Among the recursive forces at work in the disaster now unfolding are the consequences of the death struggle of capitalism in its terminal phase, when all wealth flows to the apex predators in the top one percent, as capitalism begins to collapse from the mechanical failures of its internal contradictions and attempts to free itself from its host political system, which fuels the subversion of democracy as it transforms into totalitarian forms of autocracy and tyranny.
This explains the Trump regime, but also the political, social, and economic trajectory of the whole death phase of democracy since the capture of the Republican Party in 1980 by the theocratic Christian Identity nationalism of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and its figurehead Ronald Reagan.
Here I must signpost that this period of our death spiral, which in some ways parallels that of the late Roman Republic before it became an empire, includes the disaster of the Patriot Act and the Third Imperial Phase of American history as hegemonic elites weaponized the 911 tragedy to centralize all power to a police state through militarization and the counterinsurgency model of policing leveraged by technology as pervasive surveillance, big data, propaganda and information warfare waged by the state against its own citizens.
Together our twin disasters of centralization of wealth and power to the ruling class and the state have combined horrifically to produce the aberrant Trump regime which conspires to utterly destroy the institutions of democracy, and the situation we now face, balancing on an ever-narrower wall on the edge of an Abyss.
And as Nietzsche warns, the Abyss has begun to look back at us.
As written by Callum Jones in The Guardian in an article entitled Liberation from what? Trump promised lower prices – his tariffs risk the opposite; “For weeks, Donald Trump and his aides sought to brand Wednesday as “liberation day” in America. Many in the US could be forgiven for wondering what exactly they’ve just been liberated from.
After much hype, the president unveiled his plan for a new era in global trade: a blanket 10% tariff on goods imported into the US starting Saturday, and higher “reciprocal” tariffs (of up to 49%) on countries taxing US exports starting next Wednesday.
“April 2nd 2025 will be forever remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America’s destiny was reclaimed, and the day that we began to make America wealthy again,” according to Trump.
Historians will be the judge of that. But before anyone writes this chapter, millions of Americans need to navigate the present.
Trump was re-elected last November after years of heightened inflation, and upward pressure on the cost of living. On the campaign trail he pledged, repeatedly and unambiguously, to rapidly liberate the nation from higher prices.
But tariffs, his administration has conceded, risk doing the opposite. The treasury secretary recently dismissed cheap goods as “not the essence of the American dream” after acknowledging that costs may rise as a result of Trump’s aggressive trade strategy: music to the ears of anyone seeking liberation from lower prices.
Anyone sitting in the White House Rose Garden might be reassured. “Prices are way down,” the president has claimed, since his return to office.
Anyone who has visited a grocery store in that time might feel differently. Most prices have, in fact, not fallen since January; inflation is still rising well above the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2% per year.
“Now it’s our turn to prosper,” he proclaimed. But many US firms are bracing for problematic, not prosperous, effects of this action: higher costs they warn will be passed on to their customers.
“What we have heard from business of all sizes, across all industries, from around the country is that these broad tariffs are a tax increase that will raise prices for American consumers and hurt the economy,” said Neil Bradley, chief policy officer at the US Chamber of Commerce, the corporate lobby group.
Trump likes to present the world as black and white. The US is either winning or losing. A policy, deal or plan is the best or the worst. A person, country or company is supporting or screwing you.
There is rarely space for nuance, time for complexity or tolerance for inconvenient facts. The simplicity of this narrative is its power.
By Trump’s telling, the US is about to raise trillions of dollars for the federal government by taxing the world, not its citizens: a typically black-and-white choice.
But reality is often more complex than rhetoric. There are myriad shades of grey.
Import tariffs are not paid by other countries. They are paid by importers – in this case, US firms and consumers – buying goods from overseas. These costs often trickle down through the economy, raising prices at every clink in the chain.
Trump promised lower prices. He is betting his tariffs won’t raise them too high, for too long.
“This is going to be a big moment,” he said on Wednesday. “I think you’re going to remember today.”
He may well be right.”
As written by Graham Russell in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump’s tariffs – five key takeaways: Donald Trump has upended decades of US foreign policy by bringing in a vast array of tariffs that threaten to disrupt international trade. Here are some initial key points; “Countries across the world are racing to absorb the new way of doing business with the US, after Donald Trump unveiled tailored tariffs that looks set to ignite a global trade war.
Trump has made clear the goals he wants to accomplish through the tariffs: bring manufacturing back to the US; respond to unfair trade policies from other countries; increase tax revenue; and incentivise crackdowns on migration and drug trafficking.
However, the EU and China have promised countermeasures, while South Korea has vowed an “all-out” response. The damage done at a political level with allies such as the UK may also carry its own cost, as billions are wiped off economic growth.
Here are some early points to note in the wake of Wednesday’s wideranging announcement:
1. Firms are bracing for what ‘liberation’ means
The US president sold the idea of global tariffs with a celebratory air, making good on his campaign trail promise to liberate the nation from higher prices. The president has claimed “prices are way down” since his return to office but anyone who has visited a grocery store in that time might feel differently.
And US firms are apprehensive about the wider effect of this move: higher costs, they warn, will be passed on to their customers. “What we have heard from business of all sizes, across all industries, from around the country is that these broad tariffs are a tax increase that will raise prices for American consumers and hurt the economy,” said Neil Bradley, chief policy officer at the US Chamber of Commerce, the corporate lobby group.
2. The China link?
China has been hit particularly hard by the new tariffs, which take the total levy on Chinese imports to over 50%, as well as struggling nations in South-east Asia, including war-torn and earthquake-hit Myanmar.
One theory being put forward is that countries linked to sizeable Chinese investments are being targeted. Dr Siwage Dharma Negara, a senior fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, said: “The [Trump] administration thinks is that by targeting these countries they can target Chinese investment in countries like Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Indonesia. By targeting their products maybe it will affect Chinese exports and the economy,” he said.
“The real target is China but the real impact on those countries will be quite significant because this investment creates jobs and export revenue.”
The tariffs comes as many countries in South-east Asia are already grappling with the fallout from the cuts to USAid, which provides humanitarian assistance to a region vulnerable to natural disasters and support for pro-democracy activists battling repressive regimes.
3. Key trade partners Canada and Mexico are spared – but will still feel the pain
Canada and Mexico have been exempted from the latest round of tariffs, but, as prime minister Mark Carney and business leaders reminded everyone, 25% tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, as well as on automobiles, came into effect hours after Wednesday’s announcement.
Carney warned that while Trump had preserved key elements of the bilateral relationship, the global tariffs announced earlier in the day “fundamentally change the international trading system”.
The two countries have been hit by previously declared 25% tariffs on many goods over border control and fentanyl trafficking issues, the White House said in a fact sheet.
Mexico president Claudia Sheinbaum said on Wednesday that her country would not pursue a “tit-for-tat on tariffs” but would rather announce a “comprehensive program” on Thursday.
4. This is a big gamble
Trump himself appears prepared for the announcement to spark a lot of turbulence in markets across the world, saying recently: “There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big.” The universal tariffs come into effect on 5 April, and the reciprocal ones on 9 April, so countries around the world now have a very short space of time in which to choose their path. Some may try to cut a deal with Trump, others may respond with retaliatory tariffs, but a continuing theme will be uncertainty.
5. Absolutely nowhere is immune
Heard Island and McDonald Islands are some of the most remote places on Earth, inhabited only by an array of wildlife, yet they are among the “external territories” of Australia listed separately for a 10% tariff.
Norfolk Island, which lies just of Australia’s east coast, was slugged with a tariff of 29% – or 19 percentage points higher than the rest of Australia, prompting Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese to say on Thursday: “I’m not quite sure that Norfolk Island, with respect to it, is a trade competitor with the giant economy of the United States, but that just shows and exemplifies the fact that nowhere on earth is safe from this.”
As written in The Guardian editorial entitled The Guardian view on Trump’s tariffs: a monstrous and momentous act of folly: The US president has expelled his own country from the rules-based global trade system that America itself created; “or the world’s already embattled trading system, it is as though an asteroid has crashed into the planet, devastating everyone and everything that previously existed there. But there is this important difference. If an asteroid struck the Earth, the impact would at least have been caused by ungovernable cosmic forces. The assault on world trade, by contrast, is a completely deliberate act of choice, taken by one man and one nation.
Donald Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on every country in the world is a monstrous and momentous act of folly. Unilateral and unjustified, it was expressed on Wednesday in indefensible language in which Mr Trump described US allies as “cheaters” and “scavengers” who “looted”, “raped” and “pillaged” the US. Many of the calculations on which Mr Trump doled out his punishments are perverse, not least the exclusion of Russia from the condemned list. The tariffs mean prices are certain to rise in sector after sector, in the US and elsewhere, fuelling inflation and perhaps recession. Mr Trump will presumably respond as he did when asked about foreign cars becoming more expensive: “I couldn’t care less.”
The tariffs – a minimum of 10% on all imports to the US, with higher levies on 60 nations that Mr Trump dubbed the “worst offenders” – throw a grenade into the rules-based global trading order. These are large hikes, not small ones, even for nations like Britain that have escaped the higher tariffs. They are indiscriminate between sectors, but highly discriminatory against nations, all of them, even to the extent of penalising uninhabited islands in Antarctica.
They overturn the trading system established – under US leadership – at Bretton Woods after the second world war. In effect, the nation that has underpinned the global economy for the last 80 years has expelled itself from the trading system it always led. That system’s cardinal principle – that countries in the World Trade Organization should treat one another equally – was blown apart on Wednesday.
The announcement ceremony conveyed the thrill Mr Trump derives from bullying and domination. A month after shutting down US development aid, his punishment list embodies special contempt for the world’s poor – 47% tariffs on Madagascar, the world’s ninth poorest country, for instance, or 44% on devastated Myanmar. While much pre-announcement rhetoric was directed at China, some of the toughest tariffs have been inflicted on countries such as Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Laos. The impact on US soft power is likely to be devastating.
The British government is trying to keep calm and carry on. Like its trustworthy trading allies, Britain must do what it can to maintain the rules-based trading system. But economic war is clearly beckoning. The trade secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, said on Thursday that even the UK is now preparing a list of reciprocal tariffs on US goods. It is particularly vital that Britain defends its interests in food and health systems, and against digital tech giants.
Any idea that Britain is a kind of winner in these circumstances, thanks to Brexit, is nonsensical. This country’s supposedly closest ally, the US, has just hiked the cost to British exporters by 10%, with an even greater rise of 25% in the case of steel, aluminium and cars. The consequences of Mr Trump’s tariffs will not be restricted to world trade but will impact on the global economic system more generally. This is a macro moment. It will require macro responses.”
Liberation from what? Trump promised lower prices – his tariffs risk the opposite
Trump’s tariffs – five key takeaways
The Guardian view on Trump’s tariffs: a monstrous and momentous act of folly
Editorial
Trump’s wall of tariffs is likely to raise prices and cause chaos for business
Global stock markets fall and dollar dives after Trump announces sweeping tariffs
Trump goes full gameshow host to push his tariff plan – and nobody’s a winner
Trump tariff global reaction – country by country
Asian countries riven by war and disaster face some of steepest Trump tariffs
Macron suggests pause on US investment as EU leaders condemn Trump tariffs
Trump’s ‘idiotic’ and flawed tariff calculations stun economists
Torch of Liberty 