Here's Richard Wolff, describing the predicted effect of Donald Trump's erratic tariff policies upon the American economy. The whole thing is three hours but it's broken up into sections and don't worry, you won't have to watch for long past my bookmark to get the point:

Let's explore Wolff's metaphor of a "Hail Mary" pass a bit more. There are only two scenarios wherein the Trump tariffs strategy will work:

1) all of the other countries (even, or especially, China) decide that tariffs are bad and it is up to them to save the US from itself, and decide to grant the US great deals on their goods and services.

2) Trump is spontaneously kicked out of the White House for "his" actions and an anti-Trump regime takes power in a coup d'etat.

And that's it. Otherwise we're looking at America in coffee withdrawal and dollar hegemony going down the tubes. Oh and no car sales, either. You know China? The ruling class there can just sell off the Bank of China's dollars and dollar-denominated assets. They can dump them on the open market if they want. They've been doing it slowly for some time now, so as not to disturb the market unduly, but they could do it all at once if they wanted.

And remember that "Trump gives up on tariffs" is not a success option, though that might happen too. "Trump gives up on tariffs" will simply mean a less stable business environment than the one that we would have seen had Trump not proposed tariffs in the first instance.

I can only conclude that we are being intentionally confused as to what is going on. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor call it "end times fascism.' But the authors might themselves be confused to some small extent, which is not surprising, since everyone is confused. It is hard to tell PR apocalypse apart from the real thing now. What is really going on is a compound crisis. Oh, sure, we might all be impoverished as a result. But to a very large extent we are already there.

Perhaps this is another example of how we are being continually threatened with something that is already happening. Remember last year's election? "Omigod Trump might win!" endlessly repeated by people who, if they had really been afraid of a Trump victory, would not be running Biden/ Harris against him. Think of how this looks: "Omigod something that's already happening might happen!"

I never thought much of the supposed appeal of horror movies. Is it that people actually want to be manipulated by something frightening? Why, when such manipulation is already happening to them right now in real life? The point of decline-era film is that the well-paid camera-operators are going to show you something bright and sunny that doesn't happen in real life, and so for instance back in the Nineties and Zeros you had a TV show called "Friends," marketed to people who didn't have friends. That, I understand.