Trump's Gamifying Tariffs To Make A Deal

"Never in human history has a whimsical decision by a single person destroyed so much wealth." ~Arindrajit Dube

"I keep asking myself, 'What is this [Trump] Administration trying to do? Was the objective to re-industrialize the United States, or to raise revenue to help pay for tax cuts to the rich, or to change the global flow of funds? My answer consistently is, they want to remake America, but you can't remake America unless you remake the world at the same time. So it's a revolutionary movement." ~Viktor Shvets

Musk publicly denounced the Trump trade adviser and tariff architect Peter Navarro as "dumber than a sack of bricks."~Elon Musk

“They've [All countries around the world] ripped us off left and right, but now it's our turn to do the ripping." ~ Trump told the National Republican Congressional Committee.

"The world's hot new trade is 'sell America." ~Axios re-ported

Donald J. Trump saw no international trade as a complex web of interdependence, but as a game board, a stakes-high one in which tariffs were the dice and entire economies were tokens to be moved, blocked, or taken. Surprise in this game was not a weakness, but an approach. The art of the deal had transformed into the art of destabilization, the clever use of chaos with the expectation that something positive would fall out.

Trump, assisted by his brown-nosers like Peter Navarro, whose economic anti-trade strategies were universally dismissed by academics and American oligarchs alike, believed that tariffs were not only economic tools, but psychology-warfare tools. To him, they were bluffs, bets, and punishments all rolled into one. He did not negotiate international trade as a statesman, but as a performer in a reality-TV presidency, where tension and drama replaced diplomacy and discussion. For the past 50 years, no country except United States is using tariffs to punish all the countries due to its own demise of de-industrialization.

Elon Musk, a Trump oligarch advisor, sitting in dazed dismay, tweets, Navarro's public embarrassment with a comment that likened his brain to a sack of bricks. Economists across both political parties, from Arindrajit Dube, warned of the disastrous degree of harm an unfettered decision could do, and had done. Billions of global value vanished at the stroke of a pen or 3 a.m. tweet. Investors were thrown into panic. Supply chains spasmed. Allies became overnight enemies. But to Trump and his closest advisors, this was all part of the act, or in the Deal.

Witnesses like Viktor Shvets perceived beyond sheer madness. Trump's tariffs created in his imagination the outlines of a revolutionary program, not simply to reindustrialize America, but to overthrow and recast the world order itself. But revolutions aren't precision instruments. The economic backlash was monumental, with a great deal of American farmers, producers, and consumers footing the bill for a war waged under the banner of economic industrial independence and narcissism.

Trump's cry, "they've ripped us off, now it's our turn," tapped into a nationalist desire for revenge, a sense of needing to reverse the direction of American history. But in equating the trade system as zero-sum, in equating the mathematics of trade to be gained as a contest between winners and losers, he poisoned the same partners who could rewrite the rulebook. And Axios correctly observed that the new world trade was "sell America" and sell they did, uncertainty making American institutions and markets unappealing and less reliable under this Trump Administration.

Trump was not playing poker, nor even chess. He was rolling loaded dice in a crooked casino of his own narcissistic mind, betting that chaos would yield power, that would coax his art of the deals. But the house he gambled was not his, it was America's. And the cost was not only shouldered by those who lost the deals, but by a world that had to deal with a president who toyed with global trade rules as if it were a game he could play and win by himself.