... can the talking heads report it?
THE ART OF THE GLOBAL DEAL ☙ Wednesday, April 9, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠
Pocahontas wept; and the awe-inspiring scope of Trump's global dealmaking became even more astonishing yesterday as the practical details began to appears. Media won't tell you any of it. And more.
JEFF CHILDERS
APR 09, 2025
Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! These days, life is moving very fast. You’ll miss it if you don’t stop occasionally and appreciate what’s happening. I planned to take a day off from tariff reporting to catch up on the other breaking stories. But in various comments, tweets, and announcements yesterday, President Trump confirmed parts of what is becoming undeniably the most historic and significant political and economic earthquake since the Civil War. Or possibly since ever. Some are already labeling it the “Fourth Turning” but it could be even bigger than that. Useless corporate media is, as always, missing the boat. Just wait till you see the drops merging together like mercury. But first, a little light-hearted news about Kennedy’s reservational refugees.
🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍
In 1987, Trump published The Art of the Deal. It was a worldwide instruction manual. The Trump Administration announced yesterday that over 70 countries are in active negotiations with the US. Our delighted National Economic Council Director, Kevin Hassett, complained happily to Fox that they are “managing a massive amount of requests for negotiations.”
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CLIP: Kevin Hassett reports good news on trade negotiations (0:43).
I was especially interested in Mr. Hassett’s comment that “there are a heck of a lot of concessions on the table. In the end, the President will be the one to decide whether the deal is good enough to change his mind about the tariffs.”
First, we learned for a fact that they aren’t only negotiating tariff rates. They’re negotiating everything. President Trump confirmed this in his enthusiastic tweet about discussions with the South Koreans. Saying he was dealing with “many countries,” Trump stressed that “we are bringing up other subjects that are not covered by Trade and Tariffs, and getting them negotiated also.”
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He calls it one-stop shopping. Specifically, and in all-caps, with triple exclamation marks, the President said, “‘ONE STOP SHOPPING’ is a beautiful and efficient process!!!”
It is utterly remarkable and historic, yet the clueless corporate media has completely overlooked this breathtaking dynamic. Trump isn’t just negotiating trade deals. He’s resetting America’s relationship with every other foreign government, and putting our previously one-way aid pipeline up for profitable sale.
With the South Koreans, for example, Trump referenced requiring them to pay for our military protection against North Korea, a permanent fixture since the end of the Korean war. This has nothing to do with trade, but it means billions in income for the US, for something we’re already doing anyway.
💰 I asked ChatGPT to summarize Trump’s 1987 dealmaking philosophy from the book. I think you’ll enjoy this:
Number 5: Leverage is everything. Trump spent his first 60 days securing the leverage and now he holds all the cards. As Mr. Hassett said, only “the President will be the one to decide whether the deal is good enough.”
Not Congress. Not the State Department. Not the Cabinet. Not the CIA. Not the World Trade Organization. Just Trump. That did not happen by accident.
💰 Yesterday, President Trump signed another massive executive order engineered to unleash more domestic energy production, which will lower costs, boost employment, and strengthen the dollar. It’s number 6: protect the downside, and the upside will take care of itself. In a presser with coal miners, President Trump called the negotiations, not off-the-rack, but highly-tailored deals.
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CLIP: Trump says each deal will be unique to the individual country (0:25).
Number 9: deliver the goods. In the same speech, the President said the tariffs were already bringing in $2 billion a day — or more than $700 billion a year. “We’re doing very well,” he said. And it’s just getting started.
Number 3: maximize your options, and Number 1: Think Big. He maximized his options to every other country on Earth. He literally can’t think any bigger than that, unless he can make a deal with the Martians. Number 10: squeeze value from every contractor and supplier. And now he’s squeezing value from every Prime Minister and Crown Prince.
As we’ve previously suspected, this is about much more than trade. Trump is using the universal tariffs to force every other country on Earth to come to him, fast, so he can quickly fix nearly every problem that America has with other countries, and also to get the cash flowing back from the entire world back to the United States— not just through trade, but literally in every other way the President can think of.
💰 The Deal is truly breathtaking in its scope, scale, and ambition. It is difficult to overestimate what is happening here; and that’s just the part we can see. No President has ever brought the entire world to heel —without launching a drone!
And yet Trump, the Dealmaker, has literally done it in days.
Think about it. No U.S. president has ever simultaneously negotiated with the entire planet over everything — not just trade, but security guarantees, foreign aid, market access, immigration enforcement, energy deals, pharmaceutical policy, and so on— and done it openly, using tariffs as the primary pressure mechanism, rather than through military force, strings on IMF loan, CIA black ops, soft power, or covert destabilization.
Those tools are too slow and clumsy for Donald Trump.
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💰 Historically, tariffs have always been used as protectionist tools (e.g., Smoot-Hawley) or revenue generators (in the pre-income-tax period). But Trump saw something every other president missed: he’s wielding tariffs as a universal negotiation tool, forcing countries to come to the table, not just to talk about widgets and steel, but to extract much broader concessions on things like military cost-sharing, tech regulation, currency manipulation, and who knows what else.
The concept that “only the President will decide whether the deal is good enough” is radical. It sidelines interagency red tape, State Department holdups, deep state slow-walking, congressional committees, legislative horse trading, and of course, the multinational bureaucracies. It is stylistically autocratic but perfectly legal.
To reiterate, no president has ever concentrated leverage this quickly or this personally.
Not even close.
💰 Sure, other Presidents have bribed other countries, slowly, one-by-one, by showering them with treasure chests of taxpayer dollars. But bribing is easy. Anyone can sell a bribe. No president — not even in wartime — has ever centralized and personally wielded global negotiating leverage like this, over this many countries, this fast, and in peacetime.
Trump has skillfully positioned the U.S. presidency as the checkout window at the international drive-through.
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He’s not bribing them. Trump is making real deals, using America’s hegemonic economic leverage to ensure we get exactly what we want from every single country. The countries aren’t playing hard to get, either. They’re queuing up outside the Oval Office.
It’s totally new and wildly unprecedented. It’s like the Marshall Plan in reverse, except with the whole world, not just Western Europe. Trump is monetizing American hegemony. The globalists built a one-way grocery aisle of dependency — and Trump put a cash register at the end of the aisle. And now the whole world is waiting in line.
A whole new international policy architecture is emerging. They’ll have to coin a name for it. Maybe Reverse Marshallism, or Transactional Sovereignty.
💰 Even accounting for widespread Trump Derangement Syndrome, it’s astonishing how the economic experts and even corporate media are so utterly blind as to what is really happening here. They’re like Mr. Magoo wearing a falconry hood.
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I’ve given this much thought. It’s multifaceted. Part of the problem is that Trump didn’t explain his plan to them like they were fifth-graders, so they have to figure it out for themselves. But the experts and media pundits aren’t known for their intellectual acumen, despite their proficiency in serving buzzword salad.
It also has something the unimaginably breathtaking scope of Trump’s radical approach. Think Big (rule Number 1). The financial experts are thematic micromanagers. They simply can’t think this big. They are trained in what I will now call the classic model— slow-motion leverage through American largesse. It’s all they know. They never thought of anything like this, because it has never happened before.
Trump isn’t white-boarding or slide-decking his doctrine for a focus-group audience. He just moves. And those moves force experts to reverse-engineer the strategy — a task that’s increasingly beyond the cognitive powers of the pundit class, who clearly prefer their geopolitics served in a policy brief with a bulleted executive summary.
If a policy doesn’t come from Brookings or Rand, it doesn’t exist for them, in the same way that Jurassic Park’s velociraptors can’t see you if you’re not moving.
💰 And, to be fair, Trump benefited from a whole bunch of favorable things all coalescing at once. Congress, in its ceaseless quest to avoid blame, ceded its tariff powers to the presidency under relatively recent laws for managing national security emergencies.
They handed Trump a lever, and he figured out how it worked and then shoved them out of the machine shop. (Number 4: do your homework.)
It is also arguable the Deal would, at a practical level, be impossible without all the digital technologies facilitating instant communications, up to and including Trump’s unilateral, disintermediating pronouncements on Truth Social.
He chats with foreign leaders directly, in tweets. He doesn’t need Foggy Bottom— his social media account is a foghorn.
The most underappreciated piece of the puzzle is that only President Trump spotted the possibilities. First, he got to practice for four years, unsuccessfully, learning the hard way. Then —thanks to his political enemies— got four years of forced time off to think and plan and study the battlefield.
They thought they’d buried him. But he was out back the whole time, building all their caskets.
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💰 A couple final comments. Remarkably, the long-sneered-at QAnon folks must be dancing a jig. They expected a storm, and a storm is what they’re getting. They expected something wild, unique, and unprecedented — and now Trump’s strategy has confounded the experts, bypassed the gatekeepers, and sent both enemies and frenemies scurrying for cover wherever he points the lightning.
Q followers also expected some sort of global financial reset. Well? What Trump’s doing right now is delivering a real global financial reset. He’s shifting worldwide capital flows back to the US. He’s ending one-sided trade subsidies that fueled frenemies for dabbling in our elections. He’s pressuring allies to pay for their own defense and infrastructure, repatriating trillions.
He’s hollowing out the centralized global institutions like the WTO, WEF, and IMF, making them instantly irrelevant. And he’s restructuring all our bilateral relationships to enshrine American power as a billable service rather than a charitable donation.
If that isn’t a global financial reset, then I don’t know what the word “reset” means.
Also as Q faithful insisted, it’s all perfectly legal. That’s what’s frying the circuits of every pundit and bureaucrat watching this unfold in stunned horror. Trump isn’t breaking the system — he’s wielding it better than they ever dreamed possible. The long-suffering Q movement is completely vindicated.
And, for different reasons, I also feel vindicated. When I first pointed out this emerging possibility to you, I suggested that Trump could ask for anything. I used the example of forcing the UK to hand over evidence Trump needs to prosecute his persecutors. And right on schedule, this week we’ve already seen UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer approve of Trump’s plan and declare the death of globalism.
In short: the snooty British are helping President Trump. Which should make the real insurrectionists nervous as cats in a room full of rockers.
As I asked last time: why wouldn’t Trump demand the British dish the receipts on the Obama-Clinton regime? It would be shocking if he didn’t make those demands — especially after everything he suffered.
💰 Finally, Trump’s label of “Liberation Day” now takes on far deeper meaning and casts far-ranging shadows. And it is shattering the left’s most foundational narrative.
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Since before his first term, progressives screeched that Trump was an orange-colored, fascistic cartoon billionaire oligarch, secretly selling out the working class to help his billionaire buddies get even richer.
But now he’s tanked the stock market on behalf of the working class.
Half of Americans don’t own stocks. All they have is debt. And Trump has shattered the siphon— the rigged system letting the elite laptop class extract wealth while feeding the bottom 80% of us stimulus crumbs and inflation.
And who’s shrieking loudest? The left. AOC, who bizarrely wore a thousand-dollar dress stamped with “Eat the Rich.” The “Occupy Wall Street” crowd, who once performatively prayed for a market crash.
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In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent offered a poignant contrast. Last year,” noted Bessent, “in the summer of 2024, well-off Americans took more European vacations than they had in history. And in the same summer of 2024, more Americans were using food banks than ever in history.”
There is no longer any doubt. Trump is Main Street’s champion. The Democrats are Wall Street’s champions. The left has never looked more hypocritical or exposed. They should be terrified.
I can’t wait to see what happens next. You?
https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/the-art-of-the-global-deal-wednesday
