Demolition Man

What happens when Trump detonates the global economy?

Today I want to share some thoughts on the deeper reasons behind Trump’s ruinous economic policies. I do not pretend to be an economist and I could be wrong. Feel free to ignore what I propose here. Or (politely) disagree with these ideas in the comments.

While the analysis that follows may seem dire, I am diving into it because I believe we need to fully comprehend what’s underway so we can prepare for it and, hopefully, build new systems and networks to counteract it, instead of just falling victim to it. What’s false has to die before anything true can be born.

Many mainstream economists and pundits keep saying that Trump is incompetent — that he doesn’t understand how the economy works. My assumption is different: I see Trump as the frontman for a global criminal syndicate. He does not act on his own. He does what his puppet masters (Putin, Peter Thiel, the Saudi royal family, and so on) tell him to do. Those who bankrolled his election, or supported him with psychological mind-war operations (Russian “political technology”) got what they paid for, which is a systemic takedown of U.S. democracy and America’s position and power in the world.

Along with demolishing American hegemony, they are intentionally ruining the lives and future for the U.S. populace, to further centralize power and control. They know what they are doing, why they are doing it, and how they will do it. However, as arrogant psychopaths and gamblers, they lack the ability to foresee how these destructive policies will ricochet back on them, eventually and inevitably. Let’s dive into how this is so.

Tied to a chair and the bomb is ticking

This situation was not of your picking

You say that this wasn't in your plan

Don't mess around with the demolition man

Trump’s economic policies —including his tariffs — are intentional weapons to attack the middle class, devastate lower income people, and further concentrate economic power in the hands of oligarchs who are devoid of empathy and insatiably addicted to greed. Their plan is to collapse the U.S. dollar by creating a debt crisis. This will massively devalue our currency. One way to do this is to massively inflate the federal debt, which will go up $5 trillion in the next decade due to Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy in his “Big Beautiful Bill,” a self-sabotage of the U.S. to serve the interests of the already wealthy.

The plan is to make it possible for international wealth to buy up distressed U.S. assets — from private businesses to public lands — for a pittance, once the value of the dollar collapses. This aligns with what Naomi Klein called “disaster Capitalism” in The Shock Doctrine. This is what we did to the USSR after 1989, forcing them to sell off their public companies and nationalized resources to European and American corporations, which led to Russia’s kleptocracy and the rise of Putin.

We are now seeing farmers in Red states like Nebraska and Arkansas freak out because, as a result of the tariffs, the market for U.S. exports have collapsed. They have lost a lot of their illegal immigrant workforce while prices for basic goods and farm supplies skyrocket. As much as 25 - 30 % of independent farmers in the U.S. face bankruptcy because of the tariffs. China has stopped importing U.S. soybeans. Also, with US Aid gone, the government no longer subsidizes American farms by buying produce to feed people in Somalia and other countries facing famine.

For Trump and his backers, this is all intentional. Large agro-businesses will be able to buy up those bankrupt farms and further centralize American food production. This is a complete betrayal of the MAGA base (aka the “suckers” or the “marks”). Ironically, these are the policies they voted for. They didn’t understand that foreign aid was not a giveaway but a structural part of our economy that actually served their interests.

A few days ago, Bill Gates — the former environmental hero — was at Trump’s White House, groveling before Trump with Sergei Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and so on. Gates is not only a tech oligarch but the largest private owner of farmland in the United States. When small farmers lose their farms, the beneficiaries are corporate agribusinesses, investment firms, Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), and opaque holding companies. Firms like Farmland Partners, PGIM, and Gladstone Land pay a premium to acquire farmland, then lease it back for profit, turning small land-owning farmers into dispossessed sharecroppers.

JD Vance is an investor in AcreTrader, an investment platform that allows accredited investors to buy shares in farmland-owning companies. They make profit by turning agricultural land into another abstracted financial asset, taking ownership away from local people who have generational connection to land and community. Trump’s MAGA base have been set up as the patsies for destructive policies that will, probably, take the rest of the world down with us in the next few years.

Peter Thiel — the closest thing we have to a James Bond supervillain as well as self-appointed Antichrist candidate — groomed and created J.D. Vance as a tool to run the American Fascist technocracy they are assembling. While Vance and Thiel pretend to support Trump and his “Make America Great Again” ideology, in actual fact, Thiel’s favorite book (he wrote an introduction for its reissue) is the speculative Libertarian screed, The Sovereign Individual (1997), which looks forward to the collapse of centralized currencies and the disintegration of the nation state. Libertarian wealth-holders have an ideological hatred of government regulation, because governments can restrict their power to do whatever they want, no matter how unethical, vicious, or self-serving.

These arrogant individuals are not, in the end, sovereign. The U.S. government upheld the laws and the trusted institutions that allowed them to build and maintain their wealth over the last half-century. Deconstructing that system will have many unpredictable effects and could, in the end, take all of them down as well.

Economists tend to think in terms of patterns, probabilities, and historical analogies. Some now predict a gradual U.S. decline, perhaps a slow erosion of global dominance with China and the BRICS bloc rising in its place. But this vision of history rests on outdated assumptions.

What the ecoonomists ignore is not just the scale of interconnectivity in today’s financial order, but the particular role of Donald Trump and his gangster posse. Trump’s history in business reveals a different skill set: bankruptcy, demolition, and the extraction of personal advantage from failing scams before they collapse. He has surrounded himself with people who see manufactured crises as opportunities to loot.

Trump is not even trying to be a steward of the U.S. economy: He is a demolition expert seeking to light piles of dynamite to blow up its foundation.