Reporting and opinion by Mathew Carr + Yahoo Finance, Netflix, search engines
April 2-4, 2025 — President Trump wants to Make America Wealthy Again (MAWA pronounced “more” with a southern drawl)…yet, it’s never been unwealthy during the past 80 years.
What Mr Trump is really planning is — to make wealthy Americans even more super rich at the expense of ordinary citizens of the formerly great nation — the United States.
His speech on his self-named “Liberation Day” (Wednesday) earlier this evening reminded me of the Netflix series “Zero Day”, where corrupt politicians from both the Republican and Democratic parties got into bed with each other — and also with an influential tech firm — to scare in a deadly fashion the “far right” and “far left” of American politics into the middle ground …also to make the dysfunctioning country “more controllable” by a small group of elite people.
There is a particularly telling scene, where the series hero played by Robert De Niro (a former president investigating the deception and corruption) is reminding the lady who ran the tech company played by Gabby Hoffmann about the difference between the words “liberty” and “freedom.” in the context of “safety” and “defence spending.”
Mr Tump, also, seems to need reminding how to tell between the freedoms and libertarian ideal of the few vs the many.
What’s the difference between the two words, citing a quote attributed to US founding father Benjamin Franklin? the powerful tech boss asked, in the series.
“Freedom is what allows people like you to do whatever you want. Liberty is what protects the rest of us from people like you,” De Niro’s character says, correcting the tech boss about the famous quote. See and listen to this (three minutes of NPR) for context, if you are not familiar.
Imagine “the people as a whole” as De Niro as you watch the scene and the Hoffmann character as Trump.
In the context of massive hikes in tariffs that will make cars, medicines, rifles,everything (pretty much) more expensive for ordinary Americans — including the auto workers in Trump’s immediate audience in the Whitehouse rose garden this evening — the US president’s announcements severely damage their own influence over their immediate day-to-day lives. That is, it hurts their own liberty, their own self determination.
Further, in the context of Amazon buying the US unit of Chinese social media company Tik Tok (or the whole global company), Americans are about to lose the only social media outfit that’s not dominated by US billionaires. Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos already owns the powerful newspaper the Washington Post. People associated with the “Only Fans” are another bidder for Tik Tok.
American democracy and voters’ ability to choose leaders in a rational way is in extreme peril.
Already struggling to understand the world, maintain privacy, be properly informed about what’s going via reliable information and pay for basics such as medicine and food, let alone a few nice things and holidays, Americans are heading for more acute pain as Mr Trump seems to pretend to act in their interests.
In reality, the current president seems to be, again, doing the complete opposite of what he purports to be doing.
Stoxx 600 index has fallen 4% in five days as of noon London time Thursday.
Importantly for the hedge-fund mates of Mr Trump and the mainstream financial press including WSJ, FT and Bloomberg, market volatility surged to near its highest in a couple of years …giving these people who gamble daily with our money ample opportunity to rip profit out of the system.
What Trump’s demonstrating most of all is that no single politician should ever be able to deploy such economic power globally to hurt his or her people so cruelly, recklessly and suddenly by breaching their human rights.
This demonstration is Mr Trump’s only way out of what will rightly be called a brazen grab for political and economic power.
He’s showing the world that the US needs to change its constitution to better protect its people from out-of-control leadership, or more correctly “so-called leadership.”
Indeed, the Australian PM Anthony Albanese immediately dismissed Trump’s global tariff plan as making no sense because it harms the interests of ordinary Americans…and ordinary world citizens….and apparently breaching an existing deal between the two countries.
The single-digit drops in markets across Asia this morning show traders are actually downplaying the likelihood of Trump’s announcements coming to pass (though things could easily get worse during the next days, weeks and months).
Guardian — CarrZee: the immediate single-digit drops demonstrate that the markets don’t trust that Trump will get “freedom” to implement his massive-tariff plan:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2025/apr/03/business-news-live-updates-trump-tarrifs-asian-markets-nikkei-asx-wall-st-dow-jones-dollar-euro (snipped at about 5am London time on April 3.)
The other important context is the behind-the-scenes negotiations to tame global climate change, which appears to be getting out of hand … assuming the temperature data (below) is not manipulated.
Mr Trump is not just seeking energy and banking/finance dominance, but weapons, surveilance and social media dominance, as well.
The rest of the world is sick of this constant negotiation and bullying (unless it’s designed to save people, climate and nature).
NOTES
Trump’s words (take as you will) — Otter AI was listening:
“Here are just a short list of some of the companies that have already announced and committed to investment. And this is a company that built its factories and its plants in China. Apple is going to spend $500 billion they never spent money like that. Here. They’re going to build their plants here, soft Bank Open, AI and Oracle, great, great companies are investing $500 billion almost immediately the video, a hot company is investing hundreds of billions of dollars. They just announced TSMC, the biggest, most important company in the world of chips, from Taiwan, with no investment from us, is investing 200 billion. And they said the reason was, number one, the election of november 5, and number two, the tariffs. They don’t want to pay the tariffs, and the way they’re not paying it is to build their plan here. So we’re going to go from almost no percentage. We used to have 100% of the chip market. Now it’s all in Taiwan, almost all of its entire one a couple of other countries, but mostly in Taiwan. And think of it, we had 100% we lost it because of people in that office that didn’t do their job. They allowed it to be stolen from us, Johnson and Johnson, great company, $55 billion Eli Lilly, 27 billion. Meta is investing $500 billion Wow, the Mac is investing 20 billion CMA, CGM, $20 billion and then you have Merck and clarios, stellantis, General Motors, GE, aerospace, Honda, Nissan, Hyundai, are all putting in billions and billions of dollars, and they’re committed 100% and we have never had. We’ve never had. And this is after two and a half months.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/investments-made-us-result-trump-204257813.html
That list is a total of $1.8 trillion.
Ultimately, new investment into America will be about $6 trillion, the US president said, and the total will reach even higher than that by the end of 2025, he said….without offering details
‘Liberation Day’ tariff plan
(Adds Albanese, earlier added Netflix’s De Niro, Tweets, context, market reaction, other videos)
[…] President Trump wants even MAWA (more); he’s using his own (perhaps doomed) freedom as preside… […]