TRUMP'S MASTER PLANTrump’s tariff moves aren’t just random chaos or economic ignorance. What looks like a messy trade war is actually part of a bigger, deliberate plan. It’s risky but it’s got logic behind it. The media and neolib WSJ pundits don’t get it because they still believe in this fantasy world of “free markets” where prices just magically balance everything out. Trump? He gets that power, not productivity, decides how the world actually works.
Foreign countries have been accumulating dollars, keeping their own currencies weak, which helps them export more to the US, while American manufacturing declines. These countries take the dollars the US sends them when importing their goods, then use those dollars to buy US government debt. That keeps the dollar high and American exports uncompetitive. Trump sees this not as an “exorbitant privilege” but as burden.
On one hand, he likes the dollar being the global reserve currency because it lets the US government run big deficits and throw weight around with sanctions and military power. But that’s not helping the American heartland. It’s just feeding Wall Street and coastal elites while factory towns rot. And worst of all? He thinks this won’t last. At some point, he believes foreigners will dump the dollar and the whole system will collapse. So he wants to fix it now, and that means blowing it up a bit.
The plan? Use tariffs to shock the system. Not because tariffs will fix the trade deficit directly,
he knows they won’t. But if he slaps high tariffs on imports, he’s betting that foreign central banks will panic and drop their interest rates. That would weaken their currencies even more, which would offset the cost of the tariffs so US consumers wouldn’t notice much. In other words, he wants other countries to pay for the tariffs by weakening their own currencies.That’s just phase one. Phase two is the big play: use those tariffs (and maybe military pressure) to force one-on-one deals. Trump hates multilateral stuff, he wants a hub-and-spokes world where he’s the hub. Each country gets cornered individually. For Asia, he’ll demand they start swapping short-term dollar assets for their own currencies, which strengthens theirs and weakens the dollar. For Europe, he’ll push for ultra-long-term bond swaps, German industry moving to the US, and a whole lot of arms sales.
If a country refuses? F
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