[panarky]

The WSJ says this is the "the dumbest trade war in history" because "when you tax something you get less of it".

If the goal of the Red Hats was to get more goods from Canada and Mexico, then yes, tariffs would be a dumb policy.

But the Red Hats aren't dumb. They've been planning this blitzkrieg for at least 18 months. They have thousands of intelligent people on their team and they're well organized.

It's too easy to just dismiss this as ignorance, hubris and ego.

If you recognize that they're not dumb, that they know exactly what they're doing, then they must be pursuing different and mostly hidden objectives for this to make sense.

Once the hidden objectives are revealed, we'll all recognize the horrible logic of their actions.

> Will take a decade to recover the goodwill lost this week.

Indeed. All according to the plan.

[uejfiweun]

What do you speculate that the end goal is here? What are you implying?

[addandsubtract]

The tariffs are effectively a tax on the poor and middle class, without calling it that by name. Instead, it creates outrage over "the others" for being the bad guys. Afterwards, they will lower the taxes on the rich.

[6510]

Here in the Netherlands some of the potatoes we grow are cut in Poland then some of the cut potatoes are sold in the Netherlands again.

I'm sure it makes perfect sense from a business perspective. The Polish factory can do some additional cutting, packaging and transport cheaper than our own potato cutting means. You could say it makes no sense to do it ourselves, many believe this.

If you do this with many goods and services your politicians cant really have disagreeable opinions. If they pull any lever backwards or push it forwards the ecosystem starts to destabilize.

Trump enjoys negotiating, he has various tools at his disposal one of which is the most expensive military in the world. This is a very large lever to pull. He cant really extort people with it if declaring war instantly turns the domestic market to chaos. That said, it doesn't require pulling a big lever to trigger a trade war or to implode the us dollar. Donald wants to be able to press all the buttons and flick all the switches in his negotiations.

To see the goal of his negotiations you only have to look which branch of the international mafia he supports the most. If you see him grovel at someones feet you know who his true master is.

[panarky]

I don't pretend to know their playbook.

All I can see are the visible actions on the surface and try to infer from that what the underlying rationale and strategy are.

But if a new regime took control in another nation and did everything the Red Hats have done, you could infer that they had a coherent strategy that explains their actions.

When the stated rationale for an action like tariffs doesn't make sense (preventing fentanyl from Canada?), the reason it doesn't make sense is not that the action itself is "dumb", it's because the stated rationale for the action is bogus.

So they're doing tariffs for a reason and they're hiding the real reason. If you're on the inside and know the real story, you win. If you're on the outside and keep believing their stories and thinking they're just ignorant, you lose.

Then you see the largest physical movement of gold into the US in decades, and now you guess that insiders are already positioning themselves for what's coming.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-31/jpmorgan-...

If it takes a hoard of gold to protect yourself, then what's coming is not good.

The last one to figure out the real strategy will be left holding the bag of devalued dollars and repudiated Treasury paper.

[thiht]

After the first 4 years of Trump you should have understood there’s no deeper plan than "let’s destroy shit and burn bridges", because it’s too woke or too socialist or whatever.

Trump is not a genius posing as a dumbass, he’s just a dumbass. He wanted to nuke a hurricane ffs.

[georgemcbay]

Personally I think the truth is somewhere in the middle of the vast conspiracy and your take on it.

I agree with your take on Trump, its just that I don't believe he's the one running the show this time. Watching his EO signing bonanza it was pretty obvious he had no clue what like half of them were and was just rubber stamping other people's plans.

The more interesting aspect is which faction of the people that are handling Trump (the heritage foundation folks or the techbros) will end up on top because I don't think their interests are aligned beyond the short term.

[chudstudley]

> he’s just a dumbass.

Which is precisely the point. In a plutocracy, a monarch serves at the behest of the plutocrats. He is the CEO and they are the Board of Directors over the country.

Trump doesn't need to be smart, he just needs to have sway over the single-party Management, which he does. The "destroy shit and burn bridges" is the job of Management, who ensures the security of investments made by the Board.

What the comment above you is pointing out is that major banks are stockpiling gold likely because a major crash is around the corner.

Now, what they haven't said is that these current events are actually a part of the NRx (Neo-reactionary) manifesto proposed by Curtis Yarvin at BIL in 2012. Yarvin's playbook served as a major piece of the guiding philosophy behind Project 2025. People like Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and yes Elon Musk, have all been taking notes from Yarvin's proposals for a hard-reset on the U.S. government. Even DOGE is an implementation of Yarvin's RAGE (Retire All Government Employees).

Likely, the plan is to sunset the FDIC (another New-Deal safeguard that slows corporate gains) and replace the ACH with with a new and private system backed by plutocratic investment. In order to do this, the plutocrats must take control of the Treasury's payment systems, and the FBI must be neutered to prevent investigation into this. These two things are happening now.

Next, the economy must be destabilized in order to set the precedent for either legislature or emergency powers that dissolve the FDIC and reroute ACH transfers through the new system (likely Musk's X). This destabilization is what the tariffs are for.

When all forms of cash-flow are under plutocratic control, it becomes very unlikely that domestic funds could be raised to oppose them, no matter how politically or socially motivated the masses may be. Elections can even continue if the people want, but the funds won't make it to the opposition, the news of that won't make it to the majority of the general populace, and there won't be an organization that is able to investigate why.

Trump doesn't need to know or understand any of this, however. All he needs to do is sign off on what the Board of Plutocrats tell him to. Whether they can actually pull off this switch-over is the real question.

The top 10% of the U.S. controls 60% of it's wealth, and 813 of it's 345,000,000 people are billionaires. You and I aren't rich enough to do anything but wait and see what happens. But hey, in a couple centuries, Rome will spit in two again, so there's that at least.

[panarky]

Maybe they'll replace ACH with Tether. It would suck to extract even more public wealth to oligarchs, but no tears will be shed for ACH.

Zoom out.

If the goal is to stop cooperating with other nations to remove any restraint on oligarchs, imposing punitive tariffs on your closest allies makes perfect sense. So does trashing all multilateral institutions from the UN to NATO, the EU to the World Health Organization.

You know that other nations will fight back so just as in conventional warfare, you reserve an unconventional capability.

The nuclear option in trade war is to renege on your debts. Congress probably wouldn't go along with selective default on Treasury bonds, but if your engineers control the Treasury payment system, you have fine-grained control of who gets their interest and principal repaid and who doesn't. Declare an emergency and wage economic war.

Sure, interest rates will skyrocket and the dollar will devalue, but that's what you want, right? A lower dollar helps you win the trade war and you can blame the "terrorist" countries for it instead of taking any responsibility for breaking the financial system.

Disaster capitalism at its most exquisite.

[fzeroracer]

I think you're wrong.

Not on on the oligarchs attempting to rule, that much is obvious. It's that the oligarchs we have are extremely stupid. Elon Musk has exposed how little he knows about anything multiple times, and the same goes for the other billionaires attempting to wrest control.

They're attempting to follow a children's playbook as if it was an engineering manual for how to become kings. I think they will absolutely crash the economy, but I don't think the plutocrats will survive or be able to pick up the pieces.

As I've mentioned before, Romans already figured this out. Bread and circuses. But the plutocrats are not willing to maintain the flow of bread, nor are they willing to create circuses. They aren't even willing to follow the typical fascist playbook of empowering the military and bribing them off with additional benefits and loot.

This kind of situation can only lead down two roads if they keep attempting a smash and grab hostile takeover: Either a American-style French Revolution or a military coup.

[chudstudley]

The thing is, Musk doesn't need to be competent either. He only needs to follow the playbook by throwing money at single-party Management long enough to ensure that systems are brought under plutocratic control. What all of this is counting on is that up to now, nobody has been able to do anything about their illegal acts. The Supreme Court has been giving the green light, and the American people voted to enable this situation in November. The Military is not going to stop what the majority of American people have either asked for or deigned to vote against.

The Plutocrats don't want or intend to "destroy" the economy; that would be foolish. They want to laterally move it out from under checks & balances and into systems under their more direct control, at a pace that the already compromised DoJ and FBI cannot keep up with.

The Military is an expensive operation and the Plutocrats actually are willing to maintain the flow of bread to the right places. When the cash-flow is under plutocratic control, their military budget can be used to ensure no disruptions to the new system. Enough service members will still get their paychecks as to not incur any wrath over the switch. Military High-Command might be in political trouble, sure, but where it counts is the vast numbers of Low-Command, who are a mix of those directly loyal to Trump or those duty-bound to the orders of the compromised and rapidly replaced High-Command. When both still get their paychecks, both will hesitate to interfere with that cash-flow.

Adherence to the Constitution was based on an honor system that we did away with in November by not showing up to vote to continue it. At the end of the day, what drives the function of the Military is money. "No bucks? No Buck Rodgers."

All of the American people, from rich to poor, have survived terrible economic crashes before, and this one probably won't be any worse to the top 10% than 1929 was. But consider this: If you made $1000/hour, working 24 hours/day, 7 days/week, 52 weeks/year for 100 years, you still wouldn't make enough money to even compete with the upper end of these guys. The average American is desperately trying to maintain a life that is so utterly insignificant to this wealth that bribery isn't even necessary; a return to the currently declining status quo continues to suffice. The allowance of entry into the middle and upper classes are their own benefits and loot. It's a suffocation strategy. And social media is the circus.

Ultimately, the way this coup works is that Americans will not be bothering to risk their livelihoods to rise up for a French Revolution. The Plutocrats are counting on the same incompetence in us to assure their success as we are in them to assure their failure. But they have all the wealth, and now the power. Do gamblers ever actually defeat the casino?

For all our sake, I hope you're right and I'm wrong, but it doesn't look like it this time around. No empire lasts, though, so there is indeed hope after our lifetimes.

[red-iron-pine]

The Donald is almost as old as Biden and likely has early onset dementia.

What he wants changes by the minute, and multiple people have confirmed he only really repeats what the last person he spoke to said.

So it's really the agenda of the people around him, who are a mix of Project 2025'ers, Billionaire Oligarchs who want to solidify control, and foreign money, esp. Russian & Chinese money, who want to fracture NATO and the global order.

Tank the US economy so stocks fall, the economy stumbles, and the BRICS have a chance at the world order. In exchange, the wealthy get to own the US.

Specifically, running a trade war for a couple months will tank stocks and make it easy for Capital to buy up everything. Now they own the gov'mnt and all the business. Same basic play as with Brexit -- tank the economy, burn international bridges, exactly follow the Russian playbook, and in exchange we'll let a handful of you rule like Tsars.

[Marsymars]

> The Donald is almost as old as Biden and likely has early onset dementia.

He's too old to have early onset dementia.

[licebmi__at__]

I guess we could agree that the goal of the "Red Hats" was not cheap eggs, right?