Trump’s Parlous Gambit

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

“The modern politics of division have become a banally hectoring faux morality play put on by the theater kids for the other theater kids.”

- El Gato Malo on X

While Jake Tapper leads the Mea Culpa Chorus singing Kumbaya in a minor key, absolutely nobody is fooled that the grotesque psychotic deformities of US politics can be reduced to a few White House factotums lying to the news media about “Joe Biden’s” cognitive abilities. For one thing, the news media was not lied to. The news media (including Jake) lied to the nation, consistently, flagrantly, mendaciously, for years, and most of all they lied about the gigantic racketeering operation that government had become in the age of Anything Goes and Nothing Matters.

Cases-in-point, as reported by Alex Krainer, the $93-billion barfed out of the Department of Energy between the November election and January 20 to scores of hastily-formed NGO gangs with no business model or record of competency. . . and the staggering $375 billion spread around similarly out of the EPA from a slush fund run by John Podesta (as Senior Adviser to the President for International Climate Policy and Clean Energy Innovation).

That was pure grift, you understand, and it was how the Democratic Party kept its activist troops of the so-called “marginalized” paid and happy. As it happened, the “marginalized” who dwell on the edge of society — and also just beyond the set of agreements that define reality — are out-numbered by the rest of us, who voted against the tyranny of the margin and their hallucinations. And so now, the country goes through a convulsion attempting to readjust to reality — for instance, the unhappy fact that all that money was unreal, mere bookkeeping entries by dishonest accountants.

One reality we struggle with is the doleful fact that there is no work-around for the nation’s monumental debt. Since it can’t possibly be paid off, there are two stark paths for it: default and ruinous deflation (that is, money vanishes and the nation goes broke); or a futile attempt to inflate it away with more fake money creation (you’ll have money, but it’s increasingly worthless, so you’re effectively broke). Either way, you’re broke. In the meantime, the remorseless interest that has to be paid on $36.2-trillion squeezes out everything else we’re supposed to care for as relates to the common good.

Every broke-ass family or individual person knows how debilitating money-worries can be. And since unpayable debt is the common denominator across all of Western Civ, this perhaps explains the gross, suicidal mental disorder displayed lately by leadership all across Europe, North America and Anglo-Oceania. Europe, especially, exhibits behavior that is completely cuckoo — inciting war with Russia, inviting in murderous hostiles from foreign lands, and sadistically policing their own citizens.

The exception is Mr. Trump, a businessman-outsider to government trying to pull off an escape from the deadly debt quandary. It’s probably impossible, but he is trying nonetheless. It has three main features:

1) to readjust trade relations that, in theory, would restore industrial production across the land — a bootstrapping operation to kick off “growth.”

2) to engineer a severe re-set of the money system that would effectively amount to defaulting on debt but somehow without the feature of disappearing money. At best, this would induce some kind of fall in living standards, but mostly among the small sector of financial buccaneers who thrive on swindles and the Boomers living on investment accounts (figment wealth), who are now dying off anyway — which is to say, Great Depression Lite. And

3) the least understood feature of Trumpism: to decouple the USA from the resource scarcity in the rest of the world, and the consequent strife it’s inducing, and withdraw into a sort of Fortress North America that can somehow carry-on self-sufficiently while everybody else collapses.

As big pictures go, this is a pretty wild one, stupendously ambitious, risky, and perhaps improbable. But what do Mr. Trump’s domestic opponents have to offer? To go back to their asset-stripping operation with its insane sideshow of race-and-sexual hoaxes and hustles? Let’s face it, the Democratic Party has utterly shot its wad. If it tries to start another civil war, it will have its ass handed to it. Despite all the desperate, rear-guard lawfare underway now, the party is already withdrawing into the political thickets to hide while it considers some drastic reorganization of its purpose and personnel. It may skulk there for many years, just as it did between James Buchanan (1857) and Grover Cleveland (1885).

And despite his daunting agenda, Mr. Trump at least presents a sense of confident determination to get the country righted in some fashion, to recover a sense of purpose and enterprise after years of feckless, dissipative drift into the hallucinatory madness of the Left. You must give him a chance. There is no one else right now with no other way.