'"Bloodbath" and the President's Ass: Why Trump Started and Curtailed the Trade War: Did the U.S. President Achieve What He Wanted?'

A Russian POV

In yet another RT article, “Why Trump quickly rolled back the global trade war,” that is altered beyond what the original said, I’ve translated the original Gazeta.ru article, whose full title is above and meshes with the prevailing global opinions of Trump’s actions. There appears to be a rather strong global consensus which is why there are so many similar points-of-view, this one being Russian:

"Well, now I've seen everything." I've already lost count of how many times I've said this phrase to myself in recent months. Once again, you have to amuse yourself with the illusion that now all the views are definitely seen, as Donald Trump makes another mess—-and here you are, dumbfounded, looking at one point again and trying to understand what exactly in this life you have missed.

That's right, Trump is rampaging again. American liberals and suspicious Europeans are no longer enough for him. The US president decided to drive the whole world crazy and chose the most "Trumpian" means for this—a world trade war.

Not that it was a surprise.

In early February, he threw a trial balloon by imposing tariffs against Canada and Mexico. The US president demanded that they more actively fight against migration and drug supplies, and Ottawa and Mexico City quickly entered into dialogue. Apparently, this convinced Trump that the tariff stick works and it is possible to try to apply it on a more global scale.

Well, Trump tried. It turned out, I must say, wildly entertaining. While these lines were being written, global stock exchanges, along with oil prices, were going to hell, the world economy was predicting a recession, Americans were buying basic necessities in a panic, the media were competing to see who could call the chaos more witty, and the White House was diligently pretending that everything was going according to plan.

And the plan turned out to be simple, it was very clearly set out by the US president himself–-to force everyone to "kiss his ass". Trump's classic "psychopath" strategy: immediately throw out something wild in order to bring partners to dialogue, then as a "gesture of goodwill" take a step back and try to get concessions from them. In this case, concessions should concern the improvement of the trade balance and the transfer of production back to America.

At the same time, this time the US president almost outplayed himself. The trade war against the whole world at once turned out to be a big shock, primarily for ordinary Americans. They felt a threat to their well-being from reports of a recession in America, so Trump's approval ratings plummeted, and the opinion began to prevail in the public field that the US president and his team showed themselves, to put it mildly, not very smart people.

Widespread outrage has allowed the opposition Democratic Party to finally mount its first organized push back against Trump. The day before, anti-tariff rallies were held throughout the United States, the driving force of which was liberal activists. The US President was personally criticized by Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, and Congressman Al Green said that he was launching impeachment proceedings against him (if it’s given the green light, it will be Trump's third).

Fermentation began even in the camp of the President of the United States. First of all, the Senate Republicans, who are traditionally less loyal to Trump than their colleagues in the House of Representatives of the US Congress, "woke up". Several people signed a resolution demanding the removal of tariffs from Canada and supported Democrats' attempts to push through a bill that would limit Trump's authority to impose trade tariffs.

In addition, the head of the Senate Commerce Committee, Republican Ted Cruz, warned of a potential "bloodbath" for his party in the 2026 midterm elections if Trump's tariffs lead the US economy into recession.

Both Wall Street tycoons and businessmen who supported Trump during the election campaign were outraged. The voice of the disgruntled was, oddly enough, the "first friend" of the US President Elon Musk, whose business is strongly tied to trade with China and other Asian countries. He did not attack Trump personally, but his trade adviser Peter Navarro got it. He is, in Musk's words, an "idiot" and "dumber than a bag of potatoes."

Probably, this is why trade wars turned out to be so rapid. They are too dangerous for the United States itself and can bring too many costs to Trump and his team if they drag on. As a result, on April 9, Trump announced that 75 countries had asked him for a deal, and from the "lord's shoulder" he threw off their duties of up to 10% for 90 days. Officially, in order to have time to agree. China, however, turned out to be a tougher nut to crack. The trade war with it is heating up more and more, mutual tariffs have reached 125% and continue to go up. However, sooner or later, someone will have to stop, otherwise the trade of the two largest economies in the world will collapse by 80% and no one will be happy about it.

So then I see two scenarios:

Either the US president will push trading partners to make concessions as soon as possible and finally announce a resounding victory. Or, which is more likely, he will give up halfway and go looking for a new occupation—just as he abandoned the idea of peace in Ukraine.

Note that as soon as it became clear that it would not be possible to cease fire in 24 hours or 100 days, the White House almost stopped talking about it.

Let me remind you that in the stash of unrealized brilliant ideas, Trump still has at least the "Middle East Riviera" in the Gaza Strip and the Iranian nuclear problem. So, perhaps, now I will not say that I have seen everything. Now I see that I have not seen anything yet. [My Emphasis]

Consensus by neutral geoeconomists is that China will win the trade war as its economy is fara less dependent on the Outlaw US Empire than the opposite equation, particularly the rare earths and metals that China has embargoed many of which are vital for weapons production. Many have argued why MAGA is a chimera, a pipe dream, something that can be attained but only after great effort and massive restructuring of the US economy, its politics, and government structure. Commentator RalfB, who’s a brand new Gym rat, wrote a comment on the “You make enemies” thread that screams truths that few within the Empire want to acknowledge, particularly those in power now and those now out of power for the last two generations—going back to Reaganomics, although the die was cast even before his elevation. Here’s what he wrote:

The culture of skilled labor, seeded by the medieval guilds and fully developed by the Industrial Revolution, was what made the West unstoppable for over two centuries. The RoW, while being colonized, enslaved, and generally ruthlessly screwed, at first didn't realize what the white man's advantage was; they erroneously thought it was the clever wheeling-dealing or having a more modern military.

Japan was the first to catch on; the Meiji statesmen at first tried to emulate the Western political system, with a parliament and everything, and financial institutions, because that's what the Western propaganda said were the roots of their success. But eventually they realized it was industry, and started to modernize their own. It took them several generations, not to build the factories, but to develop a proper working class, with the right ethics: the culture of skilled laborers. But the Japanese eventually got it right, and even exceeded the standards of the West, which was already floundering under the weight of its parasites all that time.

South Korea was next; then eventually China, which has just arrived. Iran and then India are not quite there yet, but getting very close. I am an engineer, working in industry; we order a lot of modules and parts from subsuppliers around the world. Twenty years ago Chinese products had a well deserved reputation of being cheap and shoddy. Ten years ago, the bad rep was still there, but the products were mostly solid, if not stellar. Now they make parts and equipment better than the Germans, not to even mention the US; quite on par with Japanese products. Twenty years; a full generation.

But the whole process, from the start, took more; two or three generations; same as in Japan. First to build up the infrastructure, and teaching cadres for technical education. Then to turn out the first, raw cohort of industrial workers, while at the same time developing the know-how, mostly by copying others and learning by painful trial-and-error. Finally, to build the attitudes and the culture of skilled labor, which is what made the difference between the "Chinese crap" of twenty-years ago, and their cutting-edge tech of today.

The United States, and the rest of the West including Germany, meanwhile destroyed their culture of skilled labor, for profit. The destruction is complete; just as we mistrusted Chinese products recently, now (in my industry, and elsewhere) we are coming to realize that German industrial products are shoddy, and not to be trusted. And Germany is the best of the lot, they still retain some old-timers who know what they are doing. American companies fired the lot of them, demolished the facilities, and salted the ground.

All manufacturing in the West is just coasting now; producing minor variations of products that were designed by previous generation's designers, on legacy production lines that have been running for decades. That is why they were so utterly unable to accelerate ammunition production. The old production lines, at Rheinmetall and elsewhere, are still limping along, but establishing new ones is not feasible---no one knows how to build them, or get them running properly. Other industries are in the same bind, churning out the same-old widgets---as financialists disdainfully refer to industrial products---using trivially upgraded legacy designs and production lines. The only real innovation comes from abroad, mostly in the form of faster chip designs.

That is why Trump's ambition of reviving American industry with nothing but financial leverage is a pipe dream. There is no know-how anymore, no cadre of industrial workers, and the culture of skilled labor that made the West has been canceled and erased. By my estimate it would take one generation to start churning out crude, failure-prone lemons, and yet another generation to bring industry to world standards. Not the kind of timeframe Mr. Deal-artist is used to be working in.

A case in point is the ongoing attempt to transplant chip manufacturing from Taiwan to the US. The factories have largely been built, at exorbitant expense, and only because Taiwanese engineers were on hand to supervise the construction. But there are no engineers and no tech-aware managers in the US to run these factories, so Taiwanese cadres were transplanted---essentially by making them an offer they couldn't refuse---to manage these factories. But the production is still no-go, because in all the third of a billion of Americans, there is not enough skilled workers capable of working in these production lines, despite the promise of exorbitant pay. Now they are at the stage of importing slaves---er, I meant coerced-volunteer production line workers---also from Taiwan, to work in these "American" chip factories. Money is being poured in by the bucketful, but I will wager a guess: once they get the production running, the chips coming out will be so substandard, that nobody will be buying them. For years.

And that is the absolute best the US can do, with all the government and finance leverage you can get, and workforce imported wholesale. In less strategic fields the situation will be much worse. And it will be made much worse yet by the impending reverse brain drain: all the foreigners doing science and STEM education in the US, all the Chinese, Russians, Indians, Persians, and Germans whose foreign names figure on most engineering textbooks and on most STEM research papers, will soon pack up and go home, because they were here only for the living conditions---and living conditions in the US are going to hell in a basket.

There are practically no top-level American-born STEM researchers left, and the few adequate exceptions have been recruited to work on classified military projects, where foreigners are barred. And we can judge their level of know-how by observing how these projects are spectacularly failing, from the F-35 boondoggle to the hypersonics development clusterfuck, to the pratfall of Boeing orbital vehicles.

Gym readers can compare the above words to what they read about Russia’s attempts to modernize and educate their skilled personnel cadres plus build new universities and engineering schools nationwide while doing their utmost to stimulate youth into pursuit of studying natural sciences—all of which the so-called leaders of the Collective West refuse to do. Trump’s plan is to kill the Department of Education, not reform it and make it function properly. The world sees what’s happening. Some are laughing and applauding Trump’s rapid unwinding of the Outlaw US Empire. Others are cautious given Trump’s proven unpredictable volatility and control of nuclear weapons. And then there’s his stupendous level of dishonesty, but then we’ve had similar levels of dishonesty at the helm of the Outlaw US Empire for most of my 69 years. I hope to live to see an honest POTUS. And I’m sure the Gym’s American readers will like to see the same.

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