The best summary of Trump's trade "philosophy" comes from Trashfuture's November Kelly, who said that Trump is flipping over the table in a poker game that's rigged in his favor because he resents having to pretend to play the game at all.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/26/i-dont-want/#your-greenback-dollar
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After all, the global system of trade was designed and enforced by American officials, especially the US Trade Representative. The US created a world whose most important commodities (food, oil, etc) were priced in dollars, meaning that anyone who wanted to buy these things from *any* country would first have to get US dollars, which they could only get by shipping their valuable stuff to the US, which sends them dollars in return.
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Think about this trade for a minute: to get US dollars, people outside of the US would have to dig up or chop down or manufacture *real things* that were in finite supply. Meanwhile, to get the US dollars to *pay* for these real, finite things, the US just had to type zeros into a spreadsheet at the Federal Reserve:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54fg-A1gCrM
The technical term political scientists use for this arrangement is "fucking sweet."
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Two of my favorite political scientists are Henry Farrell and Dan Davies, whose new paper, "The US dollar system as a source of international disorder," was just published by The British Academy as part of its "Global (Dis)Order international policy programme":
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@pluralistic 👍 🤞
Ah, the capitalization of this one word is different
broken: Global_DisOrder
workie: Global_Disorder
Cory Doctorow
foo ✅