I found myself on a recent Judging Freedom episode saying that Trump as statesman tweets too much. In retrospect, who am I to tell the President or anyone else to stop talking; it’s anti-liberty and rude. Yet, it may be good advice; saying too much can help “enemies” to shape public opinion, and even to target Trump specifically.
Getting the dirt on a country’s leader – the intentions, the predilections, their secrets and their open confessions, tweets and threats – and using that dirt strategically is an intelligence function. It’s what humans do on their own and in the employ of governments and businesses. It’s part of the competition. The hunter and the hunted, the prey outwitting the predator, or vice versa.
In nature, prey animals try to stay quiet, and the predator does the same. Trump’s favorite sport is also a quiet game. Even so, in both animal and human worlds, sound and action are used to warn the group, to compete for the best mates, and even to trick prey through subterfuge and deceit. There are a variety of creatures that exhibit camouflage patterns to hide their real vulnerability, and mislead potential predators. They pose as foul-tasting or dangerous, or hide in plain sight.
Trump may be the political version of the Texas wasp moth, which appears to be a dangerous stinging insect to avoid being eaten. Is Trump the Mothman?
Trump has created a lot of diversionary noise and confusion in his role of “Statesman Seeking Peace.” His thinking on “king” dollar is a case in point, where he boldly and erroneously claims that BRICS was set up to “degenerate” or “break” the US dollar.
The average person, economist, and politician, in and out of BRICS, takes a far more evolutionary and fact-based approach. The market in money, like anything else, moves towards security, trust, familiarity, and profitability. There was a reason that the old Soviet ruble was never a natural draw for global investors – it was state-issued fiat on top of an impossible system of production, coupled with a largely made-up set of state data about that system of production. Beyond that flawed model, state corruption and propaganda is a global constant. The bigger the state, the less accountable it has to be to either domestic or international forces. Trump’s solutions for saving the dollar do not appear to include actually improving dollar security, trust, familiarity and profitability. Like the Mothman itself, Trump’s strategies are not based in the natural order.
The more Trump speaks about his global intentions and solutions, ostensibly to Make American Great Again, the more he comes across as a statist, pursuing personality-, bureaucratic-, and party-driven mandates down to the smallest detail. This kind of totalitarian obsessiveness in the Capitol is also an indicator that a nation, and its money, is in the process of dying.
Trump doesn’t like made-up data, at least when it makes him look bad. But if Trump was really interested in facts, he would take on the entire system of inflation statistics (designed to reduce government outlays in COLA). He would attack the idea that government spending should be counted as additional GDP (without consideration of the government’s compulsive serial rape and abuse of actual domestic productivity). He would end, not harangue, the Federal Reserve (which exists, as Tucker and economist Richard Werner discuss, to fund government wars on the backs of the unborn). If Trump cared about facts, he would learn something factual about the major conflicts he is funding, in Biden’s footsteps.
Statesman Trump is as uninterested in the true US impact on the world as he is about the world itself. Instead, he wants to build out a vision filled with things he does know, like nice hotels, golf courses, casinos, and boats – through diplomatic threats, trade favors and penalties, and military power. Trump’s foreign policy is just thin. Diplomatic threats, reversals, and evolving promises quickly earned him the hated descriptor “Trump Always Chickens Out.” Illustrating the lightning speed at which the world communicates outside the state, global and domestic catcalls of TACO became a tool to manipulate Trump, one he reacted to rather than controlled.
Trump’s foreign policy is thin for two reasons. First, he does not seek or demand depth of information – and summarily rejects information that contradicts his own presumptions and assumptions. For example, he heard some things he didn’t understand about Iran from his Director of National Intelligence, so he publicly threw Tulsi Gabbard under the bus. Secondly, Trump appears not to hold any substantive philosophy that helps him understand the nature of money, in particular the infective debilitation of a national economy that comes from unreasonable lie-based state-borrowing, and state-directed and incentivized money-printing. His personal experience in becoming a billionaire and surviving a number of personal debt crises in his businesses taught him that debt is a game, and if you are good at the game, you will be OK.
As to philosophy, Scott Ritter says it all when he says Trump cheats at golf. But it is Adam Smith who explains why Trump’s “statesmanship” is a problem:
…[E]very individual, it is evident, can, in his local situation, judge much better than any statesman or lawgiver can do for him. The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.
Successful “management” of a fading fiat currency burdened by unpayable trillions in US government debt requires that for every mistake, there are only two choices: aggressively correct course, or compound the errors by continuing to misunderstand or misread the environment, the rules, and the data. Trump seems to be misreading or misunderstanding the environment, the rules and the data, time after time.
Like the Texas wasp moth, he looks like he’ll do damage to the overweening state, but it’s a camouflage to ensure he can get what he really wants – applause, power, and an absolutely worthless Nobel Peace Prize.
So, does Trump talk too much, tweet too much, and threaten too much? It’s not my place to say, but I think these tendencies reveal that his vision is not to create enduring American economic health and productivity. Instead, he is happy to continue familiar, self-justified and ever-expanding DC imperialism with just a touch of fascismo in the pattern of his 20th and 21st century predecessors.
Six months in, second time around, Trump already seems frustrated. How will he react when he discovers the whole world is moving on philosophically, economically, and innovatively without America’s permission? How will he feel as he watches US vassals and beneficiaries collapsing under their own false premises, and promises, about money, state spending and war? I imagine he will tell us in a tweet, thanking us for our attention to the matter, and silently – or not – wonder if he can get a mulligan.
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