Some of it doesn’t make sense, and some of it does.
Some of the Trump supporting billionaires have absolutely been conned. But they’re on board now, and they won’t be able to get off the ship they helped steer.
As I’ve always said, it’s Trump himself who has the real power here, and nobody else. Except Putin. Not Musk anyway. But Musk is tied to him now, and he can’t back out. He can never back out. If Musk was to turn against Trump, he’s dead, possibly literally.
What we’re seeing is multi-faceted. There’s a fundamental tension between different parts of the Trump coalition.
Trump’s stereotype voters in the rust belt are economically left wing (the little they know about it) but culturally very right wing. They hate immigrants, they don’t like the blacks and they want the blacks and the Latinos and the immigrants gone, they want to live in white picket fence land with neighbours with names like Smith and Campbell and Murfee. They want tariffs and they want a time machine to go back to 1955.
Yet they worship Reagan, who was the US’s Thatcher, who destroyed organised labour and manufacturing. Because oooh didn’t he have a lovely soothing voice and he smiled. They like him because they have Daddy issues basically.
Then you have the economically right wing but sort of culturally liberal pig rich. This group is a fairweather friend of cultural right wingism in that they want to make rape jokes, they want to say the n word, they want power to always be a big boys club. But they’re largely OK with the gays and abortion. This group has recently embraced or in some cases pretended to fully embrace the cultural right wing, mostly because they want to be close to power, in some cases because they’re big swinging dicks who think they’re geniuses (but aren’t), in some cases because the trans issue has served as a wedge to drive them towards cultural right wing neanderthalism.
This group wants immigrants, they want immigrants they can exploit for low wage labour and they want no tariffs. Trump has mainly conned this group but they can’t back out now and they won’t persuade him to abandon what he’s doing. I wouldn’t weep for them though as billionaires always benefit from a crisis, and a crisis always ultimately means a greater share of wealth in the hands of the few.
There’s a sort of shadowy third group in the middle of this made up of assorted, creepy ideologists. Central to this as far as I can see are crypto obsessives, goldbugs, nihilist libertarian fascists and ultra-religious rapture fiends. And Russians and Russian agents.
They want the whole system to burn down. Trump has their ear.
Trump’s whole presidency is a pay to play extortion racket. He believes he can make the Trumps into America’s Royal family, the unquestioned ruling family. He is planning to do and is doing something like what Putin has done in Russia, where Putin gets a cut of everything.
Chaos utterly suits Trump in doing this. He and his cronies are profiting royally off all this market manipulation. This is blatantly obvious, if you weren’t born yesterday. He now has utter impunity and can do whatever he likes. He will never face justice.
Trump is very happy to destroy America in the process, as that suits his Russian paymasters. The journalist Dave Troy who has been one of the most clued commentators on all this for a long time has consistently warned of a debt ceiling crisis as a major step in the burning down of the system including the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency and its replacement with something based largely on cryptocurrency.
By burning down the system and replacing it with something else, Trump plans to inherit the wealth of most what is left of it. As far as I can see he stands a pretty good chance of succeeding.
