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Trump's Parlous Gambit
Kunstler.com ^ | 30 May, 2025 | James Howard Kunstler

Posted on 05/31/2025 4:57:23 AM PDT by MtnClimber

“The modern politics of division have become a banally hectoring faux morality play put on by the theater kids for the other theater kids.” —El Gato Malo on X.

President Trump Alone

While Jake Tapper leads the Mea Culpa Chorus singing Kumbaya in a minor key, absolutely nobody is fooled that the grotesque psychotic deformities of US politics can be reduced to a few White House factotums lying to the news media about “Joe Biden’s” cognitive abilities. For one thing, the news media was not lied to. The news media (including Jake) lied to the nation, consistently, flagrantly, mendaciously, for years, and most of all they lied about the gigantic racketeering operation that government had become in the age of Anything Goes and Nothing Matters.

While Jake Tapper leads the Mea Culpa Chorus singing Kumbaya in a minor key, absolutely nobody is fooled that the grotesque psychotic deformities of US politics can be reduced to a few White House factotums lying to the news media about “Joe Biden’s” cognitive abilities. For one thing, the news media was not lied to. The news media (including Jake) lied to the nation, consistently, flagrantly, mendaciously, for years, and most of all they lied about the gigantic racketeering operation that government had become in the age of Anything Goes and Nothing Matters.

One reality we struggle with is the doleful fact that there is no work-around for the nation’s monumental debt. Since it can’t possibly be paid off, there are two stark paths for it: default and ruinous deflation (that is, money vanishes and the nation goes broke); or a futile attempt to inflate it away with more fake money creation (you’ll have money, but it’s increasingly worthless, so you’re effectively broke). Either way, you’re broke. In the meantime, the remorseless interest that has to be paid on $36.2-trillion squeezes out everything else we’re supposed to care for as relates to the common good.

Every broke-a** family or individual person knows how debilitating money-worries can be. And since unpayable debt is the common denominator across all of Western Civ, this perhaps explains the gross, suicidal mental disorder displayed lately by leadership all across Europe, North America and Anglo-Oceania. Europe, especially, exhibits behavior that is completely cuckoo — inciting war with Russia, inviting in murderous hostiles from foreign lands, and sadistically policing their own citizens.

The exception is Mr. Trump, a businessman-outsider to government trying to pull off an escape from the deadly debt quandary. It’s probably impossible, but he is trying nonetheless. It has three main features: 1) to readjust trade relations that, in theory, would restore industrial production across the land — a bootstrapping operation to kick off “growth.” 2) to engineer a severe re-set of the money system that would effectively amount to defaulting on debt but somehow without the feature of disappearing money. At best, this would induce some kind of fall in living standards, but mostly among the small sector of financial buccaneers who thrive on swindles and the Boomers living on investment accounts (figment wealth), who are now dying off anyway — which is to say, Great Depression Lite. And 3) the least understood feature of Trumpism: to decouple the USA from the resource scarcity in the rest of the world, and the consequent strife it’s inducing, and withdraw into a sort of Fortress North America that can somehow carry-on self-sufficiently while everybody else collapses.

As big pictures go, this is a pretty wild one, stupendously ambitious, risky, and perhaps improbable. But what do Mr. Trump’s domestic opponents have to offer? To go back to their asset-stripping operation with its insane sideshow of race-and-sexual hoaxes and hustles? Let’s face it, the Democratic Party has utterly shot its wad. If it tries to start another civil war, it will have its a** handed to it. Despite all the desperate, rear-guard lawfare underway now, the party is already withdrawing into the political thickets to hide while it considers some drastic reorganization of its purpose and personnel. It may skulk there for many years, just as it did between James Buchanan (1857) and Grover Cleveland (1885).

And despite his daunting agenda, Mr. Trump at least presents a sense of confident determination to get the country righted in some fashion, to recover a sense of purpose and enterprise after years of feckless, dissipative drift into the hallucinatory madness of the Left. You must give him a chance. There is no one else right now with no other way.


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Society
KEYWORDS: alexthompson; autopen; clowardpiven; dementia; djt; economy; hunterbiden; jaketapper; jameshowardkunstler; jhk; jillbiden; kunstler; nationaldebt; originalsin; pages; tds

1 posted on 05/31/2025 4:57:23 AM PDT by MtnClimber
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To: MtnClimber

The ‘RATs and RINOs have left us with a fine mess.


2 posted on 05/31/2025 4:57:39 AM PDT by MtnClimber (For photos of scenery, wildlife and climbing, click on my screen name for my FR home page.)
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To: little jeremiah; MtnClimber; Carriage Hill; GOPJ; Mama Shawna; notdownwidems; ...

James Howard Kunstler ping


3 posted on 05/31/2025 4:58:32 AM PDT by MtnClimber (For photos of scenery, wildlife and climbing, click on my screen name for my FR home page.)
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To: MtnClimber
Kunstler has been reflecting on our doom or most of my adult life, as a result of which he has a really good view of how we got where we are. It's a whole class of grifters and their idiot enablers, like the one that popped up this morning Yale Professor and advisor to Blinken Harold Hongju Koh, Is Trump a National Security Threat?. As bad as Harvard is, it is not the only threat to the well-being of We the People.
4 posted on 05/31/2025 5:10:33 AM PDT by AndyJackson
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To: MtnClimber

Kunstler is trashing the trump agenda. Don’t bother reading this tripe and navel gazing tome.


5 posted on 05/31/2025 5:35:50 AM PDT by central_va (I won't be reconstructed and I do not give a damn...)
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To: central_va

We must not have read the same article.


6 posted on 05/31/2025 5:42:52 AM PDT by dforest
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To: central_va

If the LSM did their jobs this never would have happened. By protecting the political class instead of providing oversight on behalf of the citizens, they enabled politicians to do this without fear of reprisal by the citizenry.


7 posted on 05/31/2025 5:44:02 AM PDT by EQAndyBuzz (TDS Much?)
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To: MtnClimber; AndyJackson; central_va

BUMP


8 posted on 05/31/2025 5:48:31 AM PDT by PGalt (Past Peak Civilization?)
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To: central_va

You need to reread it and look at Kunstler’s other postings. Kunstler’s view here is Trump is our last best hope, but we are probably all doomed a anyway, but maybe the damage can be limited to just taking out the boomers if Trump is good and we are lucky.


9 posted on 05/31/2025 5:52:28 AM PDT by AndyJackson
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To: central_va

I don’t think so..


10 posted on 05/31/2025 6:54:15 AM PDT by enumerated (81 million votes my ass)
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To: central_va

“Kunstler is trashing the trump agenda....”

I respectfully disagree.

I read this article as saying that Trump is our best possible hope in what is most likely a hopeless situation.

If Trump actually reset the financial system to a sustainable path while avoiding what appears to be unavoidable chaos, he will truly be a man for the ages.


11 posted on 05/31/2025 7:49:07 AM PDT by PTBAA
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To: All

In all Kunstler’s self promoting history, his strongest suits have remained constant. He’s anti Swamp and acutely aware of resource constraints.

He does get points for a career that did not derive from trust funds. He did oddjobs to fund his very skilled writing. And that writing has sold.

As for content, his wiki, or whoever edited it, slams his Peak Oil errors. You can always tell the oil uninformed by the phrase “technological progress that created fracking”. Fracking has been known about for many decades. It got underway in the US in about 2008-9 timeframe for the obvious reason that loans to fund it carried interest rates of near 0%.

He is resource educated. He went out and learned the realities. Peak Oil has a very specific and precise definition. It means oil flow rate from a new well climbs to a level, maybe 1000 barrels/day for fracked shale or 10,000 barrels/day for a non fracked conventional well. And then from that level is declines. The rate climbs, peaks and declines. Every oil well ever drilled does this.

You can drill and frack adjacent to it to get oil from elsewhere to flow to that well and disrupt the peak curvature, but that’s like saying an oil field is declining, and then the next year you redraw the boundaries that define that field, making it bigger, and all of a sudden the field output looks like it’s rising.

But anyway, that’s the definition of Peak Oil. You can find an avalanche of articles saying things like “Peak Oil tells us that the world will run out of oil in XXX years”. Peak Oil says nothing about this. It says very precisely and specifically what I just noted.

Anyway, Kunstler is aware of the constraints of resources and how he hopes Trump can stop flow of them outwards from the US and save them. This exact overall concept affects things in Ukraine. “Cut off Russian oil. Tell Saudi Arabia to produce more oil and cut Russia off from China and India.” Why should Kingdom of Saudi Arabia do this? Why should they care about US desires? They agreed to buy some arms from the US with their infinite money mostly to ensure the US doesn’t pursue criminal charges against MBS for the murder of that journalist a few yrs ago.


12 posted on 05/31/2025 8:14:41 AM PDT by Owen
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To: AndyJackson

but we are probably all doomed a anyway,

Ok. Now what do you mean by this? Nuclear war would be the ultimate worst thing to happen. As far as morals, they left America long ago. Economy? Well, I see 70 trillion in debt by 2060. However, we’ve always adjusted since reagan took U.S. passed our first Trillion. I highly doubt we will ever truly be doomed unless we end up nuking the world.


13 posted on 05/31/2025 8:32:21 AM PDT by napscoordinator (DeSantis is a beast! Florida is the freest state in the country! )
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To: napscoordinator
but we are probably all doomed anyway...Now what do you mean by this?

What Kunstler means by this - I read the article for once - is that it may be way too late for even Trump to escape the consequences of the debt trap we are entangled in.

14 posted on 05/31/2025 8:38:44 AM PDT by AndyJackson
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To: AndyJackson

We’ve been talking debt since 1982 when Reagan became president. It’s definitely a boy cried wolf situation. You can’t keep threatening the debt problem when every time it is mentioned, nothing happens.


15 posted on 05/31/2025 8:41:21 AM PDT by napscoordinator (DeSantis is a beast! Florida is the freest state in the country! )
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To: napscoordinator
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

We have been on the gradual part for long time. The interest on the debt is now a major component of our national budget.

16 posted on 05/31/2025 8:49:42 AM PDT by AndyJackson
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To: AndyJackson

Each taxpayer’s share of the national debt is $323,000. I suppose some of our assets could be sold off to lower that amount somewhat, but its still a problematic number.


17 posted on 05/31/2025 9:13:37 AM PDT by Starboard
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