Many people seem to keep making the mistake of taking Trump’s words at face value. This is partly the fault of the media, which hangs onto everything he says because he is their golden goose. Furthermore, there is the desire to keep finding some kind of logic in Trump’s actions.
The problem is, we keep projecting our own logic onto the Trump admin. We think, “what would we do if we were American imperialists?” Which leads us, and many analysts (like yanis) to think about the Trump admin as if they were cavalry reinforcements arriving unexpectedly in the darkest hour of western imperialism to save it.
In reality, the Trump admin simply wants to impose unequal trade treaties on his allies and get them to spend more on weapons. His fearmongering and negging is his style of salesmanship.
The fact that the Trump admin keeps flip flopping on tariffs, resumed military aid to Ukraine, tried to pull that stunt with the “30 day ceasefire” (in ukraine) and the ceasefire in Palestine has broken down all show that the Trump administration has as much of a master plan as a shitty SV startup trying to attract VC funding.
What worries me is that the Europeans are falling for this con a second time! Trump literally did the same shit in his first term and got the euros to up their NATO spending! The fact that the Europeans can’t even act in self interest or see through the tactics of a used car salesman is horrifying to see in first person. These people have nukes.
My reading of it is that Trump will indeed bluster and say random shit whenever given a microphone, which will be milked by all corporate newsmedia but does not necessarily translate into policy, but at least during his first presidency the stuff that actually got enacted had some kind of class interest behind it.
So building an actual brick wall was pointless, but ICE arresting immigrants at random was very useful for silencing the hyperexploited migrant workers. Same thing with withholding arms to Ukraine back then for domestic political goals, it also aligned with Trump openly trying to reduce tensions with Russia. There were many other such cases of random bullshit being used to push policy that upheld some class interests. I don’t think he is smart and is playing 4D chess, but back then he must have had actual imperialist strategists trying to make do with whatever strange thing he said this week. Which, when it worked, Qanon folks would retroactively use to believe Trump was a genius.
This time though, I’m starting to believe the actual strategists are long gone and all they have is sycophants and other rich fucks disconnected from reality. Trump is loose to do whatever he wants, and so we get flip flopping tariffs, Greenland annexation and other such Yankee nonsense. He is the personification of USAmerican imperialist cultural superstructure.