Same Days Mail

Can someone please let Trump starve? At this point, he’s blackmailing donors, not trade partners. On what grounds are they pumping up tariffs for everyone if they do not bend the knee? Oil, geopolitics, data, tech, every sphere of US policy (domestic) is projected onto people who have no other way but to go on feeding the monster (even drugs). It’s a pernicious logic and a very short-sighted (albeit cynical) strategy that plays Russian roulette with the global order (oh, forget about it) and the security architecture post-War. We depend on clear markers, style and function (substance) of sovereignty. The world cannot go on letting everything drip on the will of an [arrogant], uneducated and obese child. Let them drop into the hellish, postapocalyptic nightscape that 118.8% debt/GDP looks like along with $1.78 trillion in budget deficit. No one will pay your way out of your intellectual, moral and industrial decline. Do you think we’ll sit there quietly and wait until you buy enough of our products? Are you seriously thinking that decoupling is a knife that cuts both ways?

Let me share with you some very basic liberal Economics: productivity and wealth reside with productive capacity (Austrian Economics 101). Hoping your income can support a dwindling infrastructure that you have once again abandoned to your weird-ass fascist version of trickle-down economics. You have left your country and its people (its workers, its educators, its entrepreneurs and its young generation) without funds for schools and colleges, housing (crisis) and health insurance. And you expect this famine of a nation to produce goods, tools and machines? Are you high on your own supply of stupid mission? You pulled the trigger and the gun keeps firing, but the world does not revolve around a single idea, or a single country, or an ally (however glamorous they may seem). You are not the only kid kicking the ball in the block. Greater powers than your empty, lurid play of “dare me” are around. They can take you on Realpolitik. Eurasia, including Europe, Russia, and China, were born long before your era of grandeur, working with capital (people), land and institutions that will be around long after this trade war. It’s a mistake, really, to confuse cheek with force. Indian imports of oil, Spain beefing their defense spending, European rules on the Single Market (crucially, the digital framework) are things you can try to mess with, but overplaying your hand so simply and handsomely comes at a deeper, toxic cost that will linger on after any outcome to the power struggle.

You are never to be trusted with bona fides, not making a difference in the short-term but turning everything against you in the long-term (the international law and affairs run on expectations, too -if not historically/ entirely, and throwing your weight around like an over-zealous idiot helps to dispel any rule of communication: either workable, or repairable. Voluble as the approach is, the fact is that you cannot rule the world and torch it at the same time. So hoping to gun everyone until they fall in line might end up killing you. On top of lecturing on behalf of the great tradition of the Appalachians the European Union on free speech, another favorite is the pressure to tinker with the DMA (the Digital Market Act, carefully bred by the indefatigable Vestager). The fact remains that American and European interests are surreptitiously diverging, and that the Single Market cannot afford the luxury of having tech giants eat away what competition they have been fixing in place for more than a half century now.

Yes, making America great again takes clear thinking and unapologetic reasoning with the countries (or the system) that owe it their welfare. Yes, courage is very often, and naturally, mixed with pride. But have you met the Commission, Mr. Vance? Have you encountered anything other than yourself, with an open mind about the nature of greatness, the limits of identity or the muscle of heritage? You will find that acting out on privilege is seldom respected.