Mad Man-Child King Ends Tantrum, Learns Nothing
Donnie’s “pause” on tariffs has become the top reason for deeply discrediting this regime.
Oh, the Boring Department is Back!
It was no surprise that not even a “huh?” came from the Adverse Action Writer’s Suite upon hearing the announcement that Trump had paused tariffs on almost every country on the planet, including the one with penguins as its main inhabitant.
Experienced Trump observers leaned back in their chairs and felt the relief of some “normal,” predictable, malignant narcissist behavior wave over them. Or if that’s too psychoanalytical, which it’s okay if it is, let’s go with “donnie had all-alone tummy tingles.” They can be the same thing, especially when dealing with a dictator’s brain that stopped maturing at age five.
That was good because a lot of us were worrying that the brain’s body, in this case, a 78-year-old man with abundant signs of dementia, was going to carry on his mad-king tariff Poo Power Move for a lot longer than he did.
Thankfully, that didn’t happen, and Trump’s main architect of them, Peter Navarro, former prison inmate and current Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing, was nowhere to be found in press shots with Trump, maybe because his bullshit plan was wrought from a thin atmospheric whiff of bad ideas and shat into existence by sheer force of will, excluding all common sense.
That didn’t stop Donnie from rescinding when the really Terrible Guys, the campaign donor bankers, started piling up with voicemails on his personal TrumpFone, complaining about the bond-market selloff. The mad child-king grabbed Treasury Secretary of the Disney™ Imagineers™ animatronic humanoid Scott Bessent, where they met reporters and answered questions. Donnie took none of the blame and all of the credit, though. He can do both, completely free of all ties from reality. Note in this clip:
Closing bell prices on three major indices,
Trump is talking to reports with a level of condescension all his own when he calls people “yippy” as they watch their investments tank, many of which have not even started to recover. We need to add “yippy” to our morning meditations going forward.
Trump just as confidently told a stuffy room full of rich people that “I know what the hell I’m doing,” with just a little actor’s swagger on the word “hell,” adding much to the confidence level of everyone watching.
The takeaway is that none of us are expected to be upset with him deciding to lift the tariffs because (I truly think from the way the major media talks about it), they still don’t completely understand that saying “we’re bringing in $2 billion a day from those tariffs” means “we’re taxing hard-working Americans who are paying for those tariffs and have already ripped off way more than $2 billion from them today for something Mad Child-King Don just dreamed up and then un-dreamed-up 12 hours after it went into effect.
Meanwhile, Peter Navarro, the chief adviser on econ and trade, got called out (again) for just making shit up, or if you prefer a little more dignity to describe his actions, let’s say he was “cutting entire economic strategies that have been disproven for hundreds of years out of whole cloth and feeding them to the President of the United States.” This clown even invented an alter-ego “expert:”
I hope you watch this clip (above) for a few moments. Whether you’re a big fan or not, Rachel Maddow reports on facts that won’t leave that hefty sack of stinky poop Peter Navarro alone. If my thorough shredding of him did not catch your eye early Tuesday evening, I invite you to go back and read it.( LINK HERE: ) This guy is absolutely priceless, as in the “worthless” kind of price. I hope he’s ejected as far away from the White House as possible before the Trump Crack Economics team decides to play with the guts of the engine of our economy by slapping a cool $2-4 trillion on our backs again. Peter Navarro, or should I call him Ron Vara, is not only a despicable human with zero credentials, but he is likely the architect behind the entire Trump tariff scheme in the first place.
Monumental Disregard for Other Humans
The hypocrisy, arrogance, and flat-out stupidity displayed in Washington yesterday was staggering. I’m not saying that in any way because of my political views. I don’t care if the president was Martian. Anyone who actively sabotages global markets and then decides, “Oops, I’ve had enough. Time to backtrack!” deserves an extra hot place in a Hellscape By Rick™ where they will enjoy living daily in unending agony, no diet coke, and nothing but health food for snacks. Like “calorie-free rice cakes.”
My trouble with this is the absolutely filthy ethical situation our Dear Leader and any Republican or Democrat in on the game could take advantage of. Here's a quick refresher of how it would go for those who haven’t played this illegal scheme called “insider trading” out for a while.
First, say you decided to reverse course on tariffs yesterday, April 9th, at about 9 AM. The markets have been super-volatile for days but posted their greatest drops last Thursday and Friday.
Because you’re either a genius or a dumbshit hiding in plain sight, you decide at 9:37 to post this:
Second, you know that at 1:42 PM EDT, you’ll announce a 90-day tariff pause (except for China), dropping reciprocal rates to a flat 10%. This will trigger a massive relief rally. Stocks will surge as panic subsides. Posts on X and news snippets confirm markets were jittery all morning and then soared post-announcement (S&P was up between 7-9%, and the Dow was up more than 2,000 points).
Third, If you played your cards right and were immune from prosecution like Trump is, you could buy a bunch of call options (which are the right to buy a stock at a set price). You could also move to buy Index ETFs, like SPY or the QQQ (Nasdaq, tech-heavy).
Fourth, buying a call option’s value explodes if the underlying stock jumps fast. While you were at it, you’d go shopping for huge multinational firms hit very hard by your tariffs, like Apple (AAPL), Nike (NKE), or Tesla (TSLA). We might as well throw a few retailers in there because they will get red-hot, too! Pick some Wayfair – it’ll go up 20% later in the day.
Fifth: You then pick a strike price –the range just slightly “out of the money,” where the stock is above the current price and expires soon (e.g., April 11 weekly options) to keep costs low and ride the immediate pop.
I have too many examples to follow simultaneously, so I’ll stick with the SPY example. It’s at $570 after days of losses (down from $620 in February). Options are cheap, so you’d buy SPY $575 strike calls, expiring April 11th at $2.50 per contract. Each contract controls 100 shares, so $250 per contract (plus fees).
1-You drop $25,000 on 100 contracts. That’s $25K you’ve risked, controlling 10,000 SPY shares (worth $5.7M at $570).
2-The tariff pause hits at 1:42 PM EST. SPY rockets up 7%, jumping from $570 to $610 by 3 PM. Your $575 calls, now “in the money,” are worth at least their intrinsic value ($610-$575 = $35) plus some time/premium value, say $37 per contract. So you then finally sell at $37 per contract. That’s 100 contracts x $37 x 100 = $370,000.
Minus your initial investment of $25,000, you make, pre-tax, $345,000. But I forgot – you’re in the top 1% - so you don’t pay taxes!
Trump was right – SO MUCH Winning! Big jumps in the afternoon of April 9th!
The rest involves dumping the options at the end of the day as the rally peaks – before profit-taking kicks in. SPY, to continue the same example, hit $610 and then leveled off.
I walk through the scenario so you can get a visceral, real-time sense of what Trump could easily have done without getting in trouble because he has the special Golden Ticket from the U.S. Supreme Court that he put in power.It’s the Rule of Money for the Few, and it’s nauseating to the rest of us who can’t, and in some cases, wouldn’t do it.
Tangibly Intangible Problems
I’m going to shift gears and point back to something I did the other day so that, in case you missed it, you get the chance to consider its importance because I admittedly buried it inside a lot of other information I was throwing at you (my apologies) at the time.
The problem starts to show up here, in this chart describing the amount of services the United States exports by category. Note that things like Insurance, Government, Telecom, Intellectual Property, Financial Services, Travel, and Others are all included in this excellent view from today’s Wall Street Journal (Data is from the Commerce Department).
The chart is important because it describes a very real problem on American balance sheets and embedded into American accounting systems, with glaring consequences dating back to before the First World War.
Intangibles are Valuable
The issue at hand is called the Intangible Economy. There’s a very, very good book that gets into discussing this if you are not familiar with the topic and want to start at the beginning, called Capitalism Without Capital (link: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jonathan-haskel/capitalism-without-capital/ ) by London economists Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake. The book delves into the foundations of many of the United States’ problems and future solutions that are farther reaching than economics or tariffs. It does this without waxing ungrounded or philosophical, with the gimlet eye of two authors who have some deep clout in global economic circles.
The chart shows that the rise in all service categories has been meteoric except for the pandemic. While The Wall Street Journal has a very limited focus (which I will cover here), much broader issues are in play. The most fundamental, and which just hit us like a ton of bricks (along with the not-us, the rest of the world) is this notion that we can “return to manufacturing.”
I am here to tell you, and absolutely urge you to research this, that there is no “return to manufacturing.” Not. Ever. Ever.
We will never create a scenario where the magic Wheel of Time turns backwards and we are suddenly in Donald Trump’s mind from the 1950’s. We will not have another manufacturing heyday again. It’s over, and it’s never coming back.
Take a look at this infographic, this time I colored the block that points to one of the ten (six) big problems that needed to be solved before Navarro, Lutnick, Bessent, and Trump unleashed the chaos of the last week onto the world. They were so very much thinking, it seems, that hitting our allies over the heads with tariff bricks would solve these problems for us domestically, somehow.
(You can download this infographic freely and use it as an SVG to scale this to any size at this link.). (Questions send to mailto://rick@adverseaction.org ).
The “intangible economy” can be summed up this way: Accountings know how to count things, and centuries (and millennia) of counting have been used to determine who gets what and how much something is worth. But beginning in the middle of the last century, after the war, thanks to companies like McKinsey, management science bred the modern Ivy League MBA club.
Management Science Changed the World
When a science developed around management (which is an interesting story I’ll talk to you about some other time), and when it came into demand alongside studies in social interactions (sociologists), individual judgment, learning, reactions, and so forth (psychology), there was a literal explosion of intangible things that influenced a company’s performance and net value, but which was intrinsically invisible.
Accountants don’t care for invisible things.
They are not easily counted. In fact, accountants, going back to the dawn of Intangibles, tended to look at ideas, research and development, and later risky startups as mostly equity-based ventures, pushing the stock market into its fabulously sized mammoth that it is today, which recently lost several trillion dollars in value.
Most of that loss was in equity stocks, basically “blind ownership” in a company. As a shareholder of some number of shares nestled inside an ETF, you have as much say in the day-to-day happenings of a company as the mailman who delivers the mail to them. The power brokers for every company like it, and that’s most of American business today, are the real ones determining the direction of their companies.
The big idea here is that a company like Microsoft, Oracle, or Pfizer does not just produce things like ones and zeroes encoded and sent over the Internet. Yet, they provide software for servers, databases, drug companies, and medicines that take years of R&D to perfect and test.
The old way of accounting, or “the current way” for most companies, is to treat the result of those development efforts as the thing to count. As an accountant, if I say that Oracle sold eleven million copies of its database software for $100 each, that’s eleven million times $100. Easy math. But if I say it took hundreds of thousands of hours by humans – some company employees, some not – to develop that software, then the accountant will look at me blankly.
Simple: Considering that Ives designed the iPhone, he designed a complete system of interconnected software, user interface, and physical characteristics. Thousands of other engineers developed the phone subsystems, materials, and software based on his design parameters. How much was that worth? I’d say if Apple were a gold-mining company, it’d have been like hitting the Comstock Lode or hundreds of billions of dollars. Yet all of it is based on the sales that come from the phone, not the invention of the phone itself.
Why does this mean automobile manufacturing isn’t coming back? Because we have a structural mismatch of talented engineers with demand. We’ve raised two generations of kids who grew up and want to break into the “thinking economy” we’ve created but can’t. It’s a ridiculous loop.
Trump’s future vision wouldn't survive for long anyway if we mandated those kids to work factory jobs – manufacturing means automation and fewer humans. It’s a basic principle. No amount of wishing otherwise by Peter Navarro will make it different.
What Comes Next?
The world we live in right now, here on April 10th, 2025, is plagued by this problem and the near-end of civilization that this regime threw us off the cliff over because of their dimwit strategies and very stupid lack of credibility testing “experts” Trump has surrounded himself with (hello, Senate who just approved all those genius cabinet members? You there, asleep in the gallery? Yes, you) should be whipped in a public square and tied to a pole for a few days for your sins. This is exactly why the confirmation process exists the way it does, so shame on you.
Things happened. It’s done for now.
At this point, though, it’s high time new standards were developed to handle the value of what is considered equity intangibles. The reason is that those value chains are hard to describe and count. But that’s the challenge we’ve gotten ourselves into, and there is nothing stopping us.
I urge you now to help me start a discussion. Should we have a Q&A over the topic to bring everyone along? I’m open to helping in any way I can. Let me know in the comments how you’d like me to help advance this. It has downstream consequences on a huge, social level as well as political - and others.
That’s a Wrap
My signoff today will be brief. Please take care of your own mental health. Find some respite, and if you’re a little lighter because all of this deliberately inflicted self-harm is just a little less heavy, that’s great. Please mind yourself, and watch your friends and loved ones too.
Please be well.
Rick Herbst
April 10, 2028
CITATION / SOURCES
https://www.investing.com/crypto/official-trump
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/04/09/bond-market-selloff-trump/
https://www.ft.com/content/35a27906-703c-44f1-962d-aa2bf3b1c973
Wow! With credits too! Very well written and researched article BUT the orange thief will never pay because of our Supreme Court. And if there are 600 signed petitioners that are judges, that want to impeach John Robert’s what good would that do if trump has the right to replace him…?!
During the last century, politicians bent themselves into pretzels trying to get people back on small farms - the stupidest policy was paying farmers NOT to produce something. But it didn’t work. Innovation had put machines in where farmers had been, and individual farm families could not compete with them.
I see the same thing going on with manufacturing. We can’t imagine workers doing well any other way - tho I will note it was mainly the white male workers who did well and it was in heavily unionized industries.
There is some irony in Republicans pushing for the misogynist societies and child labor that produce the manufactured goods at Walmart - and Democrats looking to immigrants to do that work. But basically, as you wrote, manufacturing jobs, like family farms, are gone and ain’t coming back.
But we do have serious problems with our financial industry, which only invests in investing. By that I mean that they don’t share profits with workers, or plow profits back into the companies with innovations - they just buy up their own stock or take over other companies (which they may or may not be able to run).
Elon’s been doing the only thing he knows how to do - taking over other companies and making them more “profitable” by firing workers. Except it’s federal agencies he’s turned to. Might as well make a mess of it all. He must not have been in on the short selling opportunity.
The tariffs on/tariffs off game is clearly a dream for insiders who are short selling. A great demonstration of that is in the movie Trading Places, where they use information only they have to sell orange futures short.
That’s the kind of behavior that prompted the first real standards on the NY stock exchange 150 years ago, when Jay Gould made a fortune while crashing the market. Trump would like to be Jay Gould, if he knew he existed.
Dear God. It’s only been ten weeks. How are we going to survive four years?