“Fools and little boys”, my father used to say, “criticise unfinished work.” As the left and their media camp followers collectively clutch their pearls over US President Donald Trump’s trade war, are they making the fundamental error my father used to warn against? If so, what is the end game for Trump? What is the method to what his enemies see as unhinged madness?
It would indeed be a fool, after all, who criticises Trump’s business acumen. The witless leftist memes claiming he ‘went bankrupt X times’ are not only false (Trump has never gone near personal bankruptcy) but completely misunderstand the reality of big business. Trump has owned some 500 companies, of which six went bankrupt. That’s a 98.8 per cent success rate – an astonishing record in business.
If Trump is playing a masterful long game, what is it?
Everyone had told him that if he raised tariffs, the inflationary consequences would cause interest rates to rise. Instead, US bond interest rates had fallen, putting great pressure on US Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell to lower rates.
One of the funniest sights of the epic meltdowns is the left screaming and crying because billionaires are seeing some of their paper fortunes torched. So much for ‘eat the rich’: it turns out the left really does want the billionaire elite to get richer with unearned wealth.
In any event, their companies’ shares had been too high and were due for a correction.
In the midst of global fears that an out of control president is heading the world into a chaos driven recession, it’s important to understand that he is applying to the business of government the techniques he uses in the commercial world.
Buddhism and the Dalai Lama are very popular with left types, so perhaps they ought to pay more attention to a key image of Tibetan Buddhism, the dorje. The dorje is a lightning bolt, symbolic of creative destruction. Not wanton destruction, leaving nothing but wreckage, but the transformative power of the pure, diamond-hard destructive force of the lightning bolt. Capitalism is similarly creative destructive: the lightning bolt of market forces cleans out the detritus of failing strategies and policies.
Trump often applies the same lightning-bolt creative destruction in business, famously taking outlandish risks. Occasionally those risks fail, but most often they open radical new opportunities.
In the corporate world, if radical strategies don’t work, companies often collapse. A severe global recession is a much more serious outcome if Trump’s radical strategies don’t work.
In Trump’s presidential arena, he will measure his long-term success by the Nasdaq index. And if it keeps falling amid world chaos – as the share markets are predicting – then he knows there will be great pressure on him to resign, like any CEO. But, as always, he is supremely confident that won’t happen.
Meanwhile, the bond interest rate fall is an example of the opportunities that can open up.
The big risks for Trump’s strategy are that chicken-hearted investors will panic, and that vested interests, notably the public sector unions, will be able to control the narrative. Government employees are organising mass rallies – just as they did in Argentina when Javier Milei instituted massive public sector job cuts. But Argentina is already seeing an historic turnaround in what had been a basket-case economy for decades.
It’s therefore important to understand his directional plan while also recognising the risks and potential casualties […]
In his election campaign, Trump announced that he would impose tariffs on most imported goods and would pass on a large portion of the money raised (plus some money from Musk’s DOGE cost-cutting) to ordinary Americans via tax cuts. He was adamant that interest rates would not rise because of the dual impact. He forecast that with investment incentives, the US industrial base would be restored.
That’s the key goal almost universally overlooked: restoring the American industrial base is critical to shoring up America’s defence capabilities – and, by proxy, the Western Hemisphere’s.
The second part of that strategic goal is the same as Reagan’s for ending the Cold War without a shot: break China economically.
What was not so widely understood was that Trump had a second plan. He would impose a series of radical strategies – led by penalty tariffs – on China, Europe, Canada, Mexico and a range of other countries, aiming to force them to lower barriers against US exports and take other actions. Those penalty tariffs would be severe on the China trade linked Asian countries.
The Trump plan is to open up negotiations that simply would not have taken place without the radical steps. If an agreement that the US regards as acceptable is reached, then the tariffs return to the standard 10 per cent […]
Trump’s ideal world would be one where a 10 per cent tariff on imports became a normal situation, creating a global GST type tax that lowers taxes on income.
Trump is not content with containing China: he’s also working on neutralising another long-running threat to world peace.
Meanwhile, Trump is headed to Saudi Arabia, where he seeks to bring together a series of Middle Eastern countries to isolate Iran. He wants Russia on side in Iran isolation, and that objective is linked into his Ukraine peace plan. The Russian President has so far not accepted the Trump Ukraine terms, and many countries in Europe believe the Trump peace plan opens the way for a Russian attack on Eastern Europe in the future.
Which is the other great danger, indeed a perennial one: self-absorbed, perfidious European countries whose idiotic shenanigans are threatening to drag the world into global war for the third time in just over a century.
