Trump Time: It’s hard to make sense of a coherent American strategy amid the contradictory messaging

 

...It’s hard to make sense of a coherent American strategy amid the contradictory messaging, regular reality-show taunts, and constant flip-flopping – sold as the oddest of negotiating tools that alienates more than rallies others to the MAGA cause – but despite losing more than 600,000 jobs under NAFTA the tariffs are a ruse designed in part to slow the change from brown to green. Tariffs will not raise revenue, return supply chains to the United States, or “reshore” American manufacturing jobs hollowed out of rusted industrial regions. Billion-dollar factories require planning, investment, and tax breaks over at least a decade, not anarchic policies, market uncertainty, and the loss of investor and consumer confidence....

...American infrastructure is for sale to the highest bidder, including an eventual state-run TikTok sell-off to Trump’s tax-slashing billionaire tech pals as well as Space-X contracts for First Buddy Musk, whose Starlink company owns 60% of 10,000 earth-orbiting satellites. No surprise that space-launch support was spared the chainsaw in Musk’s DOGE clear-out. Next up, a “free trade zone” designation for his expanding empire in Bastrop, Texas, and relaxed regulation on autonomous driving for Tesla’s long-promised fleet of robotaxis. Insider trading is part of the quid pro quo, as in a “Good time to buy!!! DJT” social-media post hours before Trump announced a 90-day tariff pause using the NASDAQ ticker symbol for his company.

After four decades of outsourcing manufacturing to cheap-labour foreign markets (especially Mexico), Tesla also benefits from the tariffs on non-American-sourced cars, because 60% of the youngest American carmaker’s content is domestically produced. As Bernstein auto analyst Daniel Roeska noted, “Tesla is the clear structural winner” from the Trump tariffs, while Detroit’s Big Three, Japan, Korea, and Germany will suffer more because of larger foreign supply chains. It helps to have the ear and mouth of a salesman president using the White House as a backdrop for a new kind of showroom as Trump’s million-dollar donor is rewarded at the expense of American carmakers and workers....

Trump’s Medicine Show is killing the patient as trade reorganizes without the US.

Trump’s callous advice to “hang tough” is okay for millionaires, but not average consumers as prices rise and jobs are shed (a 25% tariff on a $100,000 car won’t deter a millionaire). ...

The me-first preacher is at war with the world to advance his own greedy Amexit agenda, one more interested in work than workers, reduced governance, and a tax-slashing oligarchy. The reality-show banter may continue to dazzle those who think Trump’s sub-literate and low-IQ thinking is a solution to what ails the world, including his Republican supporters, who should all know by now that Trump is an elitist libertarian to the bone, Republican in name only, the dreaded RINO moniker he uses to mock GOP critics.

John K. White, a former lecturer in physics and education at University College Dublin and the University of Oviedo. He is the editor of the energy news service E21NS and author of The Truth About Energy: Our Fossil-Fuel Addiction and the Transition to Renewables (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and Do The Math!: On Growth, Greed, and Strategic Thinking (Sage, 2013). He can be reached at: johnkingstonwhite@gmail.com

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/04/30/the-united-states-versus-china-tesla-byd-and-the-trump-follies/