Trump’s Brainworms Are Eating the World

"Trump is the human embodiment of those fundraisers where people smash up a car with sledgehammers: briefly satisfying, but utterly pointless."

Let’s say it out loud, like adults: Donald Trump’s trade and foreign policy isn't policy at all — it's a long, flatulent brainfart in a hypersonic wind tunnel of stupidity. It is the ideological equivalent of eating a Tide Pod for breakfast and declaring war on your toaster. It is unserious. It is reckless. It is dangerous. And it’s being cheered on by a GOP that swapped its last functioning neuron for a red baseball cap and a 40 oz bottle of Olde English 400 Snake Oil.

Trump’s trade war is not some coherent strategy for economic resurgence. It’s a tantrum. A temper flare cooking off in the night like a SpaceX rocket dropping flaming debris into the Caribbean darkness. A sulking billionaire slapping tariffs on Canadian steel like he’s punishing an ex-wife. The man thinks trade deficits are personal insults and that global supply chains are just elaborate plots to steal his lunch money. Trump is the human embodiment of those fundraisers where people smash up a car with sledgehammers: briefly satisfying, but utterly pointless.

Walker Percy talked about our profound modern dislocation of purpose — a spiritual sickness in our identity in the face of modernity. I wish I could turn a phrase as elegantly, but I keep coming back to Trump’s meaning and purpose and nothing appears but roaring chaos and unleashed evil, an incurable case of nationalism-induced brainworms, magnified by the idiocy of the goons he surrounded himself with: sociopaths who look like they were spat out of the muck of a Breitbart comments section, only with less education and intellect.

They must, at a profound level, crave this moment of chaos and destruction. There’s no other viable explanation.

These are not men of statecraft or economic diplomacy. These are clowns in ill-fitting suits, juiced on dumb trade and tariff ideas abandoned around the time we stopped wearing powdered wigs, a mindless hatred of multilateralism, and the foreign policy depth of a bottle cap. They’ve mistaken America’s post-WWII leadership of the free world as some Deep State affront to their high school trauma. They don’t want to reform our alliances. They want to burn them, piss on the ashes, and sell the footage to Newsmax.

And what did these self-proclaimed populist geniuses do with their moment in the sun? They pulled out of trade deals our allies begged us to lead. They slapped tariffs on Europe and Canada that make Smoot-Hawley look like a warmup act.. They treated China not as a complex adversary requiring multilateral containment, but as a cartoon villain to huff and puff about on Truth Social in all caps. It’s like watching a man try to disarm a nuke with a jackhammer and a MAGA challenge coin.

This isn’t policy — it’s performance art for the slow, the dumb, and the soon-to-be unemployed. Trump didn’t want to lead the world; he wanted to make people smell his farts on the Mar-a-Lago veranda while blasting 1970s gay anthem on the sound system.

Every trade war fuckup, every diplomatic snub, every tariff was less about national interest and more about feeding the beast of white, aging cultural resentment that powers the Trumpist machine.

His base wanted a trade war, and they’re about to get it, good and hard. As the early numbers start to become clear, Trump’s Brainworm Recession is upon us … and it may escalate into a depression.

And it might get worse.

He gave China the greatest economic, political, and diplomatic gift imaginable. They’re rising to the moment carving out their own global economic order while we slap moronic, economically counterproductive tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and the EU and alienate allies from Berlin to Brisbane. NATO looks nervously over its shoulder. Pacific partners hedge their bets. And the world’s most dependable economic leader — the United States — is behaving like a coked-up raccoon in a fireworks warehouse. It’s not just embarrassing. It’s dangerous.

The American-led postwar order, imperfect, yes, but vital, wasn’t a gift to the world. It was a gift to America, a beneficial, high-return investment for global power. It was the reason we became the wealthiest, most powerful country in human history. It was a strategic exchange. It was leverage. It was power. And Trump pissed on it like a dog marking territory he doesn't understand.

René Berthier would call this an epistemological break — a moment where the operating code of society collapses under the weight of its own absurdity. He’d be right. Because the Trump movement isn’t just anti-elite — it’s anti-knowledge. Anti-reason. It replaced seasoned diplomats with sycophants, replaced trade theory with gut feelings, replaced policy memos with memes, and called it patriotism.

We’re not at the end of American leadership yet. But the guardrails are gone. The world’s starting to move on. Pax Americana? Not in our lifetimes.

So here we are, America. Standing at the edge of the international stage, half-naked, covered in clown paint, screaming at our allies about tariffs and the Deep State. The curtain’s still up, but the audience is heading for the exits. The lights are dimming. And the punchline is getting darker.

It’s time we understand that this is not a joke. That our standing in the world, our economy, and our security cannot survive another four years of this deranged kabuki theater masquerading as statecraft.

Because if we don’t, the next time the curtain falls, it might not rise again.