Pinchbeck argues that Trump's economic policies are not incompetence but deliberate demolition carried out for a syndicate of oligarchs he names as including Putin, Peter Thiel and the Saudi royal family. On his reading, tariffs, the tax cuts in the 'big beautiful bill' and the shutdown of US aid are meant to inflate federal debt, devalue the dollar and let internationally mobile wealth buy distressed American assets cheaply — the pattern Naomi Klein called disaster capitalism in The Shock Doctrine, and what the West imposed on the former USSR after 1989. He points to farm bankruptcies in Arkansas and Nebraska, China's halt on US soybean purchases, Bill Gates's farmland holdings and JD Vance's investment in AcreTrader. Citing David Graeber's Debt, he closes on money as a collapsible social relation.
In brief
- Trump functions as the frontman for a group of oligarchs who bankrolled his election, rather than as an independent or incompetent actor.
- The strategy is to inflate federal debt so severely that a dollar collapse allows global capital to acquire American businesses and public land at a discount.
- Tariffs and the loss of an immigrant workforce have pushed a large share of independent US farmers toward bankruptcy, clearing the way for agribusiness and farmland investment trusts.
- Foreign aid was a structural component of the American economy that served the interests of the MAGA base who voted to eliminate it.
- Pinchbeck argues economists predicting a gradual slide toward multipolarity fail to account for an actor deliberately driving the system toward breakdown.
- Following David Graeber, he holds that money is a promise backed by mutual trust, so a collapse would dissolve billionaire holdings alongside ordinary savings, leaving land, water, energy, skills and community.
Full text
Hey folks, today I want to share some thoughts on the deeper reasons behind Trump's ruinous economic policies. So I'm not pretending to be an economist or an expert on this and I could be wrong. So feel free to, you know, ignore what I'm proposing here or disagree with me in the in the comments to this You Tube video. And by the way, if you enjoy this video, uh please like it, please subscribe to it, uh please share it and so on. So the analysis that follows may seem a little bit dire and I'm diving into it because I really do believe we need to comprehend what's underway so we can prepare for it and hopefully we can build new systems and networks to counteract it instead of just falling victim to to what's what's underway here.
And yeah, there's a sense in which we've got a very, you know, problematic false system and maybe that system just has to die before anything better can legitimately be born. So many mainstream economists and pundits keep saying that Trump is incompetent, that he doesn't understand how the economy works and so on. My assumption is different. I kind of see Trump as the frontman for, you could say, global criminal syndicate of oligarchs. He's not acting on his own. He does what his various puppet masters that include Putin and Peter Teal and the Saudi uh royal family and so on are telling him to do. So they're the ones who bankroll bankrolled his election and supported him with psychological mind war operations such as Russian political technology and so on and they they got what they paid for.
This is a systematic takedown of US democracy and America's position and power in the world as part of a larger strategy for global authoritarianism. So along with wrecking American hedgeimonyy, they are intentionally ruining the lives and future for the mass US population and they're doing this to further centralize power and control. So they're not imbeciles. They know what they're doing, why they're doing it, and how they're going to do it. However, they're also arrogant. They're, you know, a lot of them are psychopaths. They've got they're gamblers. They're big risk takers and they may lack the ability to foresee how these destructive policies could ricochet back on them eventually.
So, let's uh dive into how all this is. So Trump's economic policies, including his tariffs, could be seen as intentional weapons to attack the middle class, devastate, you know, lower income people, working-class people, people, and further concentrate economic power in the hands of these oligarchs who we can see are quite devoid of empathy and addicted to, you know, greed and accumulation of capital. So their ultimate plan is to collapse the US dollar by creating a debt crisis. This will massively devalue our currency. And the way to do this is to massively inflate the federal debt. As we know, that's going to go up by$5 trillion dollars in the next decade or so due to Trump's tax cuts for the wealthy as they've approved his big beautiful bill.
And this is really a self-sabotage of the future of the US to serve the interests of the already wealthy whose wealth is global and international. So, they're not really attached to any place the way a normal workingclass person is. But their plan is to make it possible for international wealth to buy up distressed US assets from private businesses to public lands for a pittance once the value of the dollar collapses. This aligns with what Naomi Klein called disaster capitalism in her book the shock doctrine. And that's kind of what you know Europe and America did to the USSR after 1989. We forced them to sell off their public companies, their nationalized resources to our corporations.
And this actually led to Russian kleptocracy and eventually the rise of Putin who's kind of getting his revenge on the West uh and the US right now. So right now we're seeing farmers in red states like Nebraska and Arkansas completely freak out because just as a result of these tariffs, the market for US exports has collapsed. Mr. Trump, you looked at me, sir, and you said, "I love you. Mr. Trump, I need to see the fruit of your love. Farmers in crisis, a line way out the door of the Woods Chapel Baptist Church in Brooklyn. As hundreds of farmers from not only northeast Arkansas, but from across the state came to voice their concerns about the current state of farming.
They've lost a lot of their illegal immigrant workforce while prices for basic goods and farm supplies keep skyrocketing. So now we're hearing as much as 25% 30% of independent farmers in the US are facing possible bankruptcy because of the tariffs. China has stopped importing US soybeans. Uh and also with US aid gone, the government is no longer subsidizing American farms by buying produce to feed people in Somalia and other countries facing famine. For Trump and his backers, this is all intentional. Large agro businesses will be able to buy up those bankrupt farms and further centralize American food production. And there's a whole racket around this. Uh this is obviously a complete betrayal of the MAGA base uh you know who in a way could be seen as like the marks in in the scam.
Uh and ironically these are the very policies they voted for. They didn't understand that foreign aid was not just a giveaway but a structural part of an of our economy that actually served their interests. So, we saw a few days ago, Bill Gates, uh, formerly supposed to be the the climate hero, uh, went to Bill Trump's White House, and he graveled before Trump with, uh, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Alman and so on. And Gates, of course, is not only a tech oligarch, but he's also the largest private owner of farmland in the United States. And generally when small farmers lose their farms, the beneficiaries are corporate aggra businesses, investment firms, what are called real estate investment trusts or re rates reit.
And there's a opaque holding companies uh firms like farmland partners PGIM and Gladstone Land will pay a premium to acquire farmland. Then they'll lease it back for a profit. So what they do is they turn those small landowning farmers into basically like surfs or sharecroers. dispossessed of their of their own land. Wouldn't you know it, JD Vance is an investor in Acre Trader, an investment platform that allows accredited investors to buy shares in farmlanding companies. They make a profit by turning agricultural land into another abstracted financial asset, taking ownership away from local people who have gener generational connection to the land and the local communities and so on.
So once again, Trump's MAGA base have been set up as a kind of psy for these destructive policies that will probably take the rest of the world down with us in the next few years as we'll discuss next. So Peter Teal, you know, he could be kind of seen as the closest thing we have to a James Bond super villain. He also apparently is fascinated with the uh Antichrist and maybe is a candidate for Antichrist himself in his own mind. uh Teal groomed and created JD Vance as a tool to run this kind of uh American nefascist technocracy they're they're quickly assembling uh and while Vance and Teal pretend to support Trump and this sort of make America great idea or ideology in actual fact Peter Thiel's favorite book he wrote an introduction when it was reissued is a speculative libertarian screed called the sovereign individual written in 1997 the sovereign individual looks looks forward to the complete collapse of centralized currencies and the utter disintegration of the nation state. Libertarian wealthers have an ideological hatred of government regulation.
Governments are the only sort of thing that can restrict their power to do whatever they want no matter how unethical or self-serving or uh yeah illegal even let's say. So these types of you know sovereign individuals these massive wealthers who got very lucky are not in the end sovereign. Uh the US government upheld the laws and the trusted institutions that allowed them to build and m maintain their wealth over the last half century. Deconstructing that system as they're now doing will have many unpredictable effects. It could in the end take all of them down as well. So economists tend to think in terms of patterns, probabilities, historical analogies.
Some economists are now predicting a gradual US decline, perhaps a slow erosion of global dominance with China and the bricks uh block of countries rising in our place. But this vision of history may rest on outdated assumptions. What economists ignore is not just the scale of interconnectivity in today's financial order but the particular role of Donald Trump and his you know let's say gangster group his posi his homeboys maybe uh Trump's history in business shows that he has a different skill set he's an expert in bankruptcy demolition and the extraction and of personal advantage from failing scams before they collapse and he's surrounded himself with people who, like him, see manufactured crises as opportunities to loot and pillage and extract. And let's face it, Trump is not even trying. He's not even pretending to be a steward of the US economy in any positive sense.
He's like a demolition expert seeking to light piles of dynamite to blow it up at its foundation. And one could also argue that this current system isn't really structured for a slow decline because we're so interconnected. We're not Rome where power ebbed over centuries. We're not the Soviet Soviet Union which managed decades of stagnation before it abruptly unraveled. The US is at the center of a globalized economy which is a vast interconnected network and the US dollar remains the reserve currency for most of the world. Uh US treasuries anchor the portfolios of central banks worldwide. Supply chains link continents in real time and digital finance allows trillions of dollars to move across borders instantly in seconds.
Uh Elizabeth Rose Haligan writes that a collapse at the core is not going to trigger a geopolitical shift so much as a systemic failure. Something like cardiac arrest in the body of global finance because ultimately the world economy is a system that depends on confidence or trust. uh the next crisis could come from a sudden loss of trust in muddied institutions rather than cyclical es and flows as economists tend to tend to focus on and chart. Right now we're seeing the brrics countries trying to build a new power center but bricks economies remain tied to the dollar system. Their elites have stored their wealth in western banks and assets.
Their exports depend on global demand that is priced in dollars. If the US implodes, it will drag every economy into the same black hole. So there probably is no real decoupling, only shared vulnerability and the potential for kind of collective disaster. And when we look at uh Trump's policies, including these tariffs that hurt US farmers, reckless tax cuts that balloon the deficit, or his attempts to take over the Federal Reserve, uh these are all undermining undermining the fragile trust that holds the global financial system together. He's treating institutions the way he treated his casinos, vehicles that he can drain like a vampire until they collapse. Economists who foresee a gradual slide toward multipolarity fail to account for a political actor who is actively seeking to drive the system toward breakdown.
So if and when a crash comes, it will not only wipe out middle class savings or corporate equity. It's going to call into question the fiction of money itself. Wealth today exists as digital numbers, derivative bets, accounting inventions. In many ways, it's more like Mario coins or Monopoly cash than a tangible reality. Billionaires may appear untouchable, but their holdings depend on the shared hallucination. If trust in the system breaks, their wealths their wealth could dissolve as quickly as everybody else's savings. This is what anthropologist David Greyber understood when he wrote debt the first 5,000 years. He wrote, "Money is not a thing at all, but a social relation, a promise backed only by our mutual trust.
When that trust disappears, money vanishes with it. So what would happen at that point? We would be left with the fundamentals that no crash can ultimately erase. And these include land, water, energy, skills, community, and trust. So these ultimately are not things that can be created or you know destroyed by executive order that can't be coded into crypto algorithms. We're not headed for slow passing of one empire into another. It doesn't look like that. We are living inside a system that's poised for a sudden dissolution and a massive reset with a dying narcissist at the helm who specializes in wreckage and demolition. And when this global abstraction dissolves and as this system breaks down or implodes, I guess the only question is who's going to be ready to build something real from the ashes.
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.