Agent Orange 2.0
he’s playing 50D chess, obviously
Imagine you wanted to kill the deep state.
Not annoy it. Not write a strongly-worded book about it with a serious photograph of yourself on the back.
KILL it, properly, permanently, salt-the-earth-and-plough-it-under style, so that it never never ever gets its bearings back and its grandchildren flinch when somebody says the word “interagency” at a dinner party.
You’d need POWER.
Like, ACTUAL power.
Nuclear-football-follows-you-to-the-toilet power.
So: presidency it is, there’s nothing else with that kind of reach.
And to get to the presidency you’d need people to vote for you, which means the personality has to be ENORMOUS. Needy. Loud. Physically unable to walk past a microphone. A GREAT guy. An EASY GOING guy, everybody says so, the best people say so.
Perfect cover, because nobody in the history of the world has ever suspected the loudest man in the room of being quiet about anything.
Then you GO IN.
And OH BOY! Did he go in… You couldn’t have botched it worse, even if you tried!
Think about his first term… So if you’re playing this properly, mind you, you don’t want to be seen as winning. Nonono. Winning gets you scrutiny.
A first term is for laying charges you won’t detonate for another eight years, and for that you want policies where the damage is structural but the headlines point at something else entirely.
Something as conspicuous as soybeans, you know?
In 2018 he tariffed China over IP theft, which is a completely real grievance that everybody agrees about, and Beijing does the obvious thing and retaliates on the one export that maps perfectly onto your own voters.
Exports to China drop 77%. Of the $27 billion in lost agricultural exports through to the end of 2019, soybeans were 71% of it, and you hand out $23 billion of taxpayer money to farmers to make up the difference.
Argentina and Brazil filled the gap. US farmers got a permanent hit to their exports.
The Netherlands also tried something with chips (the electronic kind, not the fried ones), but retreated real fast. I guess there’s something in the water over there.
Beautifully done. Completely deniable. Nobody dies. But an export market of 40 years just walks out of the door on its own.
And because you fail once, you’ve got to try again, right? Some famous guy once quipped he didn’t fail a thousand times.
Well, Agent Orange is certainly well-read.
Because the tax rate for corporations was 35%, he cut it to 21% in the middle of an expansion. Everybody happy, right? 35 is genuinely uncompetitive. But unintended consequences - much like karma - are a bitch. The freed up money goes mostly into buybacks rather than factories, and the deficit keeps widening. Even during those good years.
Which means when the plandemic arrives, there’s no room left. Brrrr goes the printer…
Well, we’ve got economic successes. We’ve got governmental income. Oh, yes. Military. The GREATEST CinC EVER LIVED. He sat down with the Taliban without the Afghan gov, agreed on a withdrawal date. Great right? Stopping wars and such. Lovely goal. I’m wondering how that’s going to pan out in the years ahead. What was probably not pretty well kept is operational security. Let their fighters leave prison, signal when you’re going to leave, and ask pretty pretty please not to ruin the farewell BBQ.
Ok, ok, the BBQ was Biden’s. But still. You couldn’t do a better job if you tried.
Speaking of barbecues, he tore up the nuclear deal with Iran. All well-intentioned of course because they weren’t really following it through anyway. CNN and BBC said it, so it must be true. Iran reacted by going from 3.6% enrichment to 60%. The “nuclear dust” was born.
Everyone who went to THAT particular BBQ came back practically glowing. Or so I heard.
Anyway.
Then he got cheated out of his second term - and yes, this I will defend till my last breath, no matter what I think of his actions and the (mostly unintended) consequences, the data points to major irregularities.
So we got 4 more years of a sock puppet that was a never-ending source of hilarious entertainment. No1 was (or wasn’t?) necessary.
Either way, the sock puppet didn’t instill much confidence in the geopolitical world and had to occasionally be guided off podium by his peers.
Great image on the decaying empire.
So then Agent Orange came back, spoke to his pals in the Deep State and was like “I’M GOING TO BE THE BESTEST AND MEANEST BASTERD EVER LIVED AND YOU ARE GOING TO LOVE ME SO MUCH THAT YOU’LL BEG ME TO STAY, THEY’RE CRYING ABOUT IT, BIG STRONG MEN, GENERALS, FOUR STARS, THEY COME UP TO ME WITH TEARS IN THEIR EYES AND THEY GO SIR, SIR, IN SEVENTY YEARS NOBODY HAS SERVED THE WAY YOU SERVE THE DS US, NOT LANGLEY, NOT KISSINGER, NOBODY, AND I SAY I KNOW, I KNOW, AND WHEN I’M FINISHED WITH IT YOU WON’T EVEN RECOGNISE THE PLACE!!”
So they elected him to become the POTUS because truly, he has great hair! And he got nearly assassinated a few times. That’s what all GREAT persons have as qualifications?
So on his second term he wanted to bring manufacturing back. “Let’s tariff the world”. Not on what they actually send to the US of course. That’d be too obvious. No, it was simply what the US sends to that country divided by the imports from that country. Someone mastered Excel. You buy little from US relative to what we buy from you? That’s how you end up alienating your best trading partners. Completely unintentional, I’m sure.
Oh, and the big bad Bear also attacked - purely unprovoked of course - poor completely pristine and holier-than-thou Ukraine (which the year before was ranked one of the most corrupt countries in the world, but I digress).
So what do you do? You show them you mean business! THE US OF A SHALL SWAT THAT BASTARD PUTIN LIKE A FLY. Erhm, nope, not what happened. Because that would mean some kind of nasty things would have happened on the homeland. Can’t have that. Voters and all, you know?
Well, let’s sell some weapons to our allies who are surely not passing those along to the now-declared-untainted Ukries. Not for free obviously. War is a racket after all. So our allies ask to be paid. And via a backchannel sending them the money to pay those allies for it. (and if your head just burst wide open, I cannot be held responsible for the vacuity of what passes for leaders these days.)
And on the political level you encourage - not that much encouragement was needed for the rabid anti-Ruskies that pass as leaders over here - to sanction the Soviet Union. Spit and nose and shoot and foot comes to mind.
Three years of European deindustrialisation to isolate Russia, energy bills doubled, whole sectors packed up and relocated, entire economies rebuilt around the principle that Russian oil is dirty oil.
Oh, and on the topic of those allies. Let’s ask them to pay more. Completely normal of course because they’ve been freeloading ever since NATO was created. Don’t mind that they have had a lot of socialist policies where the money was better spent. Or so they say.
Great way to make keep friends…
And because a little racket might not be enough, let’s go asking for some icesheet in the North. No1’s living there anyway. So who cares? France sent a WHOLE contingent of 15 soldiers to defend that rock! From their ally.
FRANCE?! They’re very great at wine and cheese, and burning cars, but defending Greenland?
Or to push away the best country in the world: next door, great for resource gathering and mining and those little cute reddies on horses. Let’s propose to bring them into the fold, we’re protecting them anyway already, so let’s make it official shan’t we?
At the time I was like. Yeah, that’s just him. Big mouth. Small <insert expletive>.
And then because your master closest ally is itching for a fight with its archrival, you just have to join in in the fun. Because we don’t leave No1 behind, right?
Unintended consequence :shoulder shrug: wocouldaknow? USrael got a whole can of whoopass and were begging to stop. The 12 day War was coined. Oh and decisively WON because the US has the GREATEST and MIGHTIEST bombs ever, so they were used, or so they say.
And because of the effulgent reviews the BBQ got in ‘18, you want more of it. You can’t have the baddies have all the fun. [Oh shut up Kim!] So you go and dump a buttload of bombs on residential neighbourhoods - and on military inflatables too of course.
Good intentions pave the road to hell they say.
Well in this particular case they closed the road and hell was raised. Billions of critical infrastructure destroyed, Gulf allies alienated, oil to the world: ❌ denied.
And then, when Washington needs the barrels, the previously mentioned switch flips, and Russia is suddenly allowed to furnish the world.
Except to the EU of course. Because of laws, because of the sanctions.
For good matter, Putin (because he does and decides everything there) doubles the price overnight. India paid double, Europe likely triple. For the same oil it got before for a discount.
Not bad for a loudmouth, ah?
A pattern starts to emerge.
Because how else can you destroy the Deep State SO THOROUGHLY, so METICULOUSLY, so rigorously?
You attack all the arms: the ones that sent off manufacturing to China, the ones that live off free tax money, your allies, your close friends…
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: not bad, if you tried to make the US the worst country in the world in people’s eyes… But I’m sure it’s all good intentions and stuff… Here’s a participation medal for you: 🥇
The military is weakened, out of ammunition.
The Treasury is out of money. Like 40T out of money.
Manufacturing is at an all-time low.
The trade deficit - you know, the thing tariffs were supposed to fix - is back where it started a decade ago.
Inflation’s running modestly at the designated 2%. Some Excel sheet at the FED says so, so it must be true.
Your allies despise you behind closed doors.
Your complete Middle East “unsinkable aircraft carrier” ain’t sinking, it’s just being blown to bits instead.
The Deep State is wide spread. Not one department responsible for everything.
Agent Orange 2.0 tried to go after the DS with DOGE. We all know how that ended up. Don’t we? 🦗🦗
So policy adjustments are out the window. No fancy EO signed with a nice pen, thank you very much. Those don’t survive long.
Alliances SURVIVE policies, survive presidents. The DS is too ingrained.
The USD will endure because the US never defaulted (it’s true because Wikipedia says so).
Jobs will be coming back, any day now.
And Iran is just one bomb away from capitulating.
Either this is the greatest fool that has ever lived.
Or he’s the greatest strategic mind ever having walked the Earth.
My other publications:
[Daily Digest] → The news in 5 minutes, without the forty open tabs.
[Portfolio] → What I do with my own money
I'mma go with grifter, con man and child rapist. Not a fool, and nothing resembling strategic. Barely even competent.
Thanks for the entertaining and sobering post No1.
Your closing sentence has me thinking the same. Often.
When the tech bro evangelists on their puppeteer soap boxes keep telling us eh aye will bring enormous abundance and don't believe your lying eyes, one has to wonder, enormous abundance for whom?
Asking for a friend...
Suppose thinking should be believing and to just trust the "plan"