To try to understand what Trump’s plan may be, from an overall perspective, but mainly from an economical point of view, by economist Richard Wolff: Some extracts from https://yewtu.be/watch?v=1ih7WJrcjWg mostly paraphrasing and summarising:

This is the traditional republican pitch, but carried much further.

Trump promised the rich to make them richer and the only way to do that is to savage the public sector, that is the only place he can get the money from.

He could borrow the money, that’s what his predecessors did, but we are now in a level of debt this country has never seen, it’s becoming a scary problem because if the rest of the world no longer lends to the United States, what else is he going to do.

For many many people you get paid less if you work for the government than if you go into the private sector and the compensation for that was job security. What Mr Trump and Mr Musk are doing is , they’ve taken that security away. Those employees are going to the private sector, driving down wages and working conditions in the private sector.

The ‘trickle down economics’, that preached that tax cuts and other benefits for the richest would also benefit the poorest as a consequence, may have had a grain of truth years ago, but not any more.

The American Empire is over, we’re done, we peaked about 12 or 15 years ago and we are on a down … It does happen to every Empire, we’re only the latest, look at the British, how far they’ve fallen, we’re in that process, so the problem with the trickle down is, yes, there may be more jobs, but they’re going to be created in China, in Brazil, in India, they’re not created here.

This is a cut based on desperation.

You take the G7, USA and its main allies, then China and its allies, now known as the BRICS, and their combined GPDs. The BRICS’s is bigger. We are no longer the wealthiest block in the planet. We are number two. We need to come to terms with that and we are led by people who don’t want to do that, because no one wants to be the politician who has to explain to the people it’s over.

Creating, increasing tariffs doesn’t work in an already globalised world. Nowadays we all understand ‘supply chain’, that “the coffee and the sugar in our breakfast don’t come from America” (ouch, big ouch from this lettered economist) and tariffs mean a big price increase, so it sounds like Trump “doesn’t understand the economics real well”. He seems to think that a ‘tariff’ is a tax on the Chinese, when it is a tax on import, paid by US citizens, which means that it is the party biggest on tax cuts increasing taxes.

If you look at the history of colonialism, most of the time, when a country began going overseas and snatching parts of the world, it was because it needed to, and it could. The US needs it and can. It can’t take over Europe, they’re too expensive, difficult, rich and powerful. It can’t control Russia or China, but they can control Mexico and Canada, or at least they can take a stab at it. One out of five bucks worth of food we eat in the US comes from overseas, and most of that comes from Mexico and Canada, most of our energy is Canadian and the US is a much bigger economy than either of them.

Also Trump is aware that there are going to be big tensions between the parts of the community that are hurt and those that are not, and foreign adventures have always had that wonderful quality to unite countries in opposition to ‘those other, over there’.

Even taking into account that the US still is the first military force with hundreds of military bases all over the world, while China has none, it could be said that China and the US are about equally powerful overall. But the trend is that China is going up and the US is going down, there is no mistake there and there is not turning over in neither trend.

The intelligent way out would be for both powers to sit down and work out how to coexist in the same planet. China publicly states that’s what it wants to do, that it doesn’t want to be a global empire. If this is true, it may be because it was already an empire, and it knows what it is, it is a big run but a very short run, because all empires fall and China has been there, done that.

Now it would be the turn of the US to state something similar but previous to that it would need to come to terms with the reality that it is no longer the world super power and that its Empire is over, but the latest events are not a sign of such realisation.