Donald Trump’s Tariff Psy Op
Tariff Psy Op: Is MAGA Man just a willful ignoramus, too dumb to even understand what he’s doing? Is he in cahoots with Vladimir Putin? Does he just want the nations to come crawling to him, “kissing his ass”? Is this insider trading? Does he just want to burn down the world?…Tune in for our next episode of The Donald!
“Trump has basically declared war on the global economy,” said Maurice Obstfeld, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. “It will be a globally destructive one and certainly will wash back on the U.S. economy. By differentiating the tariff rates across trade partners, he is inviting chaos in world trade as countries trans-ship goods to obtain lower duty rates.”[i]
“And he [Antichrist] shall cause astounding devastation, and will succeed in whatever he does.”
-Dan 8:24 NIV
Tariff Psy Op: Donald Trump in his typically bombastic, ignorant,[ii] head-exploding way, declared April 2 to be “Liberation Day,” because that was when he was going to announce retaliatory tariffs on every nation on earth no less, ending years of “the whole world ripping us off!” Oh wait, that’s right. He did leave Russia, Belarus and North Korea off his hit list. But everybody else has been “ripping us off”!
If that one point alone makes any sense to you, please let me know. Now after a good week of on-again/off-again threats, then a 90-day “pause,” Wall Street fund managers are wondering if the problem is that Donald Trump is simply insane. As if they haven’t had 9-10 years to figure that out.
This dunderhead move, which fails to distinguish between painstaking tariff negotiations over individual products and industries, versus slapping tariffs on entire nations—something only done in wartime when combatants completely cut each other off—naturally led to a stock market meltdown the next two days. US stocks saw their biggest two-day loss in history, $6.6 trillion of wealth vanishing into thin air.
All in all, between Musk’s chainsaw taken to our administrative state and Trump’s weeks-long demagoguery of trade deficits, $11 trillion has been wiped out of Joe Biden’s stock market since Inauguration Day. For all of you with those 401Ks and everyone facing skyrocketing consumer prices, are you getting tired of winning yet? Because “This Fucking Guy’s” just getting started.
In spite of all these disasters, Donald Trump keeps telling everyone his plans are working out perfectly, that these are little hiccups compared to how roaring rich we’re all going to be once “manufacturing comes back to the United States,”[iii] as if a sea change like that could be done overnight. Such a delicate international trade regimen was built up over decades, largely under American guidance.
This man’s head is truly in the 1950s. To congratulate[iv] himself, he’s floated the idea of a third Presidential term, commissioned a new jet fighter we absolutely don’t need called the “F-47,” declared himself the “Fertilization President,” and wants a multi-million dollar military parade through Washington on his 79th birthday. Sure. Why not?
He’s Not A Fixer; He’s A Demagogue
As is typical of the atmosphere of “lie built upon lie” the Republican party has afflicted upon a nation they set out to “dumb down” starting around 1973,[v] the whole premise/excuse for this colossally-dumb move is built upon a pack of them. The entire American-based global trade system slowly and painstakingly developed post-World War II, has not only greatly and disproportionately benefitted the United States, but was designed to prevent World War III, this time with weapons of mass destruction.
These are things self-absorbed ignoramuses like Trump don’t understand, or conveniently don’t want to. Demagoguing a situation is his specialty, not fixing it, and he’s not about to let a self-engineered crisis go to waste. As far as he is concerned, “all that ever came before him were thieves and robbers” (Jn 10:8), who left everything a “disaster” and a “catastrophe,” an “American carnage” he alone can fix.
This was especially true of Biden’s economy which Trump and his army of tools and mouthpieces in right-wing media endlessly gaslit the public about in the lead up to the 2024 election. The US economy left to him was “the envy of the world” according to The Economist, with the stock market hitting record highs (a 42% gain in just four years), unemployment falling to its lowest point in 54 years, and inflation back down to 2%. The demagoguery of egg prices was due to a global bird flu pandemic plus plain old-fashioned price gouging that was tailor-made for the bumper sticker, simpleton mindset of right-wing propaganda.
Biden even tried to accelerate American manufacturing and security infrastructure by starting with the Chips Act, an actual piece of legislation, not a dictat. He somehow worked that out in spite of an obstructionist Republican party, a party that steadfastly opposed any efforts to deal with the real problem of the US economy—ungodly income inequality (James 5:3,4).
Sometimes Stupid Explains More Than Conspiracy
Tariff Psy Op: As is so often the case with Donald Trump, the reasons he gives for doing the things he does are not the real reasons. Since the Antichrist will be someone endlessly manipulative, devious and insincere about pretty much everything, a “master of intrigue” (Dan 8:23),[vi] we are constantly left to guess at what his real motives are.
My own inclination is to assume he isn’t as dumb as he acts, that he’s a conscious agent of destruction in league with or in debt to true America haters such as Vladimir Putin, whose resentment and jealousy of the US he has had since his youth. My assumption is that, since Trump is a deeply disloyal person who nonetheless demands unquestioning loyalty from those around him, Putin and God knows who else have in some way bribed him to destroy the Western freedom alliance, leaving BRICS to take over the world financial and trade system.
And yet, since Trump is an “all-of-the-above” collection of bad qualities—ignorant, eccentric, devious, deluded, a malignant narcissist, etc.—there are times the simplest explanation is the right one. And when it comes to tariffs, it may be no more complex than “he has absolutely no idea what he’s doing.”
To wit, Rachel Maddow in the aftermath of the Stock Market meltdown after his “Liberation Day,” reminded the world of a story that came out during Trump’s first term as to how he glommed on to tariffs in the first place, as a solution to his made-up psy op that all that ever came before him have been “incompetent” and “stupid.”
Apparently when he was running in 2016, people were demanding to know who comprised his economic team, and since he didn’t have one, he assigned his son-in-law Jared Kushner to go out and shop for an economist. Kushner turned to Amazon no less, to look for authors he thought his father-in-law might like. He found a book called Death By China, probably figured this sounded on brand, and referred Trump to its unknown author Peter Navarro.
Navarro it turns out was a crackpot who kept citing someone named Ron Vara as the source for his urban myth premise that “China is ripping us off!” Subsequent investigation though, discovered that there is no such person, and that it’s probably an anagram of Navarro’s own name. In other words, Peter Navarro is not only a weirdo “economist,” but a fraudster as well.
Isn’t it so ironic that characters like Trump and Navarro seem to “find each other” in the vast scheme of things? “They have chosen their own ways…I also will choose their delusions,” saith the Lord (Isa 66:3,4). Diehard Trump fans will blow this off too because, after all, it came from Rachel Maddow, that lefty they just love to hate, in spite of her citing Vanity Fair for breaking the story.
Oh wait! Vanity Fair is “far, far left” too! Just ask the Great One to explain political spectrum to you.
Trump’s Degenerate Philosophy On Full Display
Tariff Psy Op: I have a simple question for all my fellow Christians out there who profess to be obedient to Jesus Christ’s stern warning to “watch and pray” (Luke 21:34-36), wary of a last-days normalcy that will catch the whole world off guard. That scene in Revelation 7:9 describing a final harvest of a “great multitude,” out of “all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues”? Why doesn’t it say, “a great multitude of Americans who built Fortress America, staving off the barbaric hordes populating the rest of the earth in those days”?
Because that’s what “America First” really means—Fortress America, or America uber alles. It sounds better in the original German, as Heather Digby Parton has recently put it. Yes, America, that self-absorbed, messianic, indispensable, entitled, jingoist, pseudo-Christian, self-deluded empire that has a right to take whatever it wants, anywhere in the world, any time it wants. It just so fits Donald Trump’s basic attitude toward life—everything for him, nothing for you but hot air and empty promises.
“America First” is a philosophy that is so fundamentally at odds with one of the most foundational principles of the Kingdom of God—what Jesus taught about loving your neighbor as yourself, the Golden Rule, the “do unto others as you’d have it done unto you” axiom. This is the fulfilling of the law, because it promotes equity or justice in relationships, and foreign relations are just as much relationships as personal ones. The fact that we don’t recognize this shows you just how much of a “Tower of Babel” (confusion) “Christian America” is to the world (Rev 17:3).
Donald Trump, self-centered bully that he is, considers all such sentiments to be for suckers and fools. He doesn’t believe in a win-win mentality in his “deals” at all, but a zero-sum, win-lose outcome. I’ve mentioned this before in previous articles, how Rudy Giuliani, a close and long-time associate of Trump, was baffled by this. He confided to Joe Scarborough once, something to the effect that, “Donald has the strangest way of negotiating I’ve ever seen. If he doesn’t come out of the room having won everything, and the other party left broken and bleeding, he considers that he’s failed, and it really bums him out.”
Interesting how, in all of Trump’s obsession with and hatred for China, even they have a win-win trade philosophy with the rest of the world. A one-party Communist state, no less!, practicing the Golden Rule more than we, because the law of God, as divines of the 19th Century put it, “is fit” for human nature and human life. It’s one of the secrets to China’s global popularity, in spite of their own flaws like intellectual theft, the coveting of Taiwan and the like. And yet here is “Christian America,” led around by the nose by this Dear Leader fraudster, because we don’t recognize the most practical applications of even the most basic concepts of our faith.
Trump’s entire approach to the world is that life is a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest struggle with everyone around him. His fantasy is himself as a Warlord emperor demanding fealty of all those he’s conquered. The payout, or so his delusional mind thinks, is that him slapping these across-the-board punishments on the world will have them all come begging to negotiate a way out. But all it’s doing is reaping global revulsion and retaliatory tariffs. I truly believe this is his fondest fantasy—the sight of all these nations crawling to him, begging forgiveness for decades of “ripping us off.”
Spreading The Cancer of False Grievance (Heb 12:15)
“Ask yourself, what would scare my grandmother, or piss off my grandfather? That’s a Fox story.”
-Kate McKinnon in Bombshell
Tariff Psy Op: Indeed, this is the first lie, the false premise, he builds his entire magical economic plan upon, if you can even call it a plan. The idea that everyone’s taken advantage of the United States all this time, that they’ve “robbed us of our wealth,” because “stupid leadership” (i.e., all that ever came before him), let them get away with it. The fact that somehow this plot resulted in the United States becoming the wealthiest consumer economy in the world in spite of it, is a baffling coincidence then if you buy into his bonkers logic.
The truth is, this global trade network, carefully built up for eight decades now, was engineered and led by the United States all that time. Moreover, it was done mostly for our own benefit, with thankfully, at-least marginal win-win outcomes for the rest of the world as well. The idea that it has resulted in a huge trade imbalance, with the US importing a trillion dollars a year more than it exports may seem “unfair!” to Trump’s simpleton mind, but it actually works in our favor. As one wag put it, “I have a huge payments imbalance with my barber, who hasn’t bought one thing from me all these years!”
Just one reason is that the United States first established the dollar as the world’s de facto currency as World War II was drawing to a close. That gave us the advantage of giving other nations dollars in payment that would erode in value over time, because we alone had the advantage of just printing up more to pay for our debt. Indeed, nations like Japan and China had so many dollars on hand, that they underwrote that debt for a long time. This was just one trick among many we used. I detail some of the others in “The Economic Beast” chapter of American Babylon, American Antichrist.
Since the days of NAFTA in the mid-1990s, free trade has been something of holy writ to Republicans, because their real constituency Wall Street, wanted it so bad. I remember the day Congress passed NAFTA. I can remember the house I was painting. The whole country, left, right, center, literally broke the phone system to Washington expressing their opposition to this sweeping free trade agreement. Populist billionaire Ross Perot warned that NAFTA was going to create a “giant, sucking sound” as US jobs are sent down to Mexico. Yet they passed it anyway, showing you what the power and priorities of the rich in America are.
At the time, the counter argument of all those politicians was that free trade might cause us jobs and de-industrialization in the short term, but would result in a cornucopia of products for American consumers to choose from, marginally cheaper, and the chance to move towards a high-tech economy. So what if your paycheck shrunk and the power of unions was damaged?
And devastate the American heartland it did, but adjustments did take place over time, just as they predicted. People learned new jobs, the Internet transformed business, and quite frankly, ordinary people became fabulously wealthy just coming up with creative online enterprises. This is what he wants to tear all up now, after his own party led this charge.
The one point of legitimacy you can find in Trump’s argument is that outsourcing parts for your defense industry around the world is not a smart thing to do, nor de-industrializing your economy in general. But there was a complex and dishonest logic behind it all, as we shall see below. Yet people like Trump couldn’t care less. It’s much too complicated a subject, takes too much mental energy, is too boring, etc. But it’s a perfect wedge issue for all those same reasons. Besides, where’s the “me playing savior” in actually improving it?
Where The American-Based Global Trade Network Idea Began
Tariff Psy Op: At the end of World War II, the United States was poised to emerge out of that horrific tragedy as the only major power left standing pretty much intact. All the other combatants were nearly destroyed. Russia, who conservatively lost around 8 million soldiers and 12 million civilians, suffered the most. One million of them were living in literal holes in the ground in western Russia at the end of the war.
American planners though did something kind of unusual in history, a distinctly Christian thing. Instead of slapping punitive reparations on the losers, the very thing post-World War I that led to the rise of Hitler, the US decided to turn Germany and Japan into trading partners. They even went so far as to break off parts of the US economy (automobiles to Germany, electronics to Japan) to help them get back on their feet.
It was not necessarily a popular thing they did, given how high emotions against those nations still ran in the United States. But the strategy worked. Germany and Japan remained friends with us to this day, that is, until Lord von Strappen Tough Guy succeeded in turning all our friends into enemies last week.
I can only imagine the wailing and rending of garments from MAGA world if that was tried today. Way too weak! But it all underscores a basic fact about trade that is rarely brought up in this faux-rage about tariffs. Trade relations is one of the best ways to prevent wars. Like two families who are now joined in marriage, the mutual profit found in trade relationships tends to smooth over the rough spots of in-law life.
This was the start of what we now know as the American-based global trade network designed to promote capitalism, peace and democracy in the world. We defeated right-wing extremism in World War II, left-wing extremism in the Cold War, and now hope for the defeat of residual autocracies greeted the dawn of the 21st Century. That is, until Israel engineered 9-11, George W. Bush declared a War On Terror, put two wars on the credit card, and added a huge tax cut according to Republican economic theory of “trickle down.”[vii] It was only left to time until a caricature of such ideological idiocy emerged in the form of Donald J. Trump to push it all off a cliff.
This evolving free trade model had another benefit. How can the world develop more equitably if one nation (the United States) with 5% of the world population be allowed to consume 20% of the earth’s resources? It was an “unsustainable” model as the UN put it. The free trade model envisioned poorer nations attracting more investment as capital would be allowed to “go where it can find” the cheapest labor. It wasn’t their main motive,[viii] but its effect hasn’t been all bad, in spite of all the bullhorning people like Alex Jones blare forth about “the globalists.”
Which brings us to all the other pack of lies Donald Trump never ceases to love to propagate.
Higher and Deeper
Tariff Psy Op: “China stole all those American jobs from you.” Au contraire, Wall Street gave those jobs to China! In the late 1970s, Premier Dung Xiao Ping, after decades of exhaustion from MAGA-like Cultural Revolution hysteria, led a complete U-turn onto “the capitalist road.”
At that, Wall Street eyes began to water at the thought of pocketing the difference between coolie wages and those of the high-priced American union workers. Leave it to the party of the coldest of the Cold Warriors to do a complete 180 when it came to enriching the “Chi Coms” and skimming billions of dollars off the backs of a devastated heartland working class. Now the Republicans, under the leadership of Mr. Bellyacher himself, claims it is the party of the working class. Spare me.
Trump, knowing that’s where they were hurting the most, knew exactly what itch to scratch to insinuate his way into their hearts. “In his place shall arise a contemptible person to whom royal majesty has not been given [won’t come from the political class; won’t come “out of politics”]; he shall come in without warning and obtain the kingdom by flatteries.” [and trickery—i.e., steal it, 2016, 2024]—Dan 11:21 RSV). He knows his average dumbed-down, right-wing media “fan” has virtually zero understanding of the complexities of world trade and is too lazy to bother to educate themselves anyway. But boy, does he know how to insinuate his way into their hearts!
China for its part, has some responsibility for this situation. Stealing intellectual property, closing certain markets to US exports, state-sponsored protection and subsidizing of its domestic industries—all these things and more have roiled US companies for decades now. Some have questioned the propriety of allowing China into the US-created WTO (World Trade Organization) altogether.
On the other hand, a lot of intellectual property, consulting services, entertainment, social media and the like, are areas where the US completely dominates. We also won’t let them use our state-of-the-art computer chips, etc. Trump though, being a demagogue, an opportunist, and ever belligerent, found this a useful subject.
People have rightly been pointing out that he’s been complaining about tariffs since 1988 when he went on Oprah. That’s true enough. It was the year after he came back from a KGB-sponsored trip to Russia complaining about the cost of US troops in Japan, coincidentally at a time when the KGB was promoting the same propaganda among the Japanese public. Putin knows high tariffs would destroy the US economy and its premier place of consumer power. So is he doing all this because his money is not in the stock market, but hidden deals with our enemies?
-“Trade imbalances are a rip off.” This is his simplistic mindset. He looks at all these “trade deficits” and assumes someone is getting a raw deal. Either that or he does know better, but since he believes all his followers are complete suckers and fools, he takes a chance that they won’t understand it either.
All that “tariffs” (his “favorite word”) mean therefore is an opportunity to pick a fight with the world to get them to come begging and pleading on all fours to “cut a deal,” his supposed forte. This is his wet dream and his real motivation, fantasizing about having all the world “kissing my ass” as he puts it. No wonder Timothy Noah of The New Republic asked whether this was economics policy or his own perverse psychology?
As far as his biggest target China is concerned, their exports to the US are only 3% of their GDP anyway! Cut them off and they will be doing just fine. The US on the other hand will be decimated.
In trade relations, as long as everyone is honoring international law, WTO rulings and the like, there are no “winners and losers.” If both parties didn’t get something out of it, they simply don’t enter into a trade agreement in the first place. But as was said, Trump doesn’t pursue “win-wins” but “win/loses.” Therefore, whoever negotiated these agreements are all “stupid” and “incompetent.” He forgets to remind you of course that these “rip offs” by Canada for instance, were things he negotiated himself during his first term with his USMCA, an attempt to rewrite a few minor bits of window dressing just so he could put his name on it and crow that he “fixed NAFTA.”
More Right-Wing Idols
Tariff Psy Op: Behind all this too are all the false assumptions about the superiority of a world of super-nationalism. God’s nation-state system is something of a paradox, a world of nations mostly rooted in ethnic identities going back to the Tower of Babel. But they exist within a global system of nations ordained by God (Zech 14:16) that would do well to trade with one another, seeing how it fosters greater contact, cultural exchange and cultural understanding. Uber nationalism is built on the pride of life, and eventually leads to war, as in 1914.
Trump on the other hand, wants the United States to be the purest form of the Ugly American as possible, the one global power that takes what it wants with no apology. In other words, in-your-face colonialism. He’s the poster child of everything the Founding Fathers rejected, then paints his mean, scowling face onto a flag. Go figure.
Trump’s conceit about the United States, that it is or ought to be completely self-sufficient is another romanticized fantasy dear to the hearts of his ever stuck-in-the-past followers. The reality is, American consumers simply love having a wide variety of products to choose from. This lie that trade imbalances are inherently a “rip off” is well-explained by someone who certainly isn’t one of my favorite politicians, but even Rand Paul gets it:[i]
Putin’s Tool As A Game Show Host
“Stupid people. Maybe corrupt, I don’t know. I don’t know how you can be that stupid. How do you get to be President and be that stupid?”
-Donald J. Trump, April 9, 2025, confessing to insider trading and mocking the American people just hours after the bond market crashed and he suspended his Liberation Day tariffs for 90 days.
“and he [the Antichrist] shall magnify himself in his heart…”
-Dan 8:25,[ii] 11:36
Tariff Psy Op: Perhaps Trump thought he could test the waters to see how much he could “get away with” in his bullying, but balked when the bond market began to tank along with the Stock Market. So, after days of his surrogates insisting that these tariffs are here to stay, he posts a tweet declaring “It’s a great time to buy!,” hours before he reversed course and declared a 90-day “pause.”
This of course resulted in the third biggest one-day rise in the market in its history, as Wall Street wanted to pretend this nightmare was over, or the damage isn’t long-lasting. But it also prompted speculation that this was one big “pump and dump” market manipulation scheme by him and his billionaire cronies.
Which of course it was. Or it became, as his delusions came crashing down on him. Your guess is as good as mine when it comes to a mad dive into the psychology of this deeply disturbed man. Everything about him is theater and spectacle, a fake President who rules more as a game show host as this deeply insightful article describes it. His is a world of stunning recklessness and irresponsibility, a man who should have never even come close to the levers of power, let alone three times now.
In the real world though, where actual consequences are taken seriously, Trump lives on a different level. As I said above, people have endlessly tried to describe who or what he is—a mad man, an eccentric, an ignoramus, a malignant narcissist, an eternal child, etc.
But for me, the bottom line of Donald Trump’s identity, and the real essence of the evil he represents, is as a conscious Russian agent, a traitor unlike any before him, a man with absolutely no conscience, no class, no loyalties except his own bottomless sense of entitlement and materialism. He is someone who has and will sell his soul for money to the highest bidder. You just know that his callous, crass idea of a luxury resort built on the bones of the dead women and children of Gaza entails a “deal” struck with Netanyahu to enrich himself.
So likewise it is with Putin. You just know he’s been offered millions if not billions to betray his own country, a country of hamburgers and French fries he eagerly consumes while despising the American culture it’s a part of. I wouldn’t even lower myself to call him a Manchurian Candidate, for at least that fictional character was brainwashed by the Chinese. Trump betrays us willingly and openly, and he’s just getting started.
I have no doubt that America’s intelligence agencies are now all being infiltrated by Russian agents, our business world with Russian mafiosos, while he disappears street gangs, pretending he’s fighting organized crime. Like I said last fall, that last election was something of a watershed moment, a “no looking back” point.[xii] Now MAGA world is going to reap what they’ve sown, and they’re not going to be able to turn back God’s wrath, for His hand is stretched out still (Isa 9:17,21; 10:4). Unfortunately, the whole world is being forced to go along for the ride.
Notes: Tariff Psy Op
[i] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trumps-tariffs-are-a-game-changer-not-only-for-u-s-economy-but-for-the-world-e286f077?mod=home_ln#:~:text=%E2%80%9CTrump%20has%20basically,lower%20duty%20rates.%E2%80%9D
[ii] The jury is still out as to whether this across-the-board ignorance he’s so famous for is genuine or just pretend. I opt for the second as I argue in this article.
[iii] It has been for a long time, and some of it never left.
[iv] Even before he ran in 2016, he had 220 companies named after himself. https://www.nydailynews.com/2016/07/27/heres-how-much-donald-trump-loves-naming-things-after-himself/
[v] I believe it was the Republican Rockefeller institute that set out around that time to find out “why the natives had been so restless” in the late 60s, early 70s. They decided that the American people were “too educated” for their own good, and were thus demanding “largess” of the US government, something everyone knew was an exclusive monopoly of America’s plutocratic class.
[vi] (NIV), “understanding dark trickery and craftiness” (AMPC), etc.
[vii] If the surplus budgets Clinton left the nation at the end of his 8 years had been continued, the national debt would have been completely retired by 2010. Instead, today we are northward of $30 trillion in the red. Symbolic, wouldn’t you say?
[viii] Apparently, Wall Street’s expectation was that the development of poor nations would be in service to making the rich ones richer. Ironically, the success of the “Global South” is “threatening” to bypass first world wealth. While Trump’s response is crude and self-destructive, he does share the basic attitude that these emerging economies, led by China, must be punished for their success to keep them down.
[ix] E.g., They are not coming after me; they are coming after you!
[x] Notice though, like all Republicans, he is loathe to tell the total truth, that all this controversy is due to the antics of one man, their own retributive President.
[xi] “Consider himself superior” (to everyone else—NIV).
[xii] You might even be able to argue that the line was crossed when that man was allowed to go back to Mar-a-Lago in 2021 after instigating an insurrection against our government. He should have been thrown in jail pending an investigation right then and there. But the new administration was not planted enough to do so without instigating a possible civil war.
