Ask Lemmygrad

Pump and dump baby. Classic insider trading scheme. Just on a national level with the largest economy in the world at the moment. He's probably going to be a trillionaire after this. Also, he's feeding his friends info on signal, so probably more money selling info as well.

A lot of people are suggesting it's just a cynical pump and dump scheme, and while there may be some partial truth to that (insider trading is happening, of course, they wouldn't let an opportunity to make money go to waste), i think we shouldn't underestimate how arrogant, stupid and ideologically convinced of the US's invincibility Trump and certain people around him are. I think a big part of them really did think that a) the mere threat of tariffs would get any country to bend the knee and give the US everything it wants, and b) that they really would bring manufacturing back.

I mean listen to how some of these people talk about economics when they give interviews, and i don't mean Trump and his semi-illiterate ramblings, i mean people who are supposed to be his "economic advisors". They really are that delusional and that sold on the whole American exceptionalism thing and on "the markets will just magically make it happen if we give them an incentive" neoliberal dogma. They don't understand how the economy or international trade actually works, and so of course they would draft and push utterly nonsensical policies which then catastrophically backfire.

I think this is a case of an individual having big individual influence that flies in the face of what an institution should rationally do. Trump has been talking about tariffs his entire life, and here in the second term he's found out that he can just do it and nobody can stop him.

Once he started doing it, the people in his orbit had to react. Some did so by doing insider trading, some have tried to turn this into a part of some grand strategy play to economically isolate China, some possibly hold onto hope that American manufacturing can be rebuilt. While the first group have had some success the other groups are doomed to failure because such a plan would have to be executed over decades by a unified political class - America was able to do that in the 80s and 90s, but now?

So Trump is whimsically declaring, changing, cancelling, reinstating, and delaying tariffs because he doesn't know what he's doing, and the people around him are either desperately trying to figure out how to turn this debacle into a win or just shrugging and profiting off of it personally. It's a situation that is only possible because of the combination of Trump's incompetence and the perceived power of his personality cult - nobody wants to be the one who goes against him and then doesn't have a career anymore, so they're all just going along with it waiting for him to die. It's pretty much exactly what libs think Stalin's rule was like.

Insider trading. And selling insider info about market moves to other rich bastards.

American Capitalism is in crisis, and this crisis has been managed and minimized for decades going back to the end of WWII when the stage was set to position the USD as the worlds reserve currency. This has encouraged the development of Financialization and the reduction in real productive forces in the American economy.

Because the economy is standing on financial forces, it is wildly unstable and its value is mostly tied up in perception. It is propped up by several bubbles: Housing and Tech being the largest of the two.

Since most of the worlds liquidity is tied up in USD it's possible to trigger a global recession if the USD drops significantly. The tariffs threaten this outcome. The threats are an attempt to reorganize the balance of trade in favor of the US. Again the US is trying to externalize the contradictions in American capitalism, making it the worlds problem.

This, however, isn't necessarily going to have the desired outcomes. These moves will only reveal China as the most rational actor in the world economy and pull nations to them.

Easy scheme,

Put tariff , stocks go down, buy stocks;

Remove tariff, stocks go up, sell stocks;

Have you ever done that thing where you kind of trip a little and you feel silly, so you go into this brisker pace for a moment, as if you meant to do it and didn't make a mistake?

That might be a little bit of a metaphorical ballpark to what the US empire is going through, but in slow-motion. They are striding along in the momentum of the previous decades, trying to hold onto, and continue to consolidate, power. The material realities of the pavement don't care; their contradictions are getting worse and China and its allies are strengthening, so they trip. But rather than admit to the error and watch where they're going, they are picking up the pace instead, trying to brazen their way through it like it was what they meant to do all along and they can silence any mockery by shouting at anybody who saw them trip. But they still have not accounted properly for the pavement. And if they keep ignoring it and continue to insist on their deluded and apocalyptic vision of total domination, their brazenness isn't going to lead to a little stumble or a gradual fade-out, it's going to be a careening fall that tears them apart from the outside, if the inside doesn't tear apart first.

(I think others have answered adequately in analysis and it is probably some of multiple things others have mentioned. I just wanted to add a more metaphorical lens. :))

Trump is doing tariffs because he ate too much american exceptionalism propaganda. Just like other presidents before thim thought that other countries would fold when they started wars he thought other nations would cave when he started a trade war. The only difference is that he lost the war in weeks where other presidents lost over years or even decades.

It is the result of competing US capital factions on how to maintain and expand the failing US hegemony. Trump's personal reasons may be argued as the incompetence in believing in US exceptionalism and even perceived beneficial bonuses such as stock insider-trading but if we are to move away from Great Man Theory we must ask why does the system allow him to do what he does?

Consider the opposite, what if Trump decided to create a dictatorship of the proleteriat (this is a thought exercise, not the presumption that Trump is a secret marxist)? The system including the reactionary masses would end it very quickly. It clearly does not do that with what's happening with the tariffs.

Tariffs in this context are a desperate measure where the end result is a tax on the domestic population to create state revenue along with attempts as bargaining chips (well outright brinkmanship), not just with the Global South with view to isolate and subjugate China, but also as political theater for domestic audience to create a convenient narrative for their bigotry (whether they agree with the tariffs or not, the US population is broadly sinophobic because of perceived material benefits) including to sell deepening austerity measures.

We may argue that they are hastening the self-destruction of the US and therefore cannot be "rational" but that argument could be made for capitalism in itself - we know it sows the seeds of its own destruction and yet it attempts to perservere.

the day after the tarrifs were announced when they were paused the stock market shot way up anyone who knew ahead of time baught the dip and then made tons of money, theres even a video of him bragging about it, i geniunly dont think this was anything more than a chasgrab, neo libs havent planned more than 1 week ahead in 50 years.

They're funny and it makes him laugh