The best summary of Trump's trade "philosophy" comes from Trashfuture's November Kelly, who said that Trump is flipping over the table in a poker game that's rigged in his favor because he resents having to pretend to play the game at all.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/26/i-dont-want/#your-greenback-dollar
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@pluralistic Trump's picture should be printed in the dictionary against the definition of 'Boomerism'
(And I think as a whole the USA is in its Boomer-era)
The ability to take such a strong hand, squander it so thoroughly and kill that benefit for any future generation, spin repeated terrible decisions as someone else's fault, and have so many people still believe you at the end of all of it...
In the real life version of Elizabeth Magie Landlords Game, monopolists really hate when people play prosperity, or even know that those rules exist.
When index fund investors begin to profit from the proceeds of monopoly and can't be swindled, the game turns into a kind of prosperity, and it is the winners, the monopolists who will flip the board to start a new game of monopoly.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-landlords-game/
@pluralistic Great analogy for the man who managed against all odds to bankrupt his casino business.
Trump is the laziest man alive
Some refs for those interested, as if they're even needed ...
After all, the global system of trade was designed and enforced by American officials, especially the US Trade Representative. The US created a world whose most important commodities (food, oil, etc) were priced in dollars, meaning that anyone who wanted to buy these things from *any* country would first have to get US dollars, which they could only get by shipping their valuable stuff to the US, which sends them dollars in return.
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Think about this trade for a minute: to get US dollars, people outside of the US would have to dig up or chop down or manufacture *real things* that were in finite supply. Meanwhile, to get the US dollars to *pay* for these real, finite things, the US just had to type zeros into a spreadsheet at the Federal Reserve:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54fg-A1gCrM
The technical term political scientists use for this arrangement is "fucking sweet."
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Two of my favorite political scientists are Henry Farrell and Dan Davies, whose new paper, "The US dollar system as a source of international disorder," was just published by The British Academy as part of its "Global (Dis)Order international policy programme":
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@pluralistic link no workie
@slashdottir Seems to be a problem at their end, and it's not backed up at the Internet Archive, so I'm afraid I don't have any ideas. That's definitely the right link and it definitely worked as of yesterday when I was drafting this.
Farrell and Davies explore the history of the weaponization of "dollar centrality" (their term for the arrangement where the whole world agreed to treat the dollar as a neutral trade instrument), and show how Trump's incontinent belligerence fits into it, and lay out some shrewd possibilities for where this could all end up.
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Farrell is one of the leading experts on how these boring, invisible, complex systems of financial settlement, fiber optic connections and other plumbing of the post-war era have been increasingly weaponized by successive US administrations. In 2023, he and Abraham Newman published *The Underground Empire*, an excellent book on the subject (really, the *definitive* book on the subject):
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties
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Davies, meanwhile, is a brilliant scholar (and explainer) of complex systems. Last year, he published *The Unaccountability Machine*, about the way that the feedback mechanisms in the systems that keep the world running are badly broken, leading to much of our modern dysfunction:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine
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