The Trump Heist: the fall of the American Empire

Anna Chen – 5 April 2025, Trump trade wars

My mother taught me how boom and bust works using stick-figure drawings before I even started school. She drew a TV factory scenario in a series of pictures showing what happens when too many sets are manufactured with no-one to earning enough to buy them. If the workers are on low wages, they can’t afford to purchase what they make. If they are paid high wages, the TVs cost too much for everyone else to buy.

Which means at four years old I knew more about markets than Donald Trump does with his entire army of economic advisers pretending that you can bring back manufacturing jobs like the past five decades never happened.

You may think the Don is a good-hearted idiot whose ultimate objective is to save the US economy and is merely making the wrong calls. But his tariffs “liberation day,” following on the heels of DOGE destruction at home, evokes a raging geriatric punch-drunk well past his mobster prime, in the pub at closing time, terrorising the cowering clientele. “C’mon fight with me. One hand tied behind me back with tissue paper and me boys tooled up over there.”

If, like me, you believe his objective is far from benign and what he and his cohort want to do is make as much money for themselves and screw everyone else, then this is no foolish accident. He’s trying to get right what he wasn’t able to see through in his first term.  The Covid Black Swan event crashed the markets just after his mates sold at the top of the Trump Pump in February 2020, allowing them to reload at the bottom. Fortunes were made, doubled and tripled.

February: The US is officially in recession, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, having expanded since June 2009 after China floated the global economy out of America’s Great Crash, 2008. … 13 February 2020: US politicians dump their stocks a week before the Covid market crash “Black Swan” event.

Maybe he wants to repeat the magic. Maybe he’s got the taste for extortion with menaces. A grand heist, fortune favouring the brilliant criminal mind and all that and here’s the Joker back in the White House with all his little friends.

In this latest round of feckry — Trump Mk II: the sequel – this time everybody gets whacked — his gang raced straight off the starting blocks, moving fast and breaking everything in sight.

Now it’s the turn of the economy to enter the crosshairs of the dreaded trade war trashing. Again. 

In 2018 I wrote a piece pointing out the erroneous claims about huge deficits (looks bigger in tiny hands) by Trump and Democrats alike in their aim to carve-up a rising China: What’s Trump’s trade war REALLY about?

US President Donald Trump’s trade war on the upcoming nation has little to do with the purported goods deficit of over $300bn. As Gary Cohn, former Goldman Sachs supremo and Trump’s ousted top economic advisor, pointed out at the recent Bloomberg conference in Singapore, the sum does not, as claimed by Trump, represent a loss of money. It actually means over $300bn of goods that Americans were able to buy cheaply, as if you’d spent at Walmart or T K Maxx, or if you’d bought groceries from the supermarket. Having consumed the goods they sold you, you wouldn’t then demand your money back with menaces. Presumably.

Even back then, the US deficit didn’t include fortunes made by US corporations in-country sales and services to China which was estimated at $24 billion in 2018. The US runs a services surplus of around $20 billion. Plus US corporations make around $40 billion in profit. Which brings the goods deficit down from $279 (in 2023) by a good chunk to a total deficit of $219 billion. But the facts don’t support his sophisticated “Look what they done to me, waa!” thesis.

They were all at it. Schumer accused China of manipulating currency down when they’d spent vast amounts of their reserves propping up the yuan. And that was according to the West’s US financial press like Bloomberg and the FT.

MAGA supporters hail his latest moves as “genius”: pushing money out of the stock market and into Treasuries to force Powell’s hand at the FED and make him cut interests rates under threat of a recession or worse. That means 401K pensions and other institutional investments up in smoke.

Forcing companies to build factories in the US, having already gone to the expense of setting up new operations in the likes of Vietnam and Cambodia to keep prices down for American consumers – see above what my mummy taught me. Costly, capricious and unaffordable.

Can’t keep egg prices down? Pauperise farmers by forcing them to sell at home at lower prices in a screaming economy. Farmers are already suffering losses of soybean and rice sales to China. Why not go the whole hog? Not that anyone’s bringing home the bacon any more.

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