Trump’s Brain

Dmitry Orlov

As you may or may not know, Donald Trump was elected to do a job. If you think that this job is to try to Make America Great Again (MAGA), then that’s a piece of false information you will need to unlearn. There is no known force in the universe that can make a country with a GDP of $30 trillion and total public debt of around $150 trillion anything other than bankrupt. The rough $150 trillion number is federal debt of $37 trillion plus non-discretionary spending which was written into laws that Congress is afraid to touch and which now amounts to quite close to 3/4 of all federal spending.

It also amounts to roughly 3/4 of all the value held within the United States by its governments (state, federal, local), its corporations, its banks and its citizens. When that debt goes “Poof!” — as it inevitably will — and, consequently, the payments either stop or are rendered worthless by inflation, Americans, on average, will lose 3/4 of their wealth, although it is far more likely that most people will lose just about everything — through a combination of economic depression and hyperinflation — while the rich will continue to get richer.

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So, what is Trump to do? To answer this question, all we need to do is to examine who stuck him there. And it turns out that it was a bunch of billionaires!  The reason they would want to stick him in the White House is obvious: they have the information I outlined in the preceding paragraph and want to use the time that remains to stop being billionaires and to start being trillionaires. The clever way they thought up of doing it is by having Trump rock the financial markets back and forth, telegraphing his moves to his friends ahead of time, so that they could use insider trading tricks to buy the lows and sell the highs, getting richer each time.

For a time, Trump was doing rather well by them. His first ploy was to use tariffs. He would announce ridiculously high, punitive-prohibitive tariffs against this or that country, with the rationale that the country in question was running a trade surplus with the United States and that this was somehow unfair. Businesses reliant on imports for their revenue would rush to stock up on imported products before the tariffs kicked in. Then their stock prices dove, giving Trump’s billionaire friends a chance to snap them up cheaply. But then Trump would announce a delay during which a deal could be worked out with the country in question and importers’ stock price would recover, giving Trump’s billionaire friends a chance to unload them profitably. But then enough people realized what was going on and this trick stopped working.

And so Trump tried another ploy. He would force officials from countries that are essentially US colonies — have US troops stationed on their soil and are under tight political and financial control by the US — to sign ridiculous deals according to which they agreed to buy huge nonexistent quantities of US oil and gas for which they had no use and to invest huge, nonexistent quantities of money in nonexistent US industries. The list of US-occupied vassal countries includes all of the European Union, the UK, Japan and South Korea. These manipulations would once again present wonderful insider trading opportunities for those who knew the details of the deals beforehand and could trade stocks and futures profitably… before everyone realized that the deals are all fake.

Along the way, Trump also attempted to rock the energy markets by threatening to impose 100% tariffs on all US-bound exports from any country that bought oil or gas from Russia. Since Russia’s exports of just the oil amount to 3.5 million barrels a day — a quantity which the other oil producers would be hard-pressed to make up for — Trump’s billionaire friends could have theoretically profited from a large spike in oil prices. But then the two largest importers of Russian energy — China and India — told Trump to go pound sand and the plan fell through.

Trump could have come up with some other, similar plans, such as threatening the world with starvation by blocking Russian grain exports (Russia exports grain to over 100 countries) and have his billionaire friends profit from a huge spike in grain prices, who would buy up grain futures ahead of his announcement and sell them at the peak. But then Trump lost his mind.

He probably lost his mind well before then, but it only became blatantly obvious now. What triggered him was a social media post by Dmitry Medvedev, vice-chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation. He also has some people on his staff who troll people whom the Russians generally don’t like. Everybody knows that this is a bit risqué and somewhat inappropriate, but it’s good for the morale. Responding to Trump’s shortening the already ridiculous 50-day timeline for “ending the Ukraine war” to just 10 (or 12?) days, Medvedev’s little troll army wrote:

“Trump’s playing the ultimatum game with Russia: 50 days or 10. He should remember 2 things: 1. Russia isn’t Israel or even Iran. 2. Each new ultimatum is a threat and a step towards war. Not between Russia and Ukraine, but with his own country.”

Trump responded: “Tell Medvedev, the failed former President of Russia, who thinks he’s still President, to watch his words. He’s entering very dangerous territory!” This is already quite bad: here’s the supposed “leader of the free world” (to use that old epithet one last time) being triggered by an internet troll.

But then Trump went from just inappropriate to something truly ridiculous, shifting a social media flame war with an internet troll to the domain of nuclear deterrence: “I have ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that. Words are very important, and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances.”

This is not an appropriate response. This is a careless, unreasonable and downright demented reaction. Medvedev’s trolls’ reaction to Trump’s reaction was measured and calm: “If some words of the former Russian president cause such a nervous reaction in the entire, formidable US president, it means that Russia is right in everything and will continue to go its own way.”

What Trump ordered to have done in response to a fairly obvious point made by Team Medvedev (which is that serving an ultimatum to a nuclear power is ipso facto a nuclear escalation) is not only illegal but reckless. The US is not ready for a nuclear confrontation with Russia and probably never will be again.

The “two Nuclear Submarines” (sic.) Trump refers to are Cold War era relics of which only 14 are left, built between 1981 and 1997 and carrying Trident and Tomahawk missiles. Meanwhile, Russia has updated its nuclear submarine fleet by 100%, outperforming the obsolescent US fleet in all direct indicators of efficiency while upgrading its missile defenses to a point where old Tridents and Tomahawks are no longer too much of a challenge. On the other hand, the US has no means to intercept the new Russian missiles. Therefore, even if Demented Admiral Trump were to send two nuclear submarines to threaten blogger Medvedev in his Kremlin lair, and even if he were to send all the ancient tubs out on patrol, nothing in the arithmetic of mutual deterrence would be changed. But could he have?

No, he couldn’t have. Because over the past thirty years a comfortably sedate pattern has been established for the Cold War remains of the American nuclear submarine fleet of the Ohio class: four or five submarines loiter about in designated patrol areas. These are, as everyone who is interested can pinpoint with arbitrary precision, in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans while in the Indian Ocean their acoustic signatures have not been detected in a very long time. The same number of these venerable tubs is to be found in a state of conditional combat readiness in the vicinity of certain US naval bases, undergoing extensive maintenance and major repairs. Once these efforts succeed, the tubs are fumigated, ventilated, new crews are trained, and off they go into the Atlantic and the Pacific to entertain the seamen of the world’s maritime powers with their clangs, creaks and groans as they loiter about.

The remaining vessels are suffering from senility, arthritis, prostatitis and other age-related ailments and reside at the various naval hospices, where they remain… you guessed it, “conditionally combat-ready.” Supposing they could be made to move, where would Admiral Trump send a couple of conditionally combat-ready nuclear submarines to sufficiently terrify blogger Medvedev into never trolling Admiral Trump again? To the Arctic? Let’s be serious, the American subs have no competencies for navigating under the ice, which is now routine for Russian ones. Instead, they could drift aimlessly around the North Sea, periodically being hailed in Russian-accented English by nearby surface ships curious to know whether they have been able to pinpoint the whereabouts of the errant blogger Medvedev.

Who can tell what is eating away at Trump’s mind to such an extent that he threatens a nuclear response to a perfectly reasonable bit of trolling from a known troll farm? Perhaps it’s his billionaire friends clamoring for more insider trading schemes. Or perhaps it’s the fact that he’s got his privates stuck in a Ukrainian vise between “It’s Biden’s war” and “It’s Putin’s victory — and Trump’s defeat.” Or it’s simply time for his brain to be decommissioned. His father and his older sister both went senile around his current age. Alzheimer’s was the diagnosis, I vaguely recall to have overheard somewhere.

Maybe it’s that, or maybe in his case it’s frontal lobe dementia. Empathy and emotional stability are particularly vulnerable to neurodigenerative disorders affecting the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and some of Trump’s symptoms, such as thinking it would be a good idea to build a Trump Gaza Resort and Casino, or to send nuclear subs to settle a score with a Russian internet troll, manifest specific problems with empathy and with self-control.

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Via https://boosty.to/cluborlov/posts/1767ce21-2079-4671-9fc8-cf0ff8b0ead9