Against the Based-Retard Theory of Trumpism
TLDR: Trump is neither a useful idiot nor just an idiot.
Many anons here have subscribed to what I call a based retard theory of Trumpism. That Trump is, through his incompetence, unintentionally accelerating the demise of the western-led capitalist world order.
It is obvious to everyone that the western-led international order is indeed fracturing, and quite possibly, ending or beginning to end. However, the question is, why, and what will replace it?
According to liberals, since world war 2, the US has (for more or less selfless reasons) promoted a “rules based, international order” based on liberal democracy, market (capitalist) economies and “international law”. This, according to liberals, has allowed the world to avoid the sorts of nationalism, mercantilism which led to conflicts such as world war one and world war two in favor of peace and global prosperity.
People on the left (especially far left) have often disagreed with this view for several reasons. One, they point out that the United States has often ignored so-called international law in pursuit of their own interests while using it to punish other, smaller nations. That IMF loans often came with conditions which for example incentivized or coerced countries into privatizing and liberalizing parts of their economy. Or were in other ways exploitative. That in practice, rich nations took advantaged of poorer ones, and the rule of markets simply became a proxy for the rule of western (especially US) capital, and a way to launder neocolonial exploitation.
However, in the years since the end of the Cold War, alternative economic powers have risen, such as the so-called “BRICS” nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). The rise of BRICS, especially China in particular, has meant that the rule of markets is no longer is synonymous with the rule of western corporations.
The reason liberals are confused is because they are people who have drunk the neoliberal cool aid and unironically believe that the spread of market based economies and their integration into the global trade system is a positive sum game that benefitted all nations, when in reality it primarily benefitted the west at the expense of the third world sweatshop-slave.
Until recently.
Now that other economies such as China have begun to not only dominate international trade but build up high value added service sectors in industries like Tech and Finance (in some cases, like AI, rivaling or even surpassing the US), the US finds that the international world order mythology has outlived it’s usefulness. Trumpism is simply western/US Capital discarding the mask. So US leaders realize that “the jig is up” – that multipolarity can no longer be fought and the US will no longer be a globe spanning empire. So they are pivoting to make the US into a regional power in the Americas/Western Hemisphere. Thus explaining Trump’s pivot to Panama, Greenland, and Canada – its the “donroe doctrine”. The US will be more like it was in the 19th century and pre ww1 20th century – an explicitly imperialist regional power which treats the western hemisphere as its “sphere of influence”.
Trump is not as liberals think, a Russian agent, nor is he as some here think, an irrational actor dismantling empire out of sheer stupidity. Trumpism is geopolitically rational. Rather than the cause of the decline of US Hegemony, it is actually a relatively rational reaction and adaptation TO the decline of unipolar US Hegemony. Whether it will be successful is a whole other question.
I preface this with admiting that I am not a communist but prefer conversation with you guys because, as your post showed, you tend to be smart.
>>2172756>“BRICS” nationsThe term came from a Goldman-Sachs employee who used the acronym to suggest countries to invest in.
I do not even think that South Africa was in the original acronym due to how stagnant and unstable it has been over the past twenty years.
But, yes, American unipolarity has also been declining for twenty years, and even Rubio, who has submitted himself to Trump after a cucking from Musk, recognizes this. I would even say that Obama recognized this with how withheld he was against Russia in contrast to his Middle-East escapades.
You implied this, but the only country that poses an actual threat to American hegemony is China, which is why Trump has yielded little ground in the Pacific, even though he has also caused Japan to shockingly drift to its old enemy.
I agree with your point that Trump does recognize what I will call "imperial decoupling" as a valid strategy but still struggle to guess how serious he is about the annexation of Canada and Greenland and Gaza; he clarified for each that he is absolutely serious, but these are such absurd suggestions that I struggle to understand how anyone can think of, less so support, them.
>>2172756Trump is a based retard, who:
1) tries to solve US deficit problem through decreasing govt spending. The very idea that an American president can actually try to decrease debt (despite the fact that Biden was trying to do so as well) sounds preposterous to fiatbugs
2) also, to profit through tariffs and bullying and seizing property such as Greenland or Panama or Canada. Latest round of tariffs - this time against EU - is just such an example. Notice how euroids raged at him with sudden calls for Euros' own NATO! arming Ukraine to the bitter end!
3) proclaims democrat traditional businesses ineffective and dissolves them with DOGE. Both to save money and to dunk on political enemies
4) personally profit while doing so, ala how Musk is promoting his shit while cutting inefficiencies elsewhere.
>>2172756Trump can be retarded and acting willfully maliciously at the same time.
There's this popular idea that evil people are automatically smart. It's the exact opposite in the vast majority of cases. Usually smart people are more kind and stupid people are more vicious. There are a handful of intelligent psychopaths out there working to enrich themselves but the keyword is handful, there's a lot of people who'd like to THINK they're evil geniuses but in reality fall under Dunning-Kruger and have only a mediocre intellect. Elon Musk for example, he pretends to be a polymath who knows everything about engineering, science, etc, but if you pay attention to what he says he clearly knows nothing about any of these topics. A lot of these powerful evil men look like total idiots when they speak in public and so cater their message to people who are even dumber than they are. Near-sighted men leading the blind.
The "evil genius" rhetoric plays into the idea, consciously or not, that we live in a meritocracy. "Yes they might be bad people, but they're SMART people". It's copium. They are where they are because of capital, not intelligence.
>>2172756This has been said for a long time… I remember in the 2010s a video about Trump and BoJo that called out their stupid oaf act as just another way to make people think they're harmless, or acting chaotically, etc.
Trump has denied that he has any commitment to the Heritage Foundation's program, but as soon as he was elected he faithfully implemented a majority of their goals. Vance also forewarded a book by the HF president.
If you look at Trump's negotiating tactics you see the same thing. He puts pressure then backs off when he gets what he wants. You can't take any statement or even move of his at face value. If you want to know what he will do, read Rand Corp and Heritage Foundation documents. Those are who run things. Like with the struggle against China, every single president has acted in line with Rand Corp interpretation of the situation, steadily escalating. The rhetoric of some of Trump's team is very hawkish on China and has made that a point of contrast with Biden/Harris - but we need to understand that the hawkishness would been present in the next administration simply because time has passed and the situation has developed. Same with "softness" towards "authoritarian countries". He does that while also increasing sanctions, calling drone strike assassinations and coups, and so on. His position is as a distraction. The bourgeoisie is in control. Their think tanks, PACs, etc. are running the show. The only difference between Trump and other politicians is that he doesn't distract from this fact by looking put together and in charge, he distracts with chaos, lies, and looking like a retard. Anyways, sadly this has been noted for a long time, but the fed psyop'ed retards on leftypol have permanent brain damage and won't ever catch up.
Also the USAID stuff is not him dismantling anything important for imperialism, some of it is going to DoD, and the rest was really just needed to counter the soviet union. It has long outlived its necessity. It even had backlash then. So it makes sense that the supporters of brazen imperialism want to get rid of it. This isn't new or random >>2172794This.
>>2172789>>2172756I don't know the right term for it, but I've noticed a lot of you, especially that write these long ass pontificating posts, you kind of build a narrative and work your way from there. More specifically your narratives are about being counter-to some narrative you perceive as existing. So you OP see the narrative that BRICS is some great anti-Western force and then you see some factoid on wikipedia:
>the original concept of BRICS was thought up by a Goldman Sachs guy who didn't include SA in its pitchWell like:
>>2172794 said, BRICS is a real organization with SA as a founding member and many other members as well now. Now India and Indonesia, which are larger economies, are also BRICS nations. That's really all the top economies outside of the Western, or pseudo-Western(like the Arab states) countries.
>>2172907>>2172756>This has been said for a long time… I remember in the 2010s a video about Trump and BoJo that called out their stupid oaf act as just another way to make people think they're harmless, or acting chaotically, etc.Trump isn't like BoJo. Trump is legitimately like dumb dumb. Like total rube-tier dumb. He misuses words and terms and gets things factually wrong all the time, but since he's managed to be successful in spite of it, he never feels the need to learn from his many mistakes.
I think the best way I've ever described Trump, and I haven't seen it enough or at all even, is if you want to understand Trump, think of like the average Fox News viewer. Think about the intellectual integrity that the average Fox News watcher has. They're not interested in being, informed, smart, or whatever, they like being emotionally manipulated, getting on bandwagons with false narratives(even if some part of them know's it's false, look at Vance, someone that actually does want to present himself as a Yale educated intellectual, try to explain the behavior he participated in intellectually "Who cares if the Haitians eating cats and dogs is true, the problem is it FEELS LIKE it could be true, and that's the scary part isn't it?) So these people just have vague, general, baseless ideas of how things should be and should change, and they just follow their gut instinct about it. Doesn't have to make sense, but it at the same time almost seem semi-coherent. Another example is look at the stories about all those federal workers who got DOGEd who were like "What the fuck? Why did you lay me off? I voted for you to clean up the federal government by firing all those useless leeches! Not me! I'm one of the hard working federal workers!"
>>2173237>ey're not interested in being, informed, smart, or whatever, they like being emotionally manipulated, getting on bandwagons with false narratives(even if some part of them know's it's false, look at Vance, someone that actually does want to present himself as a Yale educated intellectual, try to explain the behavior he participated in intellectually "Who cares if the Haitians eating cats and dogs is true, the problem is it FEELS LIKE it could be true, and that's the scary part isn't it?) Oh man, got another recent example. Musk tweeted about the "condoms for Hamas" thing, was called out for it clearly by a reporter during that oval office press conference with his son, then he, backed into a corner, was like,
>"Ok, so that was total bullshit, I retweeted it by mistake, sometimes I'm going to make mistakes, I'm human, and you should call me out for it when I say bullshit, but the work I'm doing is like 95% true and good even if 5% of the time I accidentally say bullshit and I'm glad you are here to correct me, but that shouldn't make me hesitant to do what I'm doing just because sometimes I'm saying lies."Meanwhile Trump is still repeating the condoms for Hamas line.
>>2173237>>2173252>they just follow their gut instinct about it. This is what leads Trump to be shocking or seem 5D chess, or genius or whatever. Sometimes your gut instinct is just right, and whatever intellectual arguments are wrong. Sometimes someone is just trying to fuck you, and you know it, it doesn't matter what kind of spurious arguments they come up with, doesn't matter trying to debunk every one they generate, because you understand what their intention is towards you instinctual. It's like the wise fool thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wise_foolBut his instincts are often just wrong and also last time he allowed himself to be browbeaten by the accumulated wisdom and intellect of the neocons. But it seems this time his gang is putting them in their place.
>>2173221True.
>>2173314It's not that he's an idiot. The way I see it, the democrats and their bourgeois supporters have one strategy, and the repubs have another. Both are doomed for different reasons, but they're made way less effective because they're not unified in strategy. Anyone with half a brain can agree with that for the continued existence of the US empire, putting Russia into a corner where it's forced to side with China was a mistake.
>>2172907>If you look at Trump's negotiating tactics you see the same thing. He puts pressure then backs off when he gets what he wants. You can't take any statement or even move of his at face value. If you want to know what he will do, read Rand Corp and Heritage Foundation documents.Yeah. My impression of Trump is that he has a kind of cunning but it's of a certain dick-move businessman type with a variety of tricks from 1970s how-to business books. There was a lot of this stuff that preached about being a "power player," down to really petty stuff like arranging furniture in such a way, where to sit during a meeting, or spreading your papers out on a desk to communicate alpha dominance. Also various "crazy" negotiating tricks where Trump starts out with a really aggressive position.
It's like buying a car. On my current one, I pulled an act where I got angry with the price offered and stormed out of the dealership and huffed around the parking lot until the salesman chased me and agreed to knock $500 off. Some bad theatre saved me $500.
Also works if you want to squelch on a deal without getting sued, or dealing with corporate raiders, slash-and-burn private equity stuff. So businesses will acquire investors, but the more money the investors put in, the more control they will want or will try to secure, because they want to gain control so they can fire everybody and sell off assets to increase the company's paper value to flip for a profit. This destroys the company but they make money. But businessmen may want to bilk the investors out of their money and then get rid of them before they can seize control. What Trump and his people were doing with Zelensky reminded me of those tactics, like just picking a fight and disrespecting the other party to frustrate them so they just stop investing (you already got the money you wanted out of them), although it's a reverse situation here as Zelensky wants the U.S. to give monies.
>The only difference between Trump and other politicians is that he doesn't distract from this fact by looking put together and in charge, he distracts with chaos, lies, and looking like a retard. Anyways, sadly this has been noted for a long time, but the fed psyop'ed retards on leftypol have permanent brain damage and won't ever catch up.I think a lot of their moves like cutting USAID is really about "getting down to business" and doing what America has always done but "without any of the bullshit." Or at least that's how I think these guys in the administration probably see it.
Wall Street can’t stop talking about the ‘Mar-a-Lago Accord’. Here’s how the currency deal would work.
Essentially, the deal would seek to recruit — or strong-arm by dangling access to American markets, or the American security umbrella — America’s biggest trading partners and creditors into an arrangement that would see them work in concert to weaken the U.S. dollar, lower American borrowing costs and encourage more manufacturing-related investment in the U.S. — all while preserving the greenback’s primacy on the international stage.
As Miran explained in a paper published in November, the U.S. dollar’s reserve status comes with pros and cons.
One of the drawbacks is that it causes the greenback to be perpetually overvalued by boosting demand for reserve assets like U.S. debt.
There are benefits, too. But as U.S. economic dominance wanes, the costs associated with this status grow increasingly steep, Miran said. This is what the Mar-a-Lago Accord would look to solve.
There is also another complicating factor: Tariffs have already been enacted by the Trump administration, which has touted them as a source of revenue and a tool for helping to boost U.S. manufacturing.
But raising tariffs also tends to cause a currency to strengthen. Rather than encouraging more companies to manufacture goods in the U.S., this could have the opposite effect.
To accomplish the delicate balancing act of engineering a weaker dollar without driving up U.S. borrowing costs, Miran, in his paper, turned to an idea first proposed by Zoltan Pozsar, the former Credit Suisse markets guru, who published a paper about the Mar-a-Lago Accord back in June.
As part of the deal, U.S. creditors would agree to swap U.S. bonds held by their central banks for 100-year nontradeable “century bonds.” Otherwise, Washington could threaten to push them out from under the U.S. security umbrella.
“Such a Mar-a-Lago Accord gives form to a 21st-century version of a multilateral currency agreement. President Trump will want foreigners to help pay for the security zone provided by the United States,” Miran said in his paper.
“A reduction in the value of the dollar helps create manufacturing jobs in America and reallocates aggregate demand from the rest of the world to the U.S.,” he added. “The term-out of reserve debt helps prevent financial-market volatility and the economic damage that would ensue. Multiple goals are accomplished with one agreement.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/wall-street-cant-stop-talking-about-the-mar-a-lago-accord-heres-how-the-currency-deal-would-work-f8fbbda0>>2173210I think it was obvious by then lmao. if the US was able to impose the same plaza accords to china, it would do so, for similar reasons. Trump is imposing tariffs on allies for two reasons that have less to do with cheap industrial outputs, and more to do with two reasons:
1) trump looks like a strongman by dominating political actors he thinks he has leverage against
2) it makes trump LOOK protectionist but without strict capital controls and without taking the reigns of industry, reindustrialization is a pipedream. tariffs bring capital to the US, which appreciates the US dollar, which makes foreign investment MORE appealing as they lose parity vs USD, which leads to increased trade deficit anyway. you will see industry moving to countries that escaped trump's eye, like vietnam. it's self-sabotaging in the long run.
3) it allows trump to finance tax cuts to the wealthy
Trump's policies are painful for abroad, but they're ultimately self-defeating, he's a based retard through and through who doesn't understand balance of payment, and if he strains his position enough, he'll start making nations default and the world's biggest creditor will look more like the world's biggest bagholder.
>>2182980Which is precisely what that faggot manlet Putler wanted in the first place.
I genuinely don't know what this retarded ass war was all about.
>>2183089>I genuinely don't know what this retarded ass war was all about.libs wanted to expand NATO for the 9th time since 1991, but this time it was into a really big country that is very easy to invade Russia through, furthermore a country that is only a 30 minute nuclear launch distance from Moscow. This triggered Russia greatly because it was considered the biggest of red lines. This came after CIA-backed Euromaidan coup in 2014 triggered a civil war in Ukraine. Russia couldn't tolerate continued destabilization of the countries bordering them, or the admittance of Ukraine into NATO, so they did a full scale invasion and got stuck in a quagmire. It is very similar to the Afghanistan shit in the 80s with the soviets. People only see what Russia (or in that case, USSR) did (invasion) and not the events leading up to it, or their potential consequences for destabilizing the region.
You also have a lot of psycho NATO people who talk openly about balkanizing Russia into ethnostates. Similar to what was done to Yugoslavia. So Russia wants to avoid that. They tried to join NATO and help bush with the war on terror but were still treated as enemies. This is because western imperialists don't even know what communism is and assume that any country which used to be communist is always communist. They also see russia as inherently "asiatic" and "despotic" and they need to have "democracy (for the rich only)" brought to them at gunpoint.
>>2172756trump has made at least a few statements that are entirely contradictory and impossible to fulfill simultaneously as policy objectives.
Drawing down the debt (ie foreign dollar reserves) and also forcing other countries to retain dollar holdings.
>>2191036to clarify, he wants to draw down the debt by reducing global dollar holdings but also somehow maintain dollar hegemony in reserve currencies and trade
and that goes exactly to OP's point, that Trump and his team are good at recognizing the real issues, but it's their solutions to the issues that fucking suck and don't work
>>2190913If that was the case why not simply hijack U.S. Agency for Global Media and have it start broadcasting fascist messaging? God knows there's plenty of right-wing media stooges who could take it over.
Destroying the whole institution is just cratering American global influence for no reason. From a right-wing authoritarian perspective it makes no sense.
Dummy or agent, those are the two options.
>>2191431What's naive is believing that we live in a meritocracy.
Even "they're an evil genius" is asserting a kind of meritocracy.
No, a lot of our leaders are not intelligent. Our system does not reward intelligence.
>>2190838Consider the following, Trump isn't a Russian/Chinese agent. However, Trump is easily manipulated by (possibly Russian or Chinese) agents.
Trump probably has private sexts with Chinese spies. 😐
>>2172756The guys a genuine retard at this point.
I thought maybe there was a plan. But a lot of his cuts, tariffs and shit just looks like it will lead to long term collapse that I think he doesnt have a plan.
>>2175745>>2172756>According to my imagined "liberals" …>The only way to combat imperialism is imperialism by another interest group.To say liberals believe in the propaganda they made up themselves is like to ask the Trump government to cut the trades with Chyna due to its "threat" and the need to satisfy their own nationalist rhetoric. It's necessary to point out that as of 2023 the largest import volume from a political entity that US trade with is Chyna, which is greater than the whole southeast Asia combined. It's needless to say how much interest the bourgeoisie gained from such treads. Chyna as a political entity is not disrupting but collaborating with bourgeoisie of the US in terms of world economics. Trumpism is in its uproar thanks to the finical support of Chyna.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maoist_Communist_Party_of_Chinahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasic_incidenthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peking_University_Marxist_Societyhttps://annas-archive.org/scidb/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2011.00881.x/The condition of the workers in Chyna, however, is like exactly what you described "sweatshop" with, in some cases, 36% of the people working more than 60 hours despite there're legislation (suggestions) that says they shouldn't work more than 44 hours per week. Chyna is suppressing worker's movement and communism on its own land. US nationalists who label themselves "anti-Trumpist" didn't realize the fact that Chyna is just another capitalist nation which is already rotten to the core considering how greed people on its land is, and whether capitalist medias say the trade war is being won or not won't change their living conditions whatsoever. "Imperialism" for them is an entity to vent their frustration rather than actually a problem that should be solved, otherwise they are likely to read some Marxist analysis first instead of watching some dualist, imperialist propaganda that eventually leads to the consolidation of power of the bourgeoisie of both empires.
Jackson Hinkle is no better than any cheap nationalist clowns that are similar to him.
>>2199198Capitalism is when trade.
>ChynaBAP please go back to twitter, thx
>>2199258https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/list-of-countries-by-number-of-police-officers.htmlhttps://www.statista.com/statistics/299513/billionaires-top-countries/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_disputes_in_the_South_China_Sea https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202502/1329086.shtml>Claims being a *communist* nation-state while *coincidentally* having the US being its most important trade partner, *coincidentally* modify the constitution so you can serve more terms, *coincidentally* avoiding to criticize Israel when there's a genocide, *coincidentally* having cops patrol on people's social medias, *coincidentally* banning your people from accessing the global internet, *coincidentally* maintains the largest police force in the world, *coincidentally* spawns 814 billionaires, *coincidentally* sell the labors to bourgeoisie across the world, *coincidentally* skyrocketing the price of real estate so most of the proletariat don't have stable housing, *coincidentally* scapegoating all the Americans and Japanese, *coincidentally* arresting all Marxist activists, *coincidentally* claiming the whole south China sea because "we are the ones who firstly discovered it", *coincidentally* support exploitation, most of all, *coincidentally* reject class struggle in favor of the fascist concept "national rejuvenation".>There is no capitalism.You, sir, is a truly intelligent and distinguished person.
>>2232085So I mean there's a small chance at least one of his advisors is a deep state Satanist neo-Nazi esoteric Hitlerist. I do worry about JD Vance. I seriously worry if a Bigballs type would nuke America for shits and giggles. I worry the deep state has cannibalized itself with operation Gladio and Nazi glowie cults. In which case we sre really fucked.
I guess from a materialist perspective you might argue that feudal and slave society elements can resurface in highly developed capitalism during periods of crisis. You think about serial killer Nazi cults you realize these people want to be Aztec god-king types, bloody human sacrifice, rule by terror kind of economy.
So a bit about cults. IMO cults are misunderstood. IMO cults are a temporary resurfacing of feudal and slave relations within contemporary capitalist society. People get into cults in part because feudal and slave society are less alienating than much of contemporary capitalism. It's not so different from sadomasochism which is a desire for a less alienating slave society.
So I think there can be an entirely rational retreat into cultish feudal and slave relations during a crisis. Of course, you can't go back and this impulse is reactionary. It will never succeed and just mess stuff up. But I think that Trump is a reactionary who just wants to go back to a simpler time during an economic crisis.
>>2232156>>So I mean there's a small chance at least one of his advisors is a deep state Satanist neo-Nazi esoteric Hitlerist. No. They're all over-comfortable capitalists who what a good life for their kids, at the cost for the extinction of the human race. You are liberated once you realize you are wiser than your class dominator.
They aren't wiser, smarter, better. They are just better positioned. And they are in service of the extinction of the human race unless they chance their ways. That's it.
>>2232193> They're all over-comfortable capitalists who what a good life for their kids, at the cost for the extinction of the human race.Ahem, apologizes for the typos… *who want
*at the cost of
>>2232156>You think about serial killer Nazi cults you realize these people want to be Aztec god-king types, bloody human sacrifice, rule by terror kind of economy … Of course, you can't go back and this impulse is reactionary. It will never succeed and just mess stuff up. I think you might be onto something, but to note an opposite (everything contains an opposite) is that this Wicca-fash stuff is also magical-thinking-powered, ego-driven, fantasy-based Don Quixote adventurism. Like, probably fueled by mania or drugs in the moment, that they're doing something in real life that will turn out like a movie, or like a great-man version of remember they half-remember from intro college courses – and then racial holy war will commence, and put-upon, self-pitying individuals like themselves will get broken out of prison or something and become sex gods or worshipped martyrs. The revolutionary class isn't even replaced by white people often enough, but themselves, like fantastical super-knighthoods at most, although that makes them easily folded into doing dirty tricks by glowies because they're keen to impress the other guys they're with.
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