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After needlessly alienating nearly every ally the United States has developed over the last half-century, Donald Trump is now in the process of launching an uncontrollable escalation of tariff wars that looks a lot like the economic equivalent of World War III. 

Trump’s original excuse for tariffs was that he wanted to pressure Mexico and Canada into stopping the traffic of fentanyl, the synthetic narcotic that, to a large extent, has replaced heroin and cocaine as the drug of choice for many Americans. Trump’s tariffs have since expanded to include just about anyone trading with the United States. Fentanyl has been all but forgotten. 

Calling it like it is, it seems increasingly clear that Trump’s ultimate fiscal goal is to shave enough money off the national budget to justify renewing the massive tax breaks to corporations and America’s wealthiest billionaires. Those tax breaks, instituted during Trump’s first term, are due to sunset at the end of this year. If they are renewed without substantial cost-cutting elsewhere, the national debt is likely to skyrocket into the stratosphere. That makes cutting costly services essential to Trump’s agenda. The rest is pretty much a smokescreen. 

The Beauty of Tariffs in the Eye of the Beholden Trump

Trump sees the regressive taxation embodied in tariffs as an appealing substitute for the progressive tax on income. Why overburden the rich, goes that train of thought, when you can soak everyone else? But even without the tax issue, tariffs hold a great attraction for Trump: They provide a sudden influx of cash, which the president can then use pretty much as he wants. 

Elon Musk’s wrecking ball approach to America’s civil service is similarly motivated. Musk claims that he wants to stop bureaucratic bloat and end corruption. However, the gaggle of computer-savvy twenty-somethings that Musk has unleashed on the civil service have little or no idea of how government actually works. The people who do know how to cut waste have been fired in the massive wave of senseless cuts. 

Improving government service is pretty clearly not the goal; the real objective is to slash government spending regardless of the consequences. Again, the cost-cutting is intended to enable Trump’s tax cuts to continue. 

What Trump is offering is a kind of bait and switch. The tax cuts offer only a negligible advantage to middle-income families, but if you are a major corporation or a billionaire, they are a real boon. 

The original idea behind the graduated income tax was that the wealthiest segment of society should pay a larger percentage of their income to keep society going than the poorer segments, who barely earn enough money to survive from paycheck to paycheck. Estimates vary with specific criteria but, as of the beginning of this year, between a third and two-thirds of Americans fell into that unfortunate group. 

Trump’s last campaign was financed by billionaires who expect a return on their investment. Trump is doing everything he can to deliver, and he’s got plenty of help.

Tariffs raise the price of just about everything. In a sense, they constitute a sales tax on everything you buy. That includes groceries and other essentials. If you are Elon Musk, currently the world’s richest man, the price increases are barely noticeable. If you are in the lower income brackets and have to work two jobs to make ends meet, you are quickly priced out of the market. If you are an average American, say a public school teacher, the shift to tariffs quickly turns into pure budgetary hell. 

Trump couldn’t care less. The idea that fair taxes are really an investment in society’s well-being is alien to him. He has spent most of his life trying to avoid anything resembling social responsibility. 

Even more to the point, his last campaign was financed by billionaires who expect a return on their investment. Trump is doing everything he can to deliver, and he’s got plenty of help. An undercurrent of the MAGA belief that all government is bad was simmering among conservatives long before Trump. The original anti-tax activist Grover Norquist used to brag that his dream was to drag the government into the bathroom and drown it in a bathtub. 

Empathy as Weakness: From Nietzsche to Hitler to Musk

Musk’s wrecking crew is attempting to do just that. Slashing government services until there is nothing left may cause enormous pain, but Musk doesn’t care. In a three-hour interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Musk explained that while he feels that it is right to care about other people, he also considers empathy — caring for the feelings of others — to be one of Western civilization’s greatest weaknesses and a potential cause of civilizational suicide. 

Musk is not the first to make that argument. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued that the Christian and Jewish religions were fundamentally weak because of their concern for others. Adolf Hitler, who admired Nietzsche, took the reasoning a few steps further and promoted man’s primal, unrestrained nature. That nature turned out to be brutal. 

Regardless of which philosophy Musk chooses to follow, Trump clearly likes the results. The fact that he is managing the tax money that others have paid and that was originally intended to provide services needed to make America thrive doesn’t seem to concern him.  

Apart from gambling with our money, Trump and his MAGA conservatives appear to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what is really at stake for the country as a whole. 

The Value of Education and the Stupidity of Gutting It

There is hardly anything new about considering education expendable, and yet uneducated segments of the population are less productive, less competitive, and more of a costly burden to society than those who are educated and productive. Nearly every immigrant coming to the US from a Third World country knows this. That’s why their first objective is to educate their children and move up in the world. 

The poorest, least productive states in the US are the ones that spend the least on education. Poverty continues to be a problem in these mostly red states and yet no one seems capable of putting two and two together and recognizing the cause of their underdevelopment. 

Musk and Trump’s decision to cut the staff of the Department of Education in half and eventually eliminate the department altogether means that poor children who depend on public school lunches for nutrition will probably have to go hungry — that, or go out in the street and start to steal or become part of the fentanyl industry that Trump claims he wants to stop. High school graduates hoping to go to college will find it even more difficult to apply for government aid. 

Why Worry About Ruining Earth When You’ve Got Mars?

Eventually, going down this road, the country will be in an even greater mess than it is today. While Trump feels that the pain is justified if that’s what it takes to cut the budget in order to follow through on his pledge to renew his tax breaks for rich people, Musk has visions of flying to Mars. 

Forget that Mars resembles an empty parking lot covered with red dust. Musk is determined to escape planet Earth, and if that means destroying the planet we happen to be living on in order to do it, well, why not? In monetary terms, the cost to taxpayers of federal funds already flowing into Musk’s companies dealing with space travel and electric vehicles adds up to roughly $38 billion. In human terms, the cost is likely to be considerably higher. 

Trump’s real objectives tend to be opaque because of all the other crazy things that he does. During their attempted takedown of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump and his mini-me, JD Vance, both threw undignified tantrums in front of a crowd of reporters and news photographers. That was bad enough, but Trump’s subsequent statements raised serious questions as to whether the president is actually representing the United States or might possibly be a Russian asset recruited by the KGB. 

Trump made it clear that he not only resonates emotionally with Russia’s Vladimir Putin but that he is also prepared to side with the Kremlin against NATO in the event of a showdown. To make sure that everyone got the picture, he canceled scheduled arms shipments to Ukraine and put a temporary stop to sharing US intelligence. The shared intelligence cost the US nothing and had given Ukraine advanced warning of Russian ballistic missile attacks against civilian areas. 

The immediate reaction in Europe was to question whether the US had suddenly switched camps. 

Europe’s nuclear umbrella, which relies to a large extent on Britain’s nuclear submarines and US-engineered Trident missiles, was suddenly called into question. Since British submarines and missiles are serviced in the US, there was immediate concern that Trump could pull the plug on Western defenses at any moment. 

If Trump really is the Kremlin’s man in the White House, a kind of “Manchurian Candidate,” then any reliance on the US for defense could suddenly vanish. France’s Emmanuel Macron stepped in and offered France’s nuclear submarines and missiles — its famous “force de frappe”— as a guarantee for Europe’s protection. 

Is it Ignorance, Indecency, Insanity, or All of the Above?

With his basic loyalties in doubt, Trump’s erratic behavior has also raised serious questions concerning his sanity. He might really like the Russians, but why make such a public, damaging display? In just a few missteps, Trump managed to transform the US from the leader of the Free World to its potential enemy. If Ukraine couldn’t count on the flip-flopping American president and his cabinet of crazies and incompetents, could Taiwan, which produces most of the vitally necessary integrated circuits and computer chips that power US technology, continue to rely on American support in resisting increasing encroachments by China? 

Another disturbing element to come out of the on-camera brawl with Zelenskyy was Trump’s astonishing ignorance about how much aid the US has actually given to Ukraine. The agitated president kept insisting that the US aid amounted to an outrageous $300 billion. In fact, US aid to Ukraine actually amounts to around $120 billion. In the same time frame, the European Union has given Ukraine more than $140 billion. 

The fact that the president was able to go in front of national television news cameras and not have anything approaching the correct figures means that either he is ginning up bald-faced lies about very easily checked facts or his own staff is failing him. He is clearly not being informed about what is really happening. Or he doesn’t care — he’ll just make up whatever he thinks works.

What is even more disturbing is that his cabinet seems equally uninformed about or dismissive of the reality of America today. Howard Lutnick, who now serves as Trump’s Secretary of Commerce, recently made an offhand remark on NBC television dismissing Joe Biden for having been upset about a bunch of sick chickens. Was the secretary of Commerce genuinely unaware that bird flu was forcing poultry companies to slaughter entire flocks of chickens in order to prevent the highly contagious flu from spreading?

The mass killing of chickens is one of the main reasons that the price of eggs has skyrocketed, and the rising price of eggs symbolized to a great extent the rise in inflation that helped get Trump elected. Lutnick, who may well wind up being the first political sacrifice to take the fall for Trump’s errors in this term, has flip-flopped to an extraordinary degree, first declaring that the US is not facing a recession and then admitting that, yes, it probably will go into recession. 

While Trump’s behavior raises obvious questions about his personal sanity, a number of false assumptions embedded in Republican thinking were steering things in a wrong direction even before Trump’s reelection. 

Having initially claimed that he wanted to stop inflation, Trump is now forced to admit that his policies probably will result in economic pain for an as yet undetermined period of time. Wall Street reacted with a stock market value that’s dropped around 10 percent since Trump’s inauguration. 

And Trump — who has in the past repeatedly gloated over, and taken full credit for, market gains during his tenure — now says he doesn’t care what the stock market does; he wants to change America’s economy. Wall Street simply wants a president who is less jittery. It would be far better for the economy if Trump simply sat on his hands and did nothing. 

Gradus ad Dystopia

While Trump’s behavior raises obvious questions about his personal sanity, a number of false assumptions embedded in Republican thinking were steering things in a wrong direction even before Trump’s reelection. 

The first wrong assumption is that poor people are unnecessarily profiting from government handouts and entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare. Despite the fact that Musk dismissed Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme,” anyone who has earned a salary knows that Social Security is anything but a handout. Each working person pays a hefty sum out of his or her paycheck to finance the program, on the contractual promise that retirement money will eventually be there when they stop working. 

Medicare makes healthcare affordable to people who are retired, and Medicaid makes healthcare affordable to poor people who have no other alternative. 

And these programs accomplish more than providing support to the people who need them. Their benefit to us all is that they sustain the enormous infrastructure of doctors, medical technicians, advanced medical equipment, pharmaceutical companies, and research teams that make America’s advances in modern medicine so impressive. Kill the programs and you put the doctors out of work, close the hospitals, and basically propel the country back into the dark ages of the previous century when a slight encounter with the flu could kill you. 

Close the Department of Education, and you not only create a generation that is less knowledgeable and less creative but also one less able to compete economically, provide for its own needs, and fuel the capitalist engine. Cut funding to universities and colleges, and you lose the competitive edge that until now has made the US a world leader in so many fields. 

Cut off foreign aid, which, in any case, never added up to more than 1 percent of the US budget, and you reduce subsidies to American farmers, whose produce not only helped prevent famine in other countries but also guaranteed that the US could produce enough food on its own to sustain itself in the case of an emergency. 

Stop educational projects and support in the Third World, and you encourage an entire generation that has no alternative but to either emigrate illegally to one of the rich countries or, failing that, join a rebel militia movement, or in the worst case scenario simply engage in terrorism and/or narcotics trafficking. 

The billionaire backers of Donald Trump really don’t care about any of that. They have their getaway resorts, and they want more. 

More offensively, they interpret the fact that they are wealthy as proof that they are superior. Instead of “government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” they’d prefer a Russian-style autocracy with selected oligarchs serving as modern-day feudal barons. Their objective is more and more riches for the select few, and let the rest take the scraps that remain. 

Going forward, artificial intelligence and advanced technology promise to concentrate wealth in the hands of ever fewer people. Elon Musk is an example. The factory workers of the industrial revolution are long gone, and arguments can be made that people are less and less essential to production, or even to society itself. 

The basic conundrum that most Republicans miss, however, is that if the mass of the population has no money because wealth is hoarded by a bunch of techno-robber barons, the vast mass of the population won’t be able to buy anything. 

If no one buys anything, there is no reason to produce anything. You face a downward spiral, and in the end, the economy stops. 

That is generally what happens in most rapacious tinpot dictatorships. That’s the world being promised by Donald Trump. It augurs a dismal future. The question is: How long will the rest of us continue to drink the Kool-Aid? And what will happen if and when we stop?