Trump Tariffs: The Madman Theory Applied to Economics (and what we should do about it)
Part One exposes how Trump’s tariff policy, far from protecting American workers, is a calculated strategy to fund militarization, crush labor, and entrench corporate-nationalist rule. Behind the chaos lies a coherent project—driven by Trump’s allies—to weaponize climate denial, exploit regressive taxes, and funnel billions into AI-driven warfare and fossil fuel expansion. The so-called “Golden Dome” is revealed as a trillion-dollar boondoggle enriching tech oligarchs under the guise of missile defense. This is not economic protectionism—it’s the financial architecture of authoritarianism.
During the Vietnam War, President Nixon believed that if he appeared insane, his nuclear threats would be taken seriously — a tactic known as the madman theory. Donald Trump is now applying this logic to the global economy. It looks like chaos, but there is method to the madness.
Despite all the rhetoric about bringing jobs back to America, Trump’s tariffs are not about protecting American workers. They are designed to fund militarization, crush labor worldwide, manage climate collapse through repression, and build a corporate-nationalist regime eager to destroy democracy to survive.
Trump’s second-term tariff war is not a random outburst of protectionism, nor is it simply about weakening China. Beneath the nationalist bluster, the emerging strategy reveals a multi-layered project: to fund a new wave of militarization — especially the so-called Golden Dome — without taxing the rich; to crush labor power both globally and domestically; to destabilize economic rivals; to dismantle regulatory institutions; and to restructure the U.S. economy around a new elite rooted in militarized AI and energy dominance.
Trump himself is no architect of this plan. He governs mostly by instinct — revenge, self-interest, and gut feeling. But surrounding him is a network of serious actors — Robert Lighthizer, Peter Navarro, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Russell Vought, Stephen Miller, J.D. Vance, Steve Bannon, and the architects of Project 2025 — who have given Trump’s instincts a more coherent, if dangerous, strategic form.
This marriage of spectacle and structural capture is essential to Trumpism’s broader project. Without it, the economic nationalism of tariffs would collapse under its own contradictions — disrupted supply chains, rising consumer prices, and shrinking industrial output. We’re already seeing warning signs: empty container ships, unstable schedules, rising shipping costs, a tumbling stock market, and open conflict with the Fed. The system isn’t built to withstand prolonged economic isolation. But with control over federal agencies and media narratives, Trump’s allies believe they can manage the fallout — at least long enough to consolidate power, crush organized labor, and lock in a new corporate-nationalist order.
It doesn’t have to be sustainable. It just has to last long enough to become irreversible.
Climate Collapse: Denial and an Iron Fist
It’s critical to address the climate crisis in this context. It’s not a side issue — it’s structurally tied to the entire strategy of tariffs, militarization, and authoritarian state-building.
First, fossil fuels are the material base of U.S. power. Energy dominance has long been a strategic goal, and Trump’s allies see climate mitigation efforts as direct threats to American hegemony. “American energy dominance will be declared a strategic economic and foreign policy goal of the United States. It’s about time,” Trump told a crowd at the final event of the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference in 2016. His executive orders are now making that vision a reality.
Second, climate change produces inevitable political instability — food shortages, mass migration, regional collapse. Trump’s faction plans to manage these crises through repression, militarized borders, and internal surveillance — not through transformation of the economy.
Third, they intend to use the climate crisis to expand corporate power, not reduce it. Disaster capitalism will intensify, with private security forces, privatized infrastructure, and resource hoarding replacing public mitigation strategies.
Fourth, they ideologically reject climate science as a threat to the “natural order” of corporate dominance and nationalism.
Fifth, they are willing to allow global warming to reach levels that are unsustainable for human civilization. Rather than confront this reality, they prefer denial and magical thinking: pretending that some technological miracle will solve the crisis, minimizing or ridiculing overwhelming scientific consensus, and dismissing climate disasters already unfolding as exaggerations or conspiracies.
Trump’s “drill baby drill” is a clarion call: science be damned, American power will triumph.
In short, this is about defending the entire material and political structure of American corporate-nationalist dominance — even if it means denying humanity’s survival.
The climate crisis is not just an environmental emergency — it’s a political and economic breaking point. The authoritarian project now underway is, in part, a response to climate-driven instability.
Real climate solutions require confronting corporate power, expanding democratic control over energy and infrastructure, and making the workers’ movement central to any transition worth fighting for.
Tariffs Are Hidden and Regressive Taxes to Fund Militarization
At the simplest level, Trump’s tariffs function as hidden taxes. Rather than overtly raising income taxes on corporations or billionaires, tariffs generate revenue quietly by taxing imports — a cost mostly borne by American consumers, not by foreign exporters, as Trump falsely claims.
Tariffs also function as a regressive tax. Even Gary Cohn, former chief economic advisor to President Trump and current Vice Chairman of IBM, gets it. During his appearance on Face the Nation on April 27, 2025, he said:
“Tariffs are highly regressive. Meaning that poorer people end up paying a disproportionate percentage of the tariffs. Because they spend 100% of their paychecks on goods. So, they’re going to Walmart, they’re going to their stores. They’re buying goods with their paycheck. Wealthier people save a bigger percentage of their paycheck. So, the tariffs are going to affect the poorer people more.”
This revenue stream is critical because Trump’s broader agenda demands massive new federal spending. The Golden Dome missile defense system — a trillion-dollar boondoggle enriching firms like Musk’s SpaceX and Thiel-aligned defense contractors — will require enormous funding. Expanding AI militarization, surveillance systems, and space-based weapons will require billions more. Building new infrastructure for fossil fuel “dominance” projects will cost still more.
At the same time, Trump remains committed to cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy even further. Tariffs bridge the gap — funding militarization while shifting the burden onto working people, all without politically explosive tax increases on the rich.
There is a legitimate case for targeted tariffs to protect American workers and rebuild domestic industry, especially in sectors hollowed out by decades of offshoring and corporate-driven trade deals. Used strategically, tariffs can support union jobs, local supply chains, and national resilience. But that’s not what Trump’s tariffs are doing. Rather than empowering workers or fostering sustainable development, they’re being deployed as a blunt instrument. The result isn’t protection for labor — it’s protection for a new oligarchy rooted in surveillance, fossil fuels, and permanent war.
The Golden Con
One of the most expensive — and absurd — pieces of this agenda is the so-called “Golden Dome” missile defense system. From here on, let’s call it what it is: The Golden Con. It’s not about the dome — it’s about the gold.
Promoted as a high-tech shield against nuclear threats, it’s more boondoggle than defense strategy — a trillion-dollar fantasy with no proven ability to stop an actual missile barrage.
As Daniel Ellsberg warned, these systems are less about protection than they are about profit: “snake oil” sold to the public to enrich aerospace contractors and tech billionaires.
Firms aligned with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are among the biggest winners, positioning themselves as indispensable to a future of endless threat and endless funding.
The only thing worse than it being a trillion-dollar boondoggle that doesn’t work… is if it might work.
Even the remote chance that a new ballistic missile defense system could be partially effective sends a message to other nuclear powers: develop new weapons to evade it — or build a Golden Con of your own.
As former California Governor and Chair of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Jerry Brown, put it:
“It leads to a limitless nuclear arms race that sooner or later has to fail — by accident, miscalculation, or design.”
And that failure, inevitably, leads to the end of human civilization. Ellsberg called it “institutional madness.”
Bottom line: tariffs are not only a hidden tax — they’re a regressive one that forces the working class to fund the insane AI weaponization of space.
But of course, it will create sooo many jobs.
This is the end of part one. Part two is about how the tariffs are part of a greater strategy to suppress unions and worker’s struggles at home and around the world, all in the name of defending the American worker.
From "A Canticle For Leibowitz":
Ch 4
It was said that God, in order to test mankind which had become swelled with pride as in the time of Noah, had commanded the wise men of that age, among them the Blessed Leibowitz, to devise great engines of war such as had never before been upon the Earth, weapons of such might that they contained the very fires of Hell, and that God had suffered these magi to place the weapons in the hands of princes, and to say to each prince: "Only because the enemies have such a thing have we devised this for thee, in order that they may know that thou hast it also, and fear to strike. See to it, m'Lord, that thou fearest them as much as they shall now fear thee, that none may unleash this dread thing which we have wrought." But the princes, putting the words of their wise men to naught, thought each to himself: If I but strike quickly enough, and in secret, I shall destroy these others in their sleep, and there will be none to fight back; the earth shall be mine.
Such was the folly of princes, and there followed the Flame Deluge.
Ch 6
The Simplification had ceased to have plan or purpose soon after it began, and became an insane frenzy of mass murder and destruction such as can occur only when the last traces of social order are gone. The madness was transmitted to the children, taught as they were — not merely to forget — but to hate, and surges of mob fury recurred sporadically even through the fourth generation after the Deluge. By then, the fury was directed not against the learned, for there were none, but against the merely literate.
Ch 6
The monks of the earliest days had not counted on the human ability to generate a new cultural inheritance in a couple of generations if an old one is utterly destroyed, to generate it by virtue of lawgivers and prophets, geniuses or maniacs; through a Moses, or through a Hitler, or an ignorant but tyrannical grandfather, a cultural inheritance may be acquired between dusk and dawn, and many have been so acquired. But the new "culture" was an inheritance of darkness, wherein "simpleton" meant the same thing as "citizen" meant the same thing as "slave."