Trump Is Not Incompetent, He Is Simply More Malicious Than People Want to Believe
- john raymond
- Oct 16, 2025
- 2 min read
The argument that President Trump’s economic policies—especially his tariffs—stem from incompetence is intellectually untenable once one examines their systemic pattern and cumulative effects.
Incompetence implies randomness, inconsistency, and accidental self-harm. What we observe instead is precision: a steady sequence of actions that weaken U.S. alliances, fracture supply chains, embolden adversaries, and concentrate domestic pain in precisely those sectors essential to long-term resilience.
That is not misfire; it is sabotage disguised as bluster.
The tariff program, presented as economic nationalism, functions as an asymmetric weapon aimed at America’s own structural foundations. The method is consistent with the Kremlin’s doctrine of internal destabilization—attack not by invasion, but by corrosion: erode trust, sow chaos, and pit the republic’s productive classes against one another until the system rots from within.
Across both Trump terms, the pattern repeats. Each tariff was framed as punitive toward China or Europe yet engineered to hurt U.S. manufacturing, agriculture, and consumers most. American farmers were forced into dependency on government bailouts while China quietly diversified its grain imports to Russia, Brazil, and etc.
American manufacturers face higher input costs, making Chinese finished goods more competitive globally. Allies alienated by these tariffs turn toward regional trade compacts excluding the United States, thereby weakening Western economic cohesion—the very cohesion that underpins NATO’s deterrence posture.
The design extends beyond economics. By normalizing permanent trade warfare, Trump conditioned a new baseline of global uncertainty. Capital flight from U.S. markets and de-dollarization initiatives advance precisely during the periods of his peak tariff rhetoric. The outcome is predictable: the United States bleeds soft power as its economic reliability collapses. This is not a pattern of bumbling; it is the pattern of deliberate erosion.
Under the Raymond Method’s first pillar—Regime Security—Trump’s loyalty is not to the American state but to his own power and to the foreign patronage networks that sustain it.
Tariffs serve that goal by producing visible conflict and economic grievance, both of which strengthen his populist narrative at home while serving the Kremlin’s strategic interest in weakening the Western order.
Pillar Two—Asymmetric Warfare—explains the tactic: the objective is not to win the trade war, but to perpetuate it as a psychological and economic bleed. Each escalation converts American strength into resentment and division.
Pillar Three—the Byzantine Traitor-General paradigm—clarifies motive: the insider who sabotages his own side is far more destructive than the enemy across the field, because he commands trust while betraying it.
To persist in calling this “incompetence” is to misunderstand the nature of modern autocratic warfare. A truly incompetent man would occasionally blunder into helping his own country; Trump never does. Every vector of policy—from tariffs to NATO antagonism to institutional purges to ICE goonery—transfers advantage away from the Republic and toward its enemies.
The cumulative coherence of those harms is the evidence of intent.
This is the cognitive trap the public still falls into: mistaking consistency of destruction for chaos. What feels like randomness is, in truth, the perfect mask for a man whose sole art is ruin.
To actually understand Trump is to recognize that his national sabotage and destruction is itself the plan.
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