Agent Orange 2.0 - by No1 - Gold and Geopolitics - (If you want excellent analysis and an entertaining read - CL)

 Imagine you wanted to kill the deep state.

Not annoy it. Not write a strongly-worded book about it with a serious photograph of yourself on the back.

KILL it, properly, permanently, salt-the-earth-and-plough-it-under style, so that it never never ever gets its bearings back and its grandchildren flinch when somebody says the word “interagency” at a dinner party.

You’d need POWER.

Like, ACTUAL power.

Nuclear-football-follows-you-to-the-toilet power.

So: presidency it is, there’s nothing else with that kind of reach.

And to get to the presidency you’d need people to vote for you, which means the personality has to be ENORMOUS. Needy. Loud. Physically unable to walk past a microphone. A GREAT guy. An EASY GOING guy, everybody says so, the best people say so.

Perfect cover, because nobody in the history of the world has ever suspected the loudest man in the room of being quiet about anything.

Then you GO IN.

And OH BOY! Did he go in… You couldn’t have botched it worse, even if you tried!

Think about his first term… So if you’re playing this properly, mind you, you don’t want to be seen as winning. Nonono. Winning gets you scrutiny.

A first term is for laying charges you won’t detonate for another eight years, and for that you want policies where the damage is structural but the headlines point at something else entirely.

Something as conspicuous as soybeans, you know?

In 2018 he tariffed China over IP theft, which is a completely real grievance that everybody agrees about, and Beijing does the obvious thing and retaliates on the one export that maps perfectly onto your own voters.

Exports to China drop 77%. Of the $27 billion in lost agricultural exports through to the end of 2019, soybeans were 71% of it, and you hand out $23 billion of taxpayer money to farmers to make up the difference.

Argentina and Brazil filled the gap. US farmers got a permanent hit to their exports.

The Netherlands also tried something with chips (the electronic kind, not the fried ones), but retreated real fast. I guess there’s something in the water over there......

https://no01.substack.com/p/agent-orange-20?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=4094764&post_id=209676871&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=y7h5a&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email 

.....Then he got cheated out of his second term - and yes, this I will defend till my last breath, no matter what I think of his actions and the (mostly unintended) consequences, the data points to major irregularities.

So we got 4 more years of a sock puppet that was a never-ending source of hilarious entertainment. No1 was (or wasn’t?) necessary.

Either way, the sock puppet didn’t instill much confidence in the geopolitical world and had to occasionally be guided off podium by his peers.

Great image on the decaying empire.

So then Agent Orange came back, spoke to his pals in the Deep State and was like “I’M GOING TO BE THE BESTEST AND MEANEST BASTERD EVER LIVED AND YOU ARE GOING TO LOVE ME SO MUCH THAT YOU’LL BEG ME TO STAY, THEY’RE CRYING ABOUT IT, BIG STRONG MEN, GENERALS, FOUR STARS, THEY COME UP TO ME WITH TEARS IN THEIR EYES AND THEY GO SIR, SIR, IN SEVENTY YEARS NOBODY HAS SERVED THE WAY YOU SERVE THE DS US, NOT LANGLEY, NOT KISSINGER, NOBODY, AND I SAY I KNOW, I KNOW, AND WHEN I’M FINISHED WITH IT YOU WON’T EVEN RECOGNISE THE PLACE!!”

So they elected him to become the POTUS because truly, he has great hair! And he got nearly assassinated a few times. That’s what all GREAT persons have as qualifications?

So on his second term he wanted to bring manufacturing back. “Let’s tariff the world”. Not on what they actually send to the US of course. That’d be too obvious. No, it was simply what the US sends to that country divided by the imports from that country. Someone mastered Excel. You buy little from US relative to what we buy from you? That’s how you end up alienating your best trading partners. Completely unintentional, I’m sure......

.....A pattern starts to emerge.

Because how else can you destroy the Deep State SO THOROUGHLY, so METICULOUSLY, so rigorously?

You attack all the arms: the ones that sent off manufacturing to China, the ones that live off free tax money, your allies, your close friends…

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: not bad, if you tried to make the US the worst country in the world in people’s eyes… But I’m sure it’s all good intentions and stuff… Here’s a participation medal for you: 🥇

The military is weakened, out of ammunition.

The Treasury is out of money. Like 40T out of money.

Manufacturing is at an all-time low.

The trade deficit - you know, the thing tariffs were supposed to fix - is back where it started a decade ago.

Inflation’s running modestly at the designated 2%. Some Excel sheet at the FED says so, so it must be true.

Your allies despise you behind closed doors.

Your complete Middle East “unsinkable aircraft carrier” ain’t sinking, it’s just being blown to bits instead.

The Deep State is wide spread. Not one department responsible for everything.

Agent Orange 2.0 tried to go after the DS with DOGE. We all know how that ended up. Don’t we? 🦗🦗

So policy adjustments are out the window. No fancy EO signed with a nice pen, thank you very much. Those don’t survive long.

Alliances SURVIVE policies, survive presidents. The DS is too ingrained.

The USD will endure because the US never defaulted (it’s true because Wikipedia says so).

Jobs will be coming back, any day now.

And Iran is just one bomb away from capitulating.

Either this is the greatest fool that has ever lived.

Or he’s the greatest strategic mind ever having walked the Earth.