Donald Trump, whose numerous lies go over well with conservative Americans notwithstanding that lies are falsehoods (so Trump’s falsehoods are evidently not damaging his support among Republicans), appeared with Tucker Carson on April 12th, and the interview-clip opened:
Iran gets together with Saudi Arabia through China, and I hear people say of China “we’ll never lose the dollar standard,” are they kidding? China wants to change the standard, the currency standard. And if that happens that’s like losing the World War. We’ll literally be a second-tier country if that happens. Now, you’re losing Brazil. You’re losing Colombia, South America. You’re losing Iran. You’ve lost Russia. And if you haven’t lost them yet, you’re gonna lose them. China is on the yuan; so, China’s done. You see France going over. What’s going on? We’re losing — if we lose our currency, that’s the equivalent of losing a world war. Our currency is what makes us powerful and strong. And this was unthinkable during the Trump Administration.
Losing the dollar’s unique status as the global reserve currency would be like losing World War III? That would be much worse even than WW II was — it would be nuclear. Trump thinks that for the dollar to lose its reserve-status would be as bad as for nuclear war to happen between superpowers. However, to lose the dollar’s reserve-status wouldn’t be losing even a single dollar: it would instead be losing only that unique status, and that is all. It would lose that monopoly-status. It would be a good thing for the entire world. Trump might like monopolies, but most people do not. (Maybe Trump thinks that Republicans do.)
Everybody knows that George W. Bush’s neoconservatism, and his resulting blatant lies about ‘Saddam’s WMD’, caused him to win a 90% approval-rating (even higher among Republicans) from suckered Americans as the most popular U.S. President ever, by invading and destroying Iraq on 20 March 2003, but what about Trump, who as President hired the rabid neocons (i.e., champions of U.S. imperialist operations such as against Syria) such as John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and Nikki Haley? How much good, and how much harm, were they?
Let’s take Trump’s anti-China statements, now, one by one:
1: China was bad not good for having brokered peace between Saudi Arabia and Iran? How was that not good instead of bad? Is peace-mongering bad, and war-mongering good? Does Trump really believe that? Or does he simply think that his fellow-Republicans do? Is he playing them for suckers on this?
2. For the U.S. dollar to no longer be the international reserve currency but instead to become replaced by commodities such as gold and by other currencies including the currencies of Governments that the U.S. Government wants to regime-change (overthrow and replace), would decrease the U.S. Government’s dictatorship over the world, and increase the freedom of all nations from that global dictatorship over nations. This would therefore be good not bad. Trump lies to assume that it would be bad. He agrees too much with Barack Obama, who said: “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. [In other words: all other nations are ‘dispensable’.] That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come. … Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums. … It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.” He was saying that to future U.S. generals: he was telling them, like Trump does, that only the U.S. is indispensable, and that for the dollar to lose its virtual monopoly status in international trade would be worth America even using nuclear weapons if needed to prevent it from happening. Both Obama and Trump were rabidly neoconservative Presidents, just like Bush was when he invaded and destroyed Iraq. Furthermore, when Obama, there, on 28 May 2014, was telling West Point cadets about “Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states,” he was ignoring that this “aggression” had actually been by his own American Government against Russia, by Obama’s February 2014 coup turning neutral Ukraine into America’s beach-head for ultimately a U.S. invasion of Russia, for “regime-change” there. Why didn’t Trump, as President, condemn, and reverse, that? Was he as much of a neoconservative as President Obama, and President Bush — and now President Biden — had been?
3. Trump’s statement that “Our currency is what makes us powerful and strong. And this was unthinkable during the Trump Administration.” is false in both of its parts. Neoconservatives worship power — they believe that “Might makes right” — but that is a supremacist ideology, which Trump alleges ”makes us powerful and strong” in which all games are win-lose and have only one winner even if many contestants. His view ignores that there is an alternative to that dog-eat-dog world-view, and it is win-win games, in which all who compete in them are improving themselves and all other competitors, by getting better and better, instead of bringing about only one surviving winner over a mountain of corpses, of the many losers. Cooperative games — NOT hostile ones — are what produce progress, and what therefore progressives support. Trump’s conservatism is instead a king-of-the-hill-of-corpses model that is what America has been offering to the world ever since 25 July 1945, but it’s increasingly being rejected by the world, and Trump here is promising that if he becomes President again, he will force the world to accept it. He didn’t when he was President, and he won’t ever, because that model of international relations is being increasingly viewed around the world as being ugly, and outright repulsive. He won’t be able to turn that around, and he never explains how he would intend to do so. He thinks that most if not all Republicans are too stupid to recognize this fact — that the world has changed. He’s just an ordinary Republican Party politician, like Biden is an ordinary Democratic Party politician. Is this what Republicans want?