It's taken me a long time to escape the standard analysis of Trump as chaotic and unhinged. It's almost impossible to get free of the effects of the culture and the smartypants analysts who create it. Watching the tariff madness unfold and listening to Andrew Klavan and 2Way has given me a new model for how Trump works. Here's my take on it.
Imagine that you've got an artillery battery. You want your barrage to hit some place within a sector that is 60 degrees wide and no less than 5000 yards away. You're not sure where you will end up targeting, but it doesn't really matter so long as you are somewhere in that wedge of the circle and no less than 5000 yards away.
Your spotting rounds are fired straight in front of you with a range of 15,000 yards. The enemy responds and you gradually dial in your targeting until you are firing ± 30 degrees from your original direction and more than 5000 yards from where you are. That's Trump.
Trump decides what he wants and then asks for the moon. The other side screams at him, but since Trump has America and they have some much weaker position, they negotiate. Eventually, he gets something better than what he had before. That ± 30 degrees gives him a ton of room to negotiate.
Tariffs As An Example
In the tariff wars, Trump said he wanted to eliminate trade deficits. In retrospect, I think even Trump knew that was idiocy. However, it was way beyond where he was willing to accept. Everyone took him at his word and went into spasms of horror.
Incidentally, I did, too. That's what I mean when I say it's very hard to escape the zeitgeist generated by the Super Smart Set Who Don't Actually Know Much Of Anything And Who Have Been Wrong About A Lot Of Things For Decades (SSSWDAKMOAWHBWAALOTFD).
Crucial to Trump's tactic of asking for the moon is to do it with the full force of whatever appropriate power he has on hand. For example, the Houthis discovered that carrier air power beats speed boats and tents in the desert. They are still learning this lesson as is the rest of the world. Trump will back up what he says with a ginormous hammer.
The Chinese discovered that Trump knows when he has all the high cards and they, as Scott Bessent said, hold a pair of 2s. I spent a little time with Grok the other day looking at who has the upper hand in the trade war between America and China. It's pretty one-sided. Here are just a few things to keep in mind.
We have the world's reserve currency. When we print money, we get inflation, but everyone still wants to hold dollars. When China prints money, they end up with piles of yuan that no one wants.
Our trade is asymmetrical. Symmetric tariffs hit them 5x harder than they hit us because they export 5x to us than we do to them.
They hold Treasuries, but selling them undermines the yuan. Their Treasury holdings are part of what backs up their currency because dollars are hard currency and yuan are not. Their threat to sell Treasuries is a one-shot deal. Once they sell them, they're gone. Yes, they did sell some recently and yes, that hurt us, but they can only sell as many as they have, but then they're all out of them and the yuan is more exposed than ever.
China's debt problem is about 50% worse than ours. Most of their debt is corporate, so it is semi-hidden, but since they are a socialist nation, there is no difference between Chinese corporate debt and Chinese government debt.
China services that mountain of debt through exports. If we reduce their trade surplus, it gets really hard for them to pay their mortgages. Oof.
Trump Is Sane, But He's Different
Contrary to what the SSSWDAKMOAWHBWAALOTFD would have you believe, Trump is not a madman. He's just not them. China is a bad actor on the world stage and has been getting stronger. Their demographics give them a deadline to exert maximum power, but that is still far off. In the meantime, if your enemy is getting stronger, then it's better to take him on today instead of tomorrow.
The SSSWDAKMOAWHBWAALOTFD don't think this way which is why they are horrified and believe we should be horrified as well.
I'm not horrified any more.
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| There are plenty of targets, so anything vaguely in front of you will do. |
2 comments:
I don't think the problem is that Trump is insane, as such. The problem is that he is 78 years old, and has the mental acuity that you would expect from someone that age. You may be right that he is using the same strategies he used all of his life, but the problem is he has lost most of the attention span and ability to concentrate that he needs to pull them off.
He may have goals that he is trying to accomplish, but he is making a lot of mistakes in the process because he just can't think as well as he used to. He may end up getting his way, more or less, just because of the advantages that he commands due to being President of the US. But, it looks to me like he is steadily whittling away those advantages, wasting them without corresponding gains. He simply is not up to the job.
And, he is surrounded by people who see an opportunity to manipulate him into doing what they want. The problem is that there are several of these people, and they all want different things. And as a result, Trump appears to be madly whipsawing from one policy to another, depending on who it was who spoke to him last.
I'm not so much horrified, as not sure how to deal with a situation where the President is obviously trying to get people to do what he wants, but seems unwilling or unable to tell anyone what it is that he wants, exactly.
It is complicated by the fact that when he talks about Critical Minerals (an area I know rather a lot about), it is clear that he and his advisors have a very poor understanding of the topic. And, from my direct experience, his actions are actually hurting our supply of critical minerals rather than helping. So if I know they are ignorant in one area where they are pretending to know what they are talking about, why should I believe that they have expertise in any of the other areas where they claim to know what they are talking about, either?
SSSWDAKMOAWHBWAALOTFD is just great!
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