Elimination of U.S. trade deficits is the demand Trump has frequently repeated. That has been an obsession of Trump's for years.
He thinks trade deficits mean the U.S. is getting "ripped off." He constantly asserts that "We've been treated very badly for so long." No, trade deficits mean Americans get to live off the labor and resources of poorer (and not poorer) nations! Americans get to buy and consume products and food for much less than it would cost to produce domestically, get food that cannot be grown in the U.S. (like coffee and bananas), and American businesses get manufactured parts and products for less cost.
The other nations get dollars.
And what happens with the dollars earned by other nations? They go into funding U.S. budget deficits by buying Treasury bonds!
So how is the U.S. suffering? How is it getting "ripped off" and "taken advantage of by everyone for years," as Trump has complained for years, with great bitterness? In fact, the U.S. has a great racket going.
Until wrecker Trump came along.
How will it be possible for, say, Vietnam, or Mexico, to NOT run a trade deficit with the U.S.? There is just too much that America as a country, as businesses, as people, want from those and many other countries, and not enough those countries can buy from the U.S. So it is an impossible demand. That means there is no plausible end in sight for the Trump tariff economic terrorism unless Trump suddenly flips his script and declares victory ("We won a great victory it's the biggest win in American history!" he'd brag in his run-on sentences style of speaking, or some such boastful blather.)
Trump has been falsely calling his punitive tariffs, intended to extort submission to his demands, as "reciprocal." Establishment media has been mindlessly parroting this fake adjective. They aren't reciprocal, because they aren't a response to any actions by the victim nations, and they are MUCH MUCH HIGHER than the tariffs those nations impose, which were in single digits until Trump started his economic warfare on the world. Trump imposed tariffs on every nation on earth, and on uninhabited territories as well.
Trump also demands that all other nations completely eliminate all tariffs on U.S. exports, and maybe he'll lower his tariffs, and on top of that eliminate all alleged "internal barriers" to U.S. exports in those countries as well as subsidies to their industries, be eliminated. (By the way, the U.S. does a lot of subsidizing of U.S. business. For example, the oil and gas business. Mining. Semiconductors. The list goes on.)
And it just so happens that a large proportion of the imports he whines about are imports by U.S. companies manufacturing their products in other countries to low the costs of production. Which is a good thing for Americans buying products and for workers in the producer countries who are provided income.
On the other hand, many American blue collar workers have been left in the lurch by this economic globalization of supply chains. To the shame of both U.S. parties of the ruling political cartel (Democratic and Republican parties) virtually nothing was done to help that class of worker.
The result is that they were ripe for the picking by a lying, deceitful, false-promising demagogue like Trump. Here's an example of the braying bombast typical of Trump, claiming he will deliver Great Things by his malicious, destructive actions: "We're going to become a wealthy nation again wealthy like never before."
Nevertheless, even though Trump got around 74 million votes or so each time he ran, he NEVER won a free and fair election. In 2016, Hillary Clinton got about 2 million more votes than Trump, but the Electoral College, that anachronistic relic of post-colonial days, "elected" Trump president.
In 2020 Trump first tried to steal the election by getting state election officials to lie about the outcome after the votes were counted, then on January 6, 2021 sent a mob to invade the Capitol to prevent the formal certification of Biden as the victor in the Electoral College. The mob's mission included hanging Trump's vice president, Michael Pence, and murdering House Speaker Nancy Pelosi if they could get their hands on her.
Stunningly, and ominously, Trump was allowed to get away with this coup attempt by a combination of Democratic Party fecklessness and dilatory action, and the Republican Judiciary's protection of Trump, most crucially the Republican Party-controlled Supreme Court. These days Trump still bellows that the 2020 election was "stolen" from him, and now he adds that he should have simply stayed in office.
And in 2024, as the journalist Greg Palast has documented with government data, several million black voters were either denied the right to vote at all, or had their ballots invalidated by Republican state officials. That made the difference between losing and winning for their Leader, Trump.
Trump has made himself a dictator, ignoring laws and court rulings about his kidnaps and renderings of foreign citizens legally in the U.S. to a prison in El Salvador, mass firings of government workers, shutting down entire departments and agencies created by Congress, impounding the funds appropriated by Congress, illegally firing key officials and purging the government of its internal watchdogs against corruption, such as Inspectors General.
So it is only logical that this dictator, Trump, and his accomplices, including the sinister Steve Bannon, are now saying that Trump will run for a third term, in blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution, which forbids it. Given Republican control of enough states to swing the Electoral College result, it seems more likely than not that Trump can accomplish his monstrosity.
If that happens, we will have to say goodbye to the illusion of American democracy. It's past time to wake up from that 200-plus year dream
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