Re: a medieval emperor or mafia don.

JAB <here@is.invalid> writes:

Trump's tariffs are about something more than economics: power
 
Above all, tariffs give Donald Trump power. They strike fear into
allies and enemies, from governments to corporations. This is a
president who runs his presidency like a medieval emperor or mafia
don.

The formula used to assess the tariffs (allegedly) imposed by other
nations on imports from the US is a cockamamie bit of pseudo-algebra
with no meaning in real economic or trade terms.  Total bullshit.

Pundits are struggling to deduce or infer economics-based motivations
behind this.  My take is that there are none.  The motive, embodied in
Peter Thiel and his acolyte Vance, Musk, Andreessen, other
techno-billionaires and their acolytes is "burn it all down".

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment

However unbalanced or deluded those people may be, they're all
brighter than Trump and not deranged in quite the same way, not and
cognitively fragmented as he is.  This tariff announcement is evidence
that Trump is too stupid, ignorant and deranged to rationally do
anything in the domain of his job, viz. being US president.  But he's
a useful idiot who can, perhaps with occasional prompting, be depended
on to do irrational, destructive things and hasten "burn it all down".

Trumps *own* motives can be reasonably estimated to be limited to
self-aggrandizement, vengeance and whim, motives easily manipulated by
anyone who can even briefly get his ear.  Being the star of his own
movie is all he has the cognitive functionality to attend to.

This isn't the kind of conspiracy theory that postulates a secret
cabal or hidden eminence grise.  These guys are on record as believing
that anything we'd recognize as democracy is a failed and obsolete
system.  They're trying to suck as much money out of the government as
they can before all of it is turned into wreckage and they're bringing
their effectively unlimited money into play to hasten the wreck.

Oddly enough, these bright & wealthy fanatics are playing from the
same score as "The Hard Reset: A Terrorgram Publication",  that
launched "hard reset" into a meme but originated with white
supremacist, neo-fascist, violence-prone, wannabe terrorist
revolutionaries.

"Hard reset" and "burn it all down" are pretty much the same.  It's
the only motivational explanation I can come up with for allowing
Trump to get away with being the mad king.

When the consequences of the mad king's maddness really begin to
emerge, the pundits are saying, we can look for reverting to sane
politics at the mid-terms.  That's worrisome for the BIAD crowd so
there aren't going to *be* any mid-terms.  "Where's our Reichstag
fire?"

 
https://news.sky.com/story/trumps-tariffs-are-about-something-more-than-economics-power-13341209
 

--
Mike Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada