FWIW # 48 - Trauma, Tariffs, Trump, and The Markets

The confrontation between President Trump, Vice President Vance, and President Zelenskyy was traumatic. It’s astounding to me that anti-Trump media pundits and politicians are quick to blame our leaders for ambushing the Ukrainian president. Zelenskyy was at the White House to sign a mineral mining agreement that would have (1) given the United States some reimbursement for the billions of dollars our country has sent Ukraine and (2) shielded Ukraine from future Russian aggression. The agreement was signed in the past month by a Ukrainian official, but President Trump said it was necessary for Ukraine’s president to sign. Treasury Secretary Bessent went to Ukraine with the understanding that Zelenskyy would sign it. Zelenskyy deferred signing, saying he would sign at the Munich Security Conference later in February. At Munich he put off signing until he came to the United States and met with President Trump. Any observer paying attention can clearly see that President Zelenskyy has no intention of signing the agreement. Having a government minister sign the document is further evidence that Zelenskyy was attempting to pacify the United States while leaving the door open to repudiate the agreement when the time was right.

            Who stood to benefit from the blowup? President Trump? It’s foolish to think so. If Trump can achieve a ceasefire and resolution to the Ukrainian War, he’ll be hailed as a peacemaker. That’s the point. Trump’s opposition in the US, both Democrat and Republican, and the European elite don’t want him to get credit for peace in Europe. Zelenskyy was warmly welcomed to the White House. It was Zelenskyy, 40 minutes into the meeting, close to the time when the signing was to take place, disrupting the proceedings. Why? Why would someone who has no ability to fight the war without the United States deliberately torpedo future relations with his benefactors? It’s clear that Zelenskyy and his economic supporters in Ukraine, Europe, and the United States do not want the war to end. This cabal of warmongers bet that the political pressure on President Trump would force him to support the Ukrainian government. Listen to the media and political opposition: They are saying Trump is colluding with Putin. These are the same people who put forth the proven falsehood of Russian collusion in 2016. In Benjamin Netanyahu’s description of US Hamas supporters, the “useful idiots” in this country are either too shallow in their thought process or deliberately proving they shouldn’t be trusted as policymaking officials.

            President Trump has told the Ukrainians they aren’t going to win back parts of eastern Ukraine or the Crimea. It’s militarily infeasible for Ukraine to do so without soldiers from the United States and NATO countries—in other words, without leading to WWIII, which would include nuclear weapons. Zelenskyy and his cabal don’t care because they’ll get richer off the carnage. What has not been said (and the silence supports the belief) is that President Trump also knows what will bring President Putin to the table. Years ago, a diplomat said Russia was a gas station with a country attached to it, or something to that effect. President Biden, and before him President Obama, allowed Russia to evade sanctions on its oil and gas industry so the global price of energy wouldn’t go up and create inflation in the United States. Putin and his backers know a full application of sanctions against Russia’s oil and gas industry would have a major crippling effect on that country. Given the stalemate on the battlefield, there are pressure points that can be applied to bring Russia to the table.

            Finish thinking about this issue by asking the question: Who wins when there’s no ceasefire? It’s not President Trump and the United States—other than that, with a disciplined approach, the US will cease giving Ukraine money. Ukraine’s leaders are betting they can get NATO countries to step up and give them loans, as they have in the past, to continue the stalemate or push the conflict into a situation where Russia will broaden the war with tactical nuclear weapons, thus forcing the US into the battle.

            Europe has had a free ride with NATO for the last 70+ years, allowing the United States to spend its resources on European defense. President Trump is forcing the NATO countries to spend the long ago agreed 2% of GDP on their own defense. US citizens are generally unaware of the expansion of NATO in the last 40 years and its implications for the US being dragged into a nuclear war caused by some politician trying to be tough.

            Everyone knows Russia invaded Ukraine. But they don’t know or give credence to the fact that Russia warned Ukraine that joining NATO and the European Union would be crossing a red line. Ukraine and Europe continued to pitch the concept of Ukraine joining both. So, who’s responsible for the Ukraine War? President Trump wants to end the killing and get on with reconstruction of Ukraine, mostly using frozen Russian assets.

The critics of President Trump and his demand for an immediate ceasefire are people and organizations that have a vested interest in seeing the war continue. In this country, it’s the established foreign policy elite, both Democrats and Republicans, who have strong ties to the defense industry and globalism. Let me give you an example. On March 26, 2012, at the Global Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul, South Korea, President Obama was overheard asking Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to tell Putin to give Obama time until after the November 2012 election, when Obama could be more flexible. When questioned, both sides brushed off the incident as a discussion of missiles. Yet in February 2014, just 13 months after Obama’s reelection, Russia invaded Crimea and eastern Ukraine. President Obama, like all Western European leaders, barked loudly and put on useless sanctions but did nothing to confront Russia in a serious way.

President Trump is correct when he says Ukraine’s leadership is gambling with WWIII. Ukraine shouldn’t be a member of NATO or the EU. Speaking of NATO, a little history lesson is important: When NATO was created in 1949, there were 12 countries banding together as a unified group against aggression. Now there are 32 countries. Article 5 of the treaty essentially states that an attack on one member of NATO is an attack on all. Interestingly, the only time Article 5 has been invoked is after the 9/11 terrorist attack on the US. Globalists are responsible for the expansion of NATO. It’s time for US citizens to fully understand what past administrations, both Democrat and Republican, have obligated our youth and resources to fight. Is it in our best interest to risk nuclear war for Estonia, Croatia, Latvia, Lithuania, or any European country whose government is questionable? How about Albania? North Macedonia? Globalists and liberals have no problem running up the US debt and inflation to build up their own wealth and power.

President Zelenskyy deliberately provoked the confrontation in the Oval Office. The question is why? And who urged him to do it?

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Most people are unaware that tariffs were the major source of revenue for the federal government from 1790 to 1913, when Congress passed the federal income tax law. All of us should be aware that the income tax was meant to be a tax on the rich. The rates ranged from 1% on income of $3,000 ($97,246 in today’s dollars) to 6% for incomes over $500,000 ($16,207,700 in today’s dollars). Tariffs are a way of keeping domestic industry and business on an equal footing with external industries and businesses. Could the United States have become the land of opportunity before 1913 without revenue from tariffs funding the federal government and protecting the various economic sectors in the country as they were being established? Doubtful. Today globalism has gutted the working class jobs in this country in the name of “cheap goods” by using semi-slave labor in developing countries. The mantra is Americans can buy more, thus enriching the globalists, rather than buying the higher-priced goods made in this country using their neighbors’ labor, thus keeping and expanding domestic wealth. Lip service about “retraining” is put forward when the question of unemployed workers in this country is raised. According to the Wall Street Journal,¹ in 2024 the US experienced a $1.2 trillion trade deficit of goods. Many countries that enjoy this trade imbalance have tariffs or other blocks preventing the sale of US goods into their economies. One thing is for sure: If these countries want to stop all trade with us, their economies will suffer more than ours since we can redirect the money we’ve been sending them via the trade imbalance to build our own industries and businesses. Mexico, Canada, China, India, Vietnam, and some of our other trading partners do not have open economies. Our financial imbalance in trade has contributed to our national debt by depriving us of the jobs and profits that now go to other countries. Tariffs have been around since America’s founding. They level the playing field. If the President is disciplined, it will disrupt the unfairness and lead to a stronger America. The present globalists and their media friends are doing all they can to scare the consumers and businesses. Stand strong and the vast working people of our country will benefit after the adjustment to the globalist wealth.

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I voted for President Trump three times for three reasons: (1) Hillary Clinton, (2) Joe Biden, and (3) Kamala Harris. Since 2016, the Democrat Party has told America these three individuals were the best members of that party to lead this nation. If that’s true, the country is in worse shape than I believe it is. Our nation has reached the point where the subversion of freedoms and the imposition of liberal philosophical doctrine to the exclusion of free thought finally became apparent to the majority of voters. President Trump has demonstrated a strength of leadership necessary to restore some, if not all, of the power stolen from the electorate and given to the handmaidens of the Washington elite. It’s breathtaking to hear about the amount of fraud, abuse, and waste in the federal government. Yet, there are political and corporate people demanding the investigations stop. Why would anyone not want fraud, waste, and abuse to be uncovered? Why would anyone resent the richest man in the world putting together a team of brilliant analysts to examine the federal government departments? In Washington everything is done on a 10-year calendar. Elon Musk and his DOGE cohorts indicate they have found over $90 billion in waste and abuse that can be eliminated. Multiply this number by 10 years, and we can make real progress on cutting the deficit. If over 20 million dead people are counted as alive on the Social Security rolls, why? Who has overseen Social Security? At least two committees in the House and Senate have oversight of the program. Why haven’t they found out about this travesty? Who has been cashing the checks or using the identities of the dead to receive other benefits from federal or state governments?

The FBI could spend years just finding the financial terrorists who have wasted, abused, and defrauded the country into near bankruptcy. While the Democrats are the real pros at manipulating government programs for their friends’ benefit, the Republicans share the blame burden equally with them. President Trump is the enemy of anyone seeking to destroy the country and has given all of us opportunities to excel in our lives. He has a big mouth that doesn’t have a filter. He also has courage and fortitude without a filter. If it’s possible to avoid the WWIII that the warmongers want, he can do it. Elon Musk asks the detractors of his DOGE work: “Tell me which line item of fraud, abuse, or waste you are saying we should not do away with?” The detractors cannot answer because they don’t know.

After the border disaster, inflation has been the most worrisome issue with ordinary workers and their families. Globalists will say tariffs will raise inflation. There is truth to the statement in the beginning, as Americans continue their normal buying habits. With the higher prices of imported goods, there will be (1) shifts in buying patterns and (2) more competition emerging from U. S. manufacturers able to fairly compete with the foreign goods. What globalists won’t say is there will be a reduction in the imbalance of trade which will accrue to the benefit of this country. There is another scary tactic being shouted: a recession is coming. Statistically, that’s possible because a recession is measured by two negative GDP numbers in a row (which may or may not be reversed in future revisions.) The economy has been in an expansion mode since the strong Trump economy was interrupted by the pandemic. Again, what they won’t say is a recession will reduce inflation as the demand for goods and services declines. Here’s the point: No one knows for sure what will evolve from the Trump policies. What we do know is the U. S. is on a path to irreversible economic decline as the national debt builds and more and more leverage is needed to keep the economy growing artificially.

President Trump is being reviled for causing everything from the Canadian plane crash to the stock market correction. As someone who observes and analyzes the stock market almost daily, it has been apparent for many months that the supply/demand variables in the stock market were out of balance. The pundits’ rationalization for high prices echoes the stupidity of every market top since 1966. The mad rush into stocks after November 5^th election was speculators hoping for another bull market like the one that followed President Trump’s election in 2016. The tariffs, the forensic analysis of the Federal Government, and the border actions are all designed to remove from the economic body of America the cancerous policies that have placed the country’s economy in a fragile state. Trump is not responsible for the current market decline. He won’t be responsible for the next bull market. We are all lucky that we are having this decline at the beginning of President Trump’s administration. Know what you want to own, set a fair price for the stock, and be ready to improve your portfolio as the market declines.

¹ Anthony DeBarros and Peter Santilli, “The Countries Driving America’s $1.2 Trillion Trade Deficit in Goods,” Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2025, https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/us-trade-import-export-deficit-charts-490a7bce.

Note: There seems to be more than one way to spell President Zelenskyy's name. We found most sources use double yy at the end so we followed that usage.