Something weird is happening on Wall Street, again.

Rich people couldn’t clap loud enough when Trump was elected. The ones who fund the Democratic Party? The ones who fund the Republicans? The ones who fund both? Doesn’t matter. Stocks went wild. The ruling class was drooling at all the profits that would be shooting down the economic ice luge into their mouths. Trump’s promising all the things they love, like slashing public spending, lowering their taxes, maybe gutting Social Security to bring down government costs. He might even help them find the silver lining in genocide, and turn Gaza into a vacation hot spot they could run.

Then $4 trillion vanished into thin air. Also, it looks like the entire economy might plunge into a recession.

The money disappeared when Trump started following through on his campaign promise and pushing for huge tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and European countries. (The ruling rich were betting he was joking when he said that in September, oops.)

Then, another strange thing. CEOs held a polite, invite-only meeting (very expensive appetizers, custom-made suits as far as the eye could see). Trump stopped by. The CEOs were nodding and grinning and slapping each other’s backs during the jokes. He left, and they suddenly had the courage to talk honestly: what do we do about the fact that this guy might sink the world economy? (Well, not that honestly. They took an anonymous poll so no one would know who said what.) The poll showed, overwhelmingly, that even if Trump crashed the stock market, they still wouldn’t push back on him, and would let him pretty much do whatever he wants with the economy. The results popped up on the screen. They jiggled their Tesla keys, shuffled their feet, and wondered what they’ll have their chefs cook for dinner.

How do you lose $4 trillion, like a champagne bubble popping? What exactly is happening with tariffs? Why are our masters on board with it?

The key to opening up this puzzle box, it turns out, is us.

The Case of the Missing $4 Trillion

What’s a tariff? Who cares?

It’s a tax on imported things. Tariffs are supposed to make imports more expensive. Politicians use them when they want to help a country’s own companies compete against companies from other countries — if other countries’ things are more expensive, maybe people in the U.S. will buy U.S.-made goods instead. To “make America great again,” Trump wants to use tariffs to bring back companies to the U.S., and lure them away from producing in countries that use much cheaper labor and have much more relaxed rules on pollution.

Side note: this plan did not work in 2016. Also, pretty much every expert everywhere says it’s not going to work this time. I think that’s called bold leadership.

Here are some reasons this tends never to work. Nikes and TVs and clothes are not made in the U.S. because it’s so cheap to make them elsewhere. Workers in China, Vietnam, Honduras, and Mexico can be treated more “efficiently”: they can be beaten, they can be children, they can be paid fractions of what’s needed to pay things like medical care, rent, and food, etc. That kind of exploitation — we should call it “hyper-exploitation” — fills up the banks of U.S. companies with mountains of green. (Not to mention their secret offshore accounts.) It’s just too good for profits. So you can get, maybe, a few companies to say they’ll build some factories in the U.S., maybe for show, for now; perhaps reshoring some parts of some industries. But an awful lot of them just aren’t going to think it’s worth it.

(Also, it’s not as if all the disappearing U.S. factory jobs were because companies left the U.S. Kim Moody points out that a lot just moved to the South — because there are fewer unions there. A lot of other companies didn’t just move away. They just needed fewer workers since workers and technology got more productive.)

Why’s tariff chaos sinking the global economy?

Problem 1: Surprise! The other countries (Canada, Mexico, China) started tariffs against Trump in response. That’s called a trade war. And with prices going up, the big threat here is inflation spiraling out of control.

Inflation surged after the pandemic. Capitalism was completely unprepared to deal with the pandemic (that’s why so many millions are dead). Supply lines of goods buckled, and prices shot up. (Also, CEOs drove up prices — “price gouging” — to make billions in profits. Don’t be selfish; they have to eat too you know.) Things became much more expensive, and people got angry. This is part of the reason why moderate parties around the globe were voted out over the last few years.

The ruling rich are scared of the instability that inflation brings. This might be the place to mention that a lot of the time, inflation comes with revolutionary upheaval. Argentina at the end of the 1990s, France in the 1780s and 1790s, when rich people were beheaded a lot, Germany after World War I … these are all times the rulers aren’t fans of.

Problem 2 — and this is key. Trump acts like there are U.S. companies over here, and other countries’ companies over there. That’s fiction. The economy is already global. Take cars, for example. Cars aren’t made either in the U.S. or in Canada or in Mexico. Parts for cars like Fords are made in all three. Beyond just cars, companies send materials to Mexican maquiladoras — read: sweatshops — to avoid pesky labor laws and environmental regulations. Then they’re shipped into the U.S. for profit bonanzas.

Problem 3: Trump can’t make up his mind. He announces tariffs, he cancels tariffs, he announces new ones. Investors don’t know where it’s safe to invest. And generally, people and businesses are starting to cut back on spending. Instability is bad for business. Besides, Trump doesn’t seem to have decided what tariffs are supposed to do. He’s got about three goals, he says: tariffs are to get companies to make things in America again. They’re to raise money for the U.S. And they’re a negotiating tool. But these things don’t fit together. If they’re a negotiating tool, then they’re designed to be taken away, and they can’t do the first two things. There’s a basic incoherence at the heart of this strategy. It’s a casino on the San Andreas fault line.

OK, fine. Rich people aren’t thrilled about what Trump’s doing. So when they had their CEO meeting the other day, why’d they say they’re still on board with Trump?

The Old Is Dying. That’s Where We Come In.

There’s been a lot of debate about these tariffs and what the “master plan” is for Trump. For example, some are saying part of the answer might be that there’s a strategy in here to rewire the global economy by changing the role of the U.S. dollar. I’m not sure about that; it involves tons of internal contradictions, and I think the wheel is still spinning, so no definite answers are possible yet.

I’ll try out one answer, or at least part of an answer, following Marx’s method of assembling conceptual configurations to approach the concrete. (Like building a wind chime to try to catch history blowing through it).

I think we should see the tariffs as part of a magic trick Trump is trying to pull off. That trick is to hold together an unstable — that’s the key word — class alliance. To get elected, he had to win over very different sections of the different classes in society. 

First sector of this support: large chunks of the ruling class, the “big bourgeoisie,” the very rich, majority shareholders and big CEOs of big companies.

(A lot of them were at that party I mentioned at the start of this article, eating charcuterie and voting in secret.)

He won a lot of them over. Trump’s selling his party as the most pro-business of the two parties. (Elections are lovers’ quarrels between segments of our masters.) He’s offering massive tax breaks for the rich, again. He’s deregulating the economy, he’s slashing protections on the environment — all this is great for profits.

One part of his appeal to the ruling rich: break the backs of the workers.

Since the pandemic, workers have been organizing more and striking more. Trump is promising to keep the working class in line. (At least, that’s his promise. That’s not up to him.)

Workers are a huge threat to him and the ruling class he works for. The “wobble” of the economy, the threat of inflation, the fragile supply lines of the economy — all this means that big strikes and big upticks in union organizing would throw a wrench into the machine. So he’s attacking the National Labor Relations Board. He’s elevated the anti-union Elon Musk as a key ally. He’s decimating federal unions, aping Reagan here to scare other unions too into being good pets.

For our rich masters, that buys a lot of goodwill. Why won’t they speak up against Trump — even the ones who were so supportive of Biden and the Democrats for so long? Some important part of the answer here is, they like what he’s offering as a consolation prize: a profit bonanza. The prospect for the ruling rich is short-term gain, come what may — and they’re betting, and crossing their fingers, there won’t be a recession. Our masters are gamblers. The stock market is the craps table. They’re sipping their drinks while they’re watching their dice roll. What they bet is the money they took out of our hides. They’d like us to stand and watch silently.

And it seems to me, the ruling class is so eager for short-term wins, because capitalism is in some trouble. It’s been in a grinding, two-headed crisis for decades.

Profit rates have been low for awhile now; there’s not a ton out there to invest in and get a great return (despite a booming stock market). Tech is one of the only exceptions. A third of the entire stock market’s value is wrapped up in just the tech sector. That’s not great. There’s a decent chance the bubble will pop like housing did in 2008. That wrecked the global economy. And more than this, productivity basically hasn’t improved in decades, with increases in productivity rates barely crawling along. 

Trump wants to play the hero here. He’s offering to ramp up exploitation and open up the spigots of profits. The old playbook of a more measured, less naked way of managing capitalism was thrown into crisis with the 2008 financial meltdown. That was the start of a dawning realization: the old way of running capitalism isn’t solving capitalism’s two-headed problem. 

I mean to say, the old is dying. The new can’t be born. Trump is a kind of desperate crisis management. That gap between old and new is the perfect opportunity for a grotesque mediocrity like Trump.

Second sector he needs to pull this all off: us.

For his magic trick to work, Trump also needs a key sector of working-class people for support. In the election, parts of unions went for him, like chunks of the Teamsters and the UAW. A layer of white workers went for him; larger numbers of Black and brown workers too.

What do you offer workers when you have to also attack them and break their backs? Here, talking about tariffs as “protection” from China or other parts of the world makes more sense —as a kind of consolation prize. In important part, tariffs are a play to that base: “Look, I’m doing something for you — against the foreigners.” It’s what he offers a part of the working class when, with the other hand, he’s beating them with a two-by-four. The tariffs fit with the attack on immigrants here, appealing to backwards racism, pretending he’s protecting working class people by deporting a chunk of them.

And there’s an upper layer of this working class that’s buying at least some of this line and agreeing to work with Trump. Like the UAW head Shawn Fain, and the head of the Teamsters, Sean O’Brien. They think Trump’s going to help protect them from the power of the corporate masters.

We have to be clear here just how wrong this is — the idea these union leaders have that tariffs will be good, somehow, for the working class. 

We just talked about how tariffs can’t bring back all kinds of businesses, magically, to the U.S., reversing the basic tendencies of capitalism. And it seems tariffs are already driving some inflation, which appears to be sticking around on things working-class desperately need. Tariffs, in this sense, are pay cuts. The idea seems to be that, by aligning with a ruling-class party, unions can get something good for themselves. But it means aligning with a president bent not just on breaking the working class’s back, but on pitting U.S. workers against immigrants, and the working class of China, Mexico, Canada. This is nothing short of a disaster for us, to cut ourselves off from the kind of real power that would come from international solidarity, from fighting capital on its own international battlefield. Union leaders working with Trump are just cheering the betters at the craps table, the ones gambling with the profits they took out of us.

Opening the Puzzle Box; Fighting Back

Let’s turn around, and take in as much of the view as we can so far.

This is the idea: tariffs are a lure for the working class, an attempt to marshal us behind Trump and our rich masters for their ruling class agenda. And tariff-talk is accepted by the ruling rich, since it’s being paired with big cash prizes: profit bonanzas in the short term, along with savage attacks on the working class, helping ramp up profits in the long grinding crisis of capitalism. Meanwhile, the rulers are gambling the tariffs are just a negotiating tool, praying Trump won’t really sink the economy.

All this helps make a little more sense of why Trump’s regime is turning with such savagery against the Left, against the Palestine movement, and so on. Trump’s regime is marked by fear of disruption in the extreme, because capitalism is fragile in its two-headed crisis. And here too we see an important part of the reason why the Democrats are so unwilling to say or do almost anything against Trump. After all, they’re just the other party of the rich masters. The people who pay their bills are pretty happy, and aren’t ready to accept any big disruptions. (The solution, in other words, isn’t going to be the Democratic Party.)

As I see it, Trump’s tariffs are a political gambit to manage capitalism in crisis that also can’t fix anything. But it’s a playbook that only works if one key “leg” of this strategy — us, the working class — plays along.

His magic trick rests, crucially, on the working class of immigrants, baristas, teachers, bus drivers, factory workers. I mean that it depends on Trump’s ability to win over some sectors of the working class — led, in part, by union leaders like Sean O’Brien and Shawn Fain, at the top of major unions, who are clapping for tariffs. And it rests on his ability to terrorize the rest of the class into obedience, like by trying to deport Mahmoud Kahlil and brutally attacking federal unions.

But something is rumbling inside our class like an engine turning over and warming up again. Young people are overwhelmingly disgusted by the government and see it as illegitimate — little wonder when both parties fund genocide. And they see hope in unions and socialism. Strikes are ticking up once more. The Palestine movement is starting to stir again in defense of Kahlil and against repression.

Trump’s rule, trying to manage capital’s rotting system, needs us to work. And that means: there’s a chance here to be its biggest threat. I mean that there’s an opportunity here waiting for us, to organize ourselves from below and attack the rotting structure — to go on strike and march together, in our unions and outside them, and outside the Democratic Party that’s playing dead so convincingly.

Sometimes what someone said a long time ago comes back around like it was written this morning:

When the rulers have already spoken

Then the ruled will start to speak.

Who dares say “never”?

Who’s to blame if oppression remains? We are.

Who can break its thrall? We can.