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While announcing his retirement from Berkshire Hathaway, the sage of Omaha, 94-year-old Warren Buffett said that “trade should not be a weapon.”
Yet, trade is a weapon.
It is Trump’s weapon.
He is using his weapon exactly like George Custer once did — with the same amount of care, but more about that a bit later on.
What should not be so, is.
Nazi Germany should not have invaded Poland and started the Second World War.
The Japanese should not have bombed Pearl Harbor and declared war on the United States.
Lyndon Johnson should not have sent ground combat troops to Vietnam.
George Bush should not have invaded Iraq.
Yet, all of these things happened.
There is something you need to know.
Trade wars precede war.
Donald Trump declared war on the whole world at once, and he is losing.
Make no mistake that it is a war and it is happening.
What has come to pass simply is.
After a long season of warnings — all ignored — it is too late to stop the flood.
There is no place to run and no place to hide.
When it comes to the insanity at hand and the looming devastation of the American economy it is too late to stop the catastrophe.
There was time, but it has all slipped away.
Donald’s war is a war of madness and aggression.
Like all wars launched by whim, on foundations of madness and aggression, the generals are zealots and sycophants who act to please their dictator in the moment. They tell him what he wants to hear — especially when it isn’t true.
Lying to sate the ego is the very definition of courage in all autocratic systems.
Trump loves Howard Lutnick because Howard Lutnick loves power and Trump:
“We've got so much as I travel around, the attention on the Trump gold card. I mean, it makes me very popular. Last night, I was out to dinner, and someone came up and said, ‘Can I buy 10? And how do I buy 10?’ And I'm like, that's pretty good. It's $50 million for dinner. So, you know, it's paying for my dinner.
The bigger the fool, the more they are loved.
There is no cap on sycophancy around Trump, so the war was begun with no plan, no strategy and no vision for how it ends.
It was launched by Trump’s ego, was drafted by incompetents, and executed by nihilists.
The results will be ruinous for scores of tens of millions of Americans who have no idea how the global economy functions.
The Wall Street Journal ran a profile on a man named Ryan Petersen, founder of FlexPort, whom they described this way:
Most people have no clue how their stuff moves around the world.
But a few years ago, when a gigantic containership got stuck in the Suez Canal, lots of people suddenly found themselves captivated by supply-chain logistics. This was Ryan Petersen’s chance to geek out.
As the founder and chief executive of Flexport, which helps companies move all kinds of stuff from wherever it’s made to wherever it’s sold, Petersen was perfectly situated to explain the traffic jam in a clear way. Once the boat was unstuck, he even published a children’s picture book called “The Big Ship and the Little Digger,” turning the complexities of ocean freight and global trade into simple language that anyone could understand.
Now he’s doing it again to make another crisis accessible—and not for a bunch of children.
This time, Petersen is explaining to anyone who will listen why hefty U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports could be catastrophic for America’s small businesses.
Petersen put it this way:
If they don’t change the tariffs, it’s going to be an extinction-level, asteroid-wiping-out-the-dinosaurs kind of event. Only these aren’t dinosaurs. These are dynamic, healthy businesses.
Simple question: do you know how a refrigerator works? As Molson Hart, a FlexPort customer, explains in this same WSJ article:
Supply chains are like refrigerators. Everyone needs them. No one knows how they work.
How about your car engine? Electricity?
Do you know how a well works?
Donald Trump did something even the very stupidest general in the world understands is the dumbest thing a commander could do.
He started a two-front war — only in Donald’s case it was a 90-front war and he was surrounded in seconds.
How stupid is all of this?
How unnecessary?
There are no words and none are necessary. The experience coming will not soon be forgotten.
Millions enthralled to a cult of malice will have their dependency broken Jonestown-style.
Now, some may say that figuring out who Jim Jones was didn’t help the people whom he murdered.
True enough.
In the end, he couldn’t actually raise them from the dead, but his death and pictures like this made it harder for the next cult leader to recruit for the next massacre:
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Yet, it isn’t too soon to describe the nature of the stupidity that will result in catastrophe.
There are examples.
This is one of my favorites because as a strategist, thinker and leader there is really only one person as profoundly dumb as Donald John Trump. His name was George Armstrong Custer. Appreciating him will help you understand the moment.
Please feel free to forward to all of your MAGA friends and relatives, and do it without anger or malice. Instead, do it with charity because none of this is academic anymore.
They will suffer greatly.
The chances that Trump was a secret genius and that Trump derangement syndrome were a real thing have all been disproven by events, and reduced to absolute zero over the first 100 days of his term.
There are no plants returning, no jobs coming back, no golden age, no nothing.
America will be weaker, poorer and isolated. All of it will be because of Donald Trump, his henchmen and women, and the easily conned and deeply ignorant American voter.
America is in crisis because Donald Trump was narrowly elected president of the United States in 2016.
The crisis worsened when he refused to concede his defeat in 2020.
It deepened when he incited an insurrection against the peaceful transition of power with a fusillade of lies.
What comes next is catastrophe.
What began as a farce — a TV show of sorts, a ratings magnet that fueled cable news the way that the OJ trial did — quickly degenerated into something that proved the wisdom of John Kennedy’s admonishment about winding up in the belly of the tiger for the fools who think the tiger can be ridden.
Waves of meanness, capriciousness, cruelty, insanity and nonsense spewed forth from Trump and his family, while the overwhelming majority of the American media was the last to figure out that Trump meant every word of his toxic Borscht Belt schtick.
Trump was feted and celebrated by America’s media mandarins, who saw a golden calf, where most saw an orange buffoon.
They loved the ratings, and were mostly blind to the autocratic movement that was congealing underneath the bed from which Trump called in to so many morning shows.
There were rarely challenges or confrontation. In fact, did anyone ever ask him a probing question about what he believes concerning freedom and dissent?
Of course not.
Mostly, there were giggles and little inside jokes.
With a few exceptions, Trump steamrolled everyone in front of him with the same ease that he emasculated and humiliated Jeb, Little Marco and Ted Cruz.
Ambitious men with no core, great ambitions and fragile egos seem to be a particular, susceptible prey for Trump.
They are hapless seals to his malevolent shark.
Can you imagine the conversation in the moments before Justin Trudeau, JoMika, or any of the capitulant elites who have made the Mar-a-Lago pilgrimage arrive to kiss the ring?
Ten years have passed since Donald Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator, and initiated the series of events that would lead to the great American crisis of the 21st century — and one of the greatest in American history.
It is important to remember that without the work of the American political media and transactional political journalists, trust would likely not have collapsed in every consequential American institution over the last 30 years.
The last holdout was the military, but even the Armed Forces couldn’t hold the integrity line.
This collapse of trust and the inability of so many media stars to understand that they possess somewhere between none to little is startling to observe.
All of it begs some questions:
How stupid is this moment?
How much dumber can it get?
George Armstrong Custer was dumb.
Very dumb.
How dumb?
American political media dumb.
DOGE dumb.
Though he was dumb, he was also very brave, which makes him better than his contemporary peers, who possess none of his virtues.
He graduated last in his class from West Point, and then took it from there.
After the Civil War in which he fought valiantly as the youngest Union general and a fearless cavalry leader, he headed west to fight the Lakota.
One day, Custer peeled off from his men and chased after a buffalo.
He rode off by himself in hostile country, drew his revolver to shoot the magnificent bison, and blew his horse’s brains out instead.
The horse collapsed, and Custer was thrown, alone and lost. He was saved by the random passing of a few of his men.
What’s the point of the story?
It’s simple. It’s the only example I can think of to properly illustrate the stupidity of Donald’s tariff war.
This country is in crisis because the concept of democracy is in danger.
It is endangered because of the lassitude of the citizenry, the malice of a fascist movement, and a dishonest billion-dollar media industry that revels in conflict.
At the same time, it is repulsed by the truth because it is too contentious for the liars who demand coddling and accommodation in the name of “balance” and “fairness.”
The American media isn’t a stakeholder in the epic fight underway for American democracy besides being billion-dollar economic players.
That’s the only “balance” they are interested in.
All the democracy talk is marketing schtick.
They don’t mean a word. The problem is that the fascists mean everything they say. That’s the truth.
They have conviction, and mostly, the opposition does not.
It is what makes this a tragedy.
It’s a tragedy that should not be, but is.
Just like Donald’s trade war.
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