to the Chinese; they had been subjected to this attempt to throttle economic and technological progress for years. Xi didn’t see this as a negative; it was proof to him that the US could simply not keep pace with Chinese progress because the greed of the shareholder class was stifling domestic innovation. Xi knew that while there was still a way to go, they had already laid the foundations to beat America at its own game. All he had to do was wait.
What was truly telling is that Trump didn’t go to corporate shareholders to raise money to pressure China; he decided instead to tax Americans to do it. There will be those who say he did raise taxes on corporate importers. But he did so knowing they would simply pass the costs on to everyday Americans. These are now the same companies that are suing Trump over his tariffs, which SCOTUS declared illegal, and whose costs they have largely already passed on to American families. Yet another example of ‘double dipping’ at the expense of hard-working Americans. Billions for me and nought for thee, I’m afraid.
Meanwhile, the fairy tale he sold to those gullible enough to believe was that China was paying the tariffs. It’s astounding to me that they swallow the line that there is no affordability crisis, while at the same time, they’re handing over real money for more expensive everyday basics. It’s yet another example of Trump’s persistent ‘don’t believe your own lying eyes’ narrative. The grocery till receipt and bank balance of his victims seem not to have received the memo.
The cult is being bombarded with daily reinforcement messaging that the US is bringing in so much money, and Trump is struggling to know what to do with it after he’s taken his personal cut. They are told it’s all about reducing the trade deficit and paying off the national debt, while preparing the ground for nobody to pay income tax. The latter is, of course, nonsense. The trade deficit stood at $901.5 billion at the end of 2025, just $2 billion less than in 2024, and still remains the highest since 1960. Now, call me old-fashioned, but in the big scheme of things, a $2 billion reduction is little more than a rounding error.
Meanwhile, during the same period, the national debt has risen to nearly $39 trillion, so not only has he not reduced the trade deficit, he’s increased the national debt by an estimated $2.25 trillion. It’s like a scene from an Oliver and Hardy film as the American people scream, “That’s another fine mess you’ve got us into, Mr President.” Despite everything he claims to have achieved, America is poorer for his economic incompetence. As he advocates for ‘back to the future’ when it comes to power generation, China has already begun the shift away from fossil fuel import dependency, with the objective of electrifying the nation using low-cost renewable and next-generation nuclear energy. This is all baked into its long-term planning, something America would recognise if it slapped them in the face.
For all the threats and all the action, China now has a $1.2 trillion trade SURPLUS, and remains the manufacturing capital of the world. It has infrastructure across Africa, Europe and South America. It controls 80% of global rare-earth processing while holding almost $700 billion in U.S. sovereign debt. That’s before we talk about leading the world in nuclear technology and cheap renewable energy, as well as outpacing US energy generation by a factor of two. Did I mention their race to dominate the global AI Tech Stack and the robotics space? Their entire economic strategy is based on reducing reliance on US technology, as it drives domestic AI innovation and offers it globally as open-source technology, competing with the US.
This is no longer about China playing catch-up; it’s the rest of the world being forced to keep up with them. While US companies chase profit by controlling their AI stacks, China is playing a different game, focused on low-cost, low-power-consumption models that are consistently breaking benchmarks set by US technology. While corporate America seeks to throw millions more American workers under the bus to deliver a better bottom line and recoup the outsized investment in US models, the Chinese have no shareholders to serve, so they can work on better integrating it into society.
This is why companies like Unitree and Agibot are spiking Western interest in Chinese robotics. Having been interested in this space for some time, I’ve been watching the parallel development in the humanoid robot space. US-based Boston Dynamics was long regarded as the leader in this field. However, these new Chinese companies seem to be ahead of the game, as Elon Musk has openly admitted, bringing his own robots to market this year. If you’d like a little more information on Chinese Robotics, take a look at this piece by Maya Yang, in The Guardian on February 18th 2025.
The bottom line is, don’t blame China for the most catastrophic US economic fuck up in history. As a result of Trump’s short-sighted, imbecilic policies, America is far from hot; it’s simply a legend in its own lunch break. His obsession with power and stuffing his own pockets with money is breaking America and diminishing its global influence. The American people deserve better, and above all, deserve to know the truth, that this corrupt regime is NOT winning on anything except economic and geopolitical incompetence, at which they have now become world champions.
Trump’s delusional belief that the U.S. is respected is frankly embarrassing. The world is laughing, knowing that it is quietly rewiring trade and security ties in the background. In a decade, the U.S. may well face irrelevance in a new world order, where it’s no longer calling the shots. Don’t be fooled by the struggles of US trading partners scrambling to adjust to Trump’s daily tantrums. The global trading models are being rewritten to reduce dependence on the US. Canada is now part of a new coalition with a vision to revitalise the UK Commonwealth and encourage closer relationships with the EU. Little does Trump know about the sleeping giant he’s unwittingly awakened.
His tariff-for-leverage playbook has been defanged by the US Supreme Court; regardless of what he might be screaming on the international stage, he faces increased challenges in extorting trading partners going forward, which will significantly weaken his position. To be frank, nobody views Trump as the threat he was anymore, because you can only listen to his nonsense for so long before it becomes meaningless background noise. The markets factor in his madness as do world leaders.
He now faces a situation where he has to decide whether to roll the dice on a performative war with Iran, believing that he can do another Venezuela. Once again, arrogance is blinding him to the real risk he is taking. There is much speculation about China supplying anti-ship missiles to Iran. In a report by John Irish, Parisa Hafezi and Gavin Finch, in Reuters on February 24th 2026, it is noted:
Iran is close to a deal with China to purchase anti‑ship cruise missiles, according to six people with knowledge of the negotiations, just as the United States deploys a vast naval force near the Iranian coast ahead of possible strikes on the Islamic Republic.
This relates to the sale of Chinese‑made CM‑302 supersonic anti-ship missiles. The report continues:
The supersonic missiles have a range of about 290 kilometres and are designed to evade shipborne defences by flying low and fast
I can tell you without fear of contradiction that there is nothing the Chinese would like to see more than the sinking of a US aircraft carrier. Not only would it be devastating for the US, but it would also signal that Chinese weapons are able to compete in an active battlespace with the US, and that is propaganda gold.
Iran is not Venezuela, Colombia or Cuba. It won’t matter to the Chinese if the US obliterates Iran if one of its weapons sinks a carrier, and make no mistake, the carriers will be the targets.
Empires rise and fall, as do reserve currencies. China can smell blood in the water, and if it’s one thing China excels at, it’s playing the long game. It doesn’t have to worry about four-year election cycles or a fickle voting public. It can wait as long as it takes to drain the economic lifeblood from a nation it sees as eating itself alive.
Xi is more than happy to wait for Trump to faceplant. He’s in no rush; China has global infrastructure in place, the world’s most advanced manufacturing and an AI-capable economy with a pipeline of highly educated graduates. It has a digital currency already deployed across its ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ that facilitates instant payment transactions. The system has already been deployed and successfully tested.
If you would like to read more about the threat the US faces from the digital yuan, take a moment to read this piece by Alisha Chhangani from The Atlantic Council on January 15th, 2025. In it, she notes:
China’s digital yuan (the e-CNY) has grown over 800% since 2023, becoming the world’s largest live central bank digital currency experiment, with cumulative transaction value exceeding $2.3 trillion by late 2025.
Meanwhile, Project mBridge transaction volume has surged to $55.49 billion, a 2,500-fold increase over early-2022 pilots, with the e-CNY making up over 95% of total settlement volume.
You should take a moment to read Alisha’s full piece, because it’s important in the context of Trump’s fantasy, where the US rules the world. It’s all in his tiny, incoherent mind, where sentence structure often breaks down between brain and mouth. The days of America dictating the future are receding. The change will not happen overnight, and China is fine with that. They’re prepared to wait as long as it takes for the U.S. to slowly self-suffocate.
The sad thing is, because of Trump and his treatment of longstanding allies, nobody will lift a finger to help the U.S. without the kind of concessions that will further diminish American standing on the world stage. If Democrats think it just needs a change of government to make things better, those days are long gone. It will take a generation to repair the damage done by Mad King Don. People don’t easily forget extortion attempts, arrogant posturing, and bullying.
We are at a true inflexion point, sadly, it’s not one recognised by the delusional convicted criminal in the White House.
Excellent article; thank you
Domestic clothing manufacturing that was once done in this country with pride, has all but been shifted to overseas cheap labor. How about .25 cent per hour labor in Ethiopia building Nike shoes, for instance? In just my own lifetime, home sewing has gone from an essential home skill to have to virtually no one having these skills anymore!