Trump for Dummies

The first thing he did was close the borders to the illegal immigrants, but that is only half the job. There is somewhere around 40 to 50 million of them in the US. What percentage of these need to be belligerents for the US to have a problem? So the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is going to repatriate as many as it can. In the event of a hot war you don’t need domestic insurgents opening up a second or third front.

The next was to cut costs. There was the DOGE exercise which signalled seriousness, although it appears to have had limited success. Just like the Romans he is trying to withdraw troops from the regions, which is behind the drive to end the “forever wars”. If Ukraine gets an icky deal, it might be because of the need to preserve stockpiled weapons for another conflict closer to home.

The counterparty to demanding that other countries increase their defence spending has always been that there will be far fewer resources available from the US than there is now. An utterly reasonable, and internationalist, point of view from the US. They do not have infinite national resources.

On the income front Trump has promised to cut taxes. This is a gamble that lower taxes will increase economic activity and ultimately total income. He has also introduced a new indirect tax via tariffs but convinced the public that it is being paid by competitors. The tariffs are also meant to perform the function of returning manufacturing – the sinews of war, plus a stabilizer of working class communities – to the USA.

Tariffs are one of the areas where Trump does look truly erratic. The formula used to levy them in the first place is loopy. This is where the dealmaker comes in. Trump is anchoring in a world he sees like a Middle Eastern bazaar. Nothing too much is to be read into opening bids – ridiculous figures get bandied around in an attempt to decrease, or increase, the price as much as possible. But you have to have a rationale, even if it is not a good rationale, and the formula was the rationale.

There is no intrinsic value, just the ultimate price paid by a willing buyer and a willing seller. If a 50% tariff collapsed to 20% plus significant investment in the US makes the counterparty feel better, then 50% was the right initial tariff no matter how irrational the original justicication.

Withdrawing from the Paris Accord makes sense when you are measuring yourself not against your cultural confreres but your strategic rival who doesn’t have to worry about Paris until 2060, if then.