Is the Trump Project Unravelling?
Alastair Crooke:
"The ‘Tech Bros’ vision is wildly radical; it is ‘authoritarian libertarianism’. Peter Thiel, for example, argues that a small posse of Oligarchs should rule the empire, unfettered by any democratic limitation; that the future should be based in ‘disruptive technology’; be robotic and AI driven; and that the populace should be tightly ‘managed’ through AI control.
The Trump Economic Team’s vision is quite different: Trump’s own primordial objective – to which geo-politics is subordinate – is to shore up the dollar as the world’s main trading currency. This objective however can only be sustained through addressing America’s unsustainable debt overhang.
The overhang reflects the imbalance that built up after 1970 when the U.S. trade account slipped into deficit: On the one hand, the U.S. has facilitated an exaggeratedly large sphere of global dollar indebtedness to splurge worldwide; but at the same time, this massive inverted pyramid of debt rests on a diminutive and shrinking American production base.
In other words, whilst America benefited enormously from these capital inflows, it can no longer expect to grow itself out of its own, self-created debt-trap.
Team Trump proposes to address this imbalance through devaluing the dollar (perhaps by up to 30%), by corporate tax cuts (to induce a return of overseas manufacturing to the U.S.), and thus bringing about a managed shrinkage of the offshore dollar debt cloud relative to U.S. productive capacity.
To be clear, this does not solve the debt problem – It just buys time.
The Tariff ‘shock and awe’ strategy was intended to frighten the world into making unwise deals to accommodate this schema. The U.S. pressure on states for greater NATO defence spending too, similarly follows U.S. ‘bankruptcy best practice’ for the restructuring of existing creditors.
So far, this has not worked out as planned, due in major part to Chinese resistance. As a result, the U.S. bond-market (debt market) remains today on tenderhooks, with every auction a nail-biter.
Over simplifying things – one can see that the populist MAGA base are insisting on a return to a real human economy and well-paid employment prospects versus the contrasting dystopian view of theTech Bros, who see only a (non-human) disruptive tech, robotic and AI future. These visions are completely at odds with each other.
The problem here is obvious: The values of the Populist revolutionaries run counter to those venture-capitalist backers of Trump – such as Peter Thiel, David Sachs, Elon Musk or Marc Andreessen.
How might this be resolved? The MAGA fear is that the Silicon Valley Oligarchs possibly could rejoin the Democrats in time for the Mid-Term Congressional elections. Or even that Musk could launch a centrist Third Party (an idea that he has already mooted on social media)."
https://www.unz.com/acrooke/is-the-trump-project-unravelling/