Empire's End USA

Trump is Gorbachev, and the Great Trump Toddler Tariff Tantrum proves it

The Great Trump Toddler Tariff Tantrum that we have all been living through is so very Trump – blunt like a baseball bat, burn-it-down-first-figure-out-the-consequences-later reckless, and attention-grabbing like Kim Kardashian – that it is easy to forget that Donald Trump is merely human, too.

The now 47th US president has an extraordinary gift for occupying center stage. Yet, as Karl Marx wrote almost two hundred years ago with reference to France’s Napoleon III, another bigger-than-life “global disrupter” leading his country into a fiasco, “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please […] but under circumstances existing already.”

And if the co-founder of “scientific Communism” isn’t your thing, take it from the other side: Arch billionaire capitalist and creator of the world’s largest hedge fund Ray Dalio is warning us that the current tariff brouhaha, fundamentally driven by Trump’s crude ideas about how to re-industrialize the US, is obscuring what is really at stake: namely, a “once-in-a-lifetime event”: a “classic breakdown of the major monetary, political, and geopolitical orders.”