A number of people who have had to work closely around Donald Trump have reported his stench. Some say it is his body odor. Some say his diapers. I say it may be the sulfur from his native habitat. Now his nauseating stench has rubbed off on the United States. Today’s top headline reports that “the world economy is becoming wary of the US.” The world is trying to get away from us:
“Global investors are balking at U.S. bonds. Talk of the dollar’s dwindling power is getting louder. Foreign governments are hauling their gold out of American vaults,” the New York Times reports.
All these are facts that I’ve been reporting and commenting on for months, pulled together in a single sentence by the Times. The US has become a threat to everyone:
“Almost two years into President Trump’s second term, the world economy is increasingly looking for ways to distance itself from America. Concerns about a $40 trillion debt burden, the excessive use of sanctions to solve foreign policy problems and Mr. Trump’s penchant for pushing the limits of the rule of law are raising questions about the appeal of the United States as a haven for global investment.”
In short, we got a stink on us, and we got it from the guy I often refer to meaningfully as “TheRump.”
Remember those big promised factory builds from corporate heads that Trump boasted about as coming to the US due to his tariff wars?
“Despite pledges by foreign companies and nations to invest in the United States — in many cases to curry favor with the White House — capital is starting to seek alternative destinations.”
As a net result, an article in The Atlantic announces,
The American Age Is Over
The american age that followed World War II was bound to end eventually. What’s shocking is how suddenly that moment has arrived. In the past six months, America’s power—long exemplified by the world’s best warfighting equipment and most highly trained military personnel, a global network of bases and logistics systems, and military and diplomatic partnerships with all corners of the world—has proved insufficient to defeat Iran, a repressive, economically stagnant regime armed with cheap missiles and drones.
It’s a sad state of affairs that makes America look and smell like a dinosaur after the big asteroid impact, lying on the clay, breathing hard and bleeding. Its downfall has come swiftly. O.K. the analogy is a little overreaching for where we are at this stage in the game, but dinosaurs didn’t all die in a year, either. Some lasted longer; but we know their rapid ignominious end.
The White House wrecking ball
With those two quoted articles and others that I’ll share below (and there is a rapidly swelling stream like them), the jury is now in on the proclamation I made at the start of Trump 1.0. You may recall my rebuking Trump’s White House prophets (yes, one of them actually has an office there), who had claimed to their large audiences that God had appointed Donald Trump to be president of America. I declared, “If he did, He must have appointed him to be God’s wrecking ball for America.”
(See; “TEN 2025 ECONOMIC PREDICTIONS as America’s Great Wrecking Ball Wipes out Huge Swaths of the Economy Every Hour of Every Day,” “Is Trump a Wrecking Ball or a Flaming Asteroid that Just Hit Earth?” and “Swinging Wildly toward Armageddon, the Wrecking Ball Gets Wrecked.”)
If he and his horde of prophets are right, perhaps he has been chosen as God’s wrecking ball. The question that remains for me from that claim is, “Does God have a plan for redevelopment, or is it just time to destroy America in sweeping judgment?” I guess we’ll see what we have left to deal with a year down the road when the demolition phase is over—if the demolition even is over by then.
From there we’ll have to see whether Trump is also God’s developer, having done the dirty work of demolition. Can Trump rebuild from the rubble that remains, or will he just walk away from it as he has from many of his past failures, wiping the dust off his own silk suit and not caring at all about those he dusted? (from the first article listed above)
It’s certainly clear now how that turned out. At least, I find it stunningly clear. America is being demolished and humiliated by Iran, and the rest of the world gets to take the ride with America into some fierce inflation and fuel shortages and economic destruction. Articles are appearing about it all over the world after the events that unfolded between last Wednesday and Friday.
As I’ve pointed out before, all the dysfunctional demolition around Washington, D.C. of the White House, the reflection pool, the Kennedy Arts Center, and other ongoing messes present a starkly symbolic scene of the chaos the nation is falling into under Trump’s wild-swinging autocracy. Maybe someday those projects will get finished and look like improvements, albeit gaudy ones, but that remains to be seen. Right now, they are in various stages of destructive chaos because most of them began under questionable legal authority or were done with inferior workmanship or unapproved budgets. For now, they stand as symbols of what the empire is starting turn into—a series of misfortunate events.
Nowhere is that more obvious than in Trump’s dysfunctionally inept war with Iran—inept not because of poorly trained or less than brave or less than strong soldiers, not because of poor-quality equipment, not because of bad commanders (though he fired many of his top commanders with the most experience), but because of the commander-in-chief, himself, and his warmongering cohort, Pentagon Pete, who was just put up for possible impeachment by a truly conservative Republican because of his poor fighting skills, but then saved by the bell when congress conveniently declared recess a day early. Inept because of poor planning that was obvious from the beginning by the president’s and Hagsbreath’s lack of clearly stated, achievable goals. A military mission without goals is not a mission; it’s just a brawl.
Most of all, it was inept due to serious underestimation of the enemy’s resolve. We all know “Never underestimate the enemy.” It was obvious from the outset to me, as I am certain it was to most readers here, that Trump thought Iran’s leadership would fold like Venezuela even though there was not the slightest chance they would fold at all. Hegseth’s bravado and Trump’s bottomless ego caused both chest-thumpers to think they are so grand and strong that nothing can withstand them when also armed with the largest, best-armed, most highly trained military in the world. They were wrong, because when the core is weak (especially if weak with corruption), the whole enterprise loses strength.
Heart of darkness
As “Leah,” author of The Leah Files on Substack, astutely enumerates in great detail and with solid facts to underpin those details, Trump has proven to be the most corrupt president in history. I’m going to move her article up into the generally available free section of The Daily Doom today because I’m going to let her cover all the details that build her case since she does it so well and because I want to stay focused on the results that show Trump has turned out be the wrecking ball for the United States I said he would prove to be … like no other president in American history. He has hit that level because he is corrupt in the fiber of his being like no other president:
Leah’s thesis is calibrated with a careful measuring system and set of definitions of kinds of corruption that she explains in order to try to make the rating system as objective as she can by using historical people as benchmarks. You can see the measurements as against other world leaders and a summary statement of her rational for the number assigned to each one in each category she measures. All I’ll add is that everyone reading her article must surely recognize that, if Biden had done HALF of these same things that Leah lays out neatly in one article (which I’ve been somewhat covering along the way), Republicans would be howling for impeachment all along the way. I don’t even know how she found the time to assemble it all with everything else she writes, so I strongly recommend the article: The Most Corrupt President in American History.
The coming Trump Famine
Now coming back to how such a corrupt individual has already become in the court of global opinion, not just the United States’ wrecking ball, but a wrecking ball for the whole world. I’m going to start with a quick report from Hal Turner. I haven’t tracked him long enough to know for sure how reliable he is. I’ll say that he often publishes information before I see it in other sources, which is why I often check out what he is saying (as a tip for my own exploration).
Most of the time his information scoop has come out in the press twelve hours or more later, but there have been times where something that he claimed was about to happen seems not to have happened at all; but that is not surprising for anyone when they are trying to take the lead in getting information out. If you have more experience with him, please let us know in the comments what you think:
After giving an interesting introduction that explains his intricate inside national intelligence sources for information, which I did not know about until now, he lays out the intelligence he just gathered that makes him think that, thanks mostly to Trump and somewhat to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the world is heading into a serious famine this winter.
I am going to pull his latest (and now rarely public) article forward from the headlines section for all readers, too, as there may be very few more you’ll get a chance to see, since he has just gone total subscriber base, stating that no one deserves his had work for free. Yet, obviously, he believed this report is so serious he gave it out to everyone for free because how can you not yell “fire” when the building is actually burning down.
This will give you a chance to consider his very reasonable subscription cost in case you want to keep getting his info. (Please don’t forget yours truly when making a subscription decision, as to who works hard feed to feed you critical information on a daily basis already.)
Here are his claims in summary form:
The topics discussed yesterday are severe; some of the worst info I've ever received.
The whole civilized, developed, world is on the verge of a collapse.
Countries are now preparing for the deadliest food crisis in history….
Saudi Arabia can no longer export crude oil or diesel, or fertilizer.
[He then names the major oil refineries knocked out over the weekend and the other details that I laid out already in Saturday’s Deeper Dive:]
The Persian Gulf is closed at the Strait of Hormuz, the Houthis in Yemen have blown up Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, and conquered all the geographic coastline of Yemen along the Red Sea, giving them absolute operational control over the Strait of Bab al-Mandeb.
Saudi Aramco just cancelled all of their crude oil exports to Europe because the East-West Pipeline is destroyed.
[All of that you got here, but he adds:]
Houthis from Yemen hit the pipeline in nine separate areas along its several hundred mile length. They also hit PUMPING STATIONS…. [One I reported on, but later I read there were two. Now Hal shows three pumping station wiped out.]
Brazil is one of the world’s largest food exporters.
But even Brazil is now collapsing because of food. Their general public has not been told.
They import 80% of their fertilizer, urea and sulfur.
Intel people from around the world confirmed to me via video conference that tens-of-thousands of trucks that transport grain from farms to mills worldwide, have stopped. They either cannot get - or cannot afford to buy - diesel fuel.
The intel guys also confirmed to me that ships which carry rice and wheat have also stopped. They can’t get - or can’t afford - BUNKER FUEL. That’s what large, ocean-going vessels have to use to power the ship engines. So a lot of the ships are now stopped. Food isn’t moving at the levels needed to feed people.
Here in the US, Tractors that plow and plant crops have also stopped. Farmers report they either cannot get, or more often cannot afford, diesel fuel. They also report they cannot get or cannot afford, fertilizer.
Many Farmers simply did not plant a second crop for harvest this year. They can’t. The ground is exhausted and they have no fertilizer.
The diesel crisis will only get worse from here….
Saudi Crown Prince MBS also met US Central Command Chief Admiral Brad Cooper in Jeddah. This is where the worst information came out; directly from the mouth of the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.
MBS warned Admiral Cooper about the “worldwide catastrophe that’s coming….”
Riots have already started in Syria. These riots are primarily over the rising cost of fuel, but also about the availability of food.
The Intel guys I conferenced with told me “There will most likely be more riots in multiple countries soon.”
They also told me “Countries could start attacking each other to fight for the remaining resources.”
The bottom line: “Human civilization ____could____ totally collapse.”
Not “some time” in the future. Soon. In some places, before Christmas.
Here’s the worst part: NONE of this can be avoided now. The oil reserves are almost gone, the fertilizer is almost non-existent and even if it magically became available tomorrow, we’ve missed the second harvest planting. The food supply CANNOT be grown in time.
Is Hal an alarmist? I honestly don’t know because I haven’t been reading him long enough to decide. The things I have seen him claim have checked out more often than they have not. I’m not vouching for him, since this is a very “alarmist” sounding warning, but so are some of mine at times; so, I thought you should have the warning to consider for yourself.
Sounding out of scale in times like this when the reality unfolding around us it out of scale compared to anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes (like those diesel prices and the massive scale of damage done to the multi-national oil hub of the world) then it can easily be that large-scale catastrophes are actually just reasonable projections about where such extensive destruction of the world’s most critical resource is heading, and, in the very least, taking some precautions would be reasonable, such as these basics that Hal gives:
The only hope we have is for those of us who know what’s coming, to take action now and buy extra food.
Bags and Bags of white rice. Not brown rice; it has oils and those oils go rancid.
Boxes and boxes of Pasta.
Lots and lots of Canned foods: meat, tuna/fish, vegetables.
Jarred sauces and gravy
If you buy meat that has to be frozen, make sure you have an emergency generator for electric to keep the refrigerator/freezer running if the power goes down.
If you have a generator, make sure you have FUEL for it. Store it safely and legally in accordance with your local fire code.
Remember my plan, which is similar and easy: Buy double of everything on your grocery list that has a long shelf life and stock half of what you buy. If it’s all stuff on your normal household shopping list, you know you will not mind having to eat it or use it in the bathroom, etc. Keep doing that until you have built up enough overstock to feel you have a sufficient buffer to buy you some time to figure out others things you can do IF a calamity like this comes about. If it does not, the worst that has happened is you hurt your cash flow now but saved yourself on future inflation so your money will go further when the harder times come as you dip into those supplies. Once you have enough stored, rotate through before expiration dates.
I so know this: In every food shortage I have seen, the US always gets its hands on sufficient food supplies for it own people because we are rich enough compared to a good part of the world for our businesses to outbid others for the supply that is available. However, at what cost this time when inflation was already rising before all of this? How much will each of us have to pay to extract food resources out of the hands of people who are starving? (It is a horrible way to think about it, but that will be the reality if other nations do experience the famine Hal says intelligence sources know is coming.)
Think about having enough to share, and maybe if you have enough for your self and a little money left over, you can contribute to organizations you fully trust to help out with food in nations that don’t have enough. But those organization cannot buy food that doesn’t even exist.
Hopefully Hal is wrong, but I have been warning we’ll see some form of food shortages, though not this bad. Again, if you know about Hal’s track record, please share here: (Last time I looked Substack now allows non-paying subscribers to comment, which was not an option before.)
People and machines protest when they cannot get fuel
Now, let’s look at those fuel protests Hal said he got intel about because one of our articles below today confirms it in spades. They are bordering on violent in a number of nations already, and they are just getting started. We know who started the war that caused them and who has been feeding another war with US weapons, which he wants to blame for our inflation.
Then recognize that, for the reasons Hal gave, where fuel is short, food will likely soon be, too. This protest line stopping all tanker trucks in Syria shows how nutty things are getting:
Hundreds of oil tanker trucks were stranded in Syria on Wednesday, the latest example of protests around the world that are triggered in part by fuel prices.
The politics of each situation vary — the truck blockade pictured above, near Tal Tamr, Syria, is tied closely to a plan to bring formerly autonomous Kurdish institutions under control of the country’s central government.
But in places as far afield as Guatemala and the Philippines, global fuel prices have been a key ingredient in rising unrest.
In this case, locals were using the fuel shortage as an achilles heal they could exploit in protest of things not at all related to fuel. (Maybe those who hate the Kurds believe the Kurds are responsible for the fuel crisis.) They are copying Iran’s example! Copycatting is a whole new way this crisis can broaden that I hadn’t even thought of until now. In this case, the protest appears to have started out fuel-related before it veered off to being about the Kurds living in Syria:
On Sunday, Syria’s government hiked gasoline prices by more than 25 per cent and diesel by 40 per cent, citing rising global fuel prices due to the U.S.-Iran war and repair work at a coastal refinery. Protests broke out in several areas, including on the highway between Turkey and Syria’s biggest city, Aleppo.
Then they spread to people seizing the fuel friction point in ways to exploit it in order to register their own protest about Kurds.
You can find many powerful photos of fuel protests around the world in that article, but I cannot share them in my own article due to copyright concerns. I sometimes take that risk when I am making an article’s link available to everyone and can, at least, argue that I’m helping the publisher out by sending readers their direction, but I’ve made too much available for free today without making everything free because I want everyone to have the news that could be seriously critical to their lives.
Again, I’m not vouching for this intensification of my food shortage predictions, but it squares with a lot of what I have been reporting without the benefit of intelligence sources that Hal says he has, so I will be keeping an eye on the situation. While it is in line with my projections, it kicks them up exponentially. Even Hal professes to have been shocked by what he heard.
In Guatemala, transport workers, taxi drivers and Indigenous people have all protested against rising fuel prices….
There had been 40 demonstrations across 27 cities. Along with higher fuel prices due to the conflict in the Middle East, the country has been dealing with El Niño-related droughts.
You get the point, and I have more to cover, so I’ll move along; but you can find several other nations mentioned that are experiencing fuel-shortage uprisings in the article.
The wrecking balls final swing?
Now here’s the big one that cuts to the heart of what a wrecking ball Trump truly is as judged solely by his own words. Of course, we all know he routinely makes big, empty threats and then TACOs. Maybe that is all the following threat is, just more vain boasting. But I certainly see no reason to give him the benefit of the doubt, given all that he’s already brought down on the world with his tariff wars, his turf wars against friendly nations like Canada and Denmark (Greenland) and now his war with Iran, which the House of Representative finally got up enough nerve today to tell him it ends now.
Of course, that still has to pass the senate, and then Trump may veto it anyway, so that, too, is meaningless … unless it gives him the back door out of Iran that he is dying to take. It could save face for him, even as he beats a Bidenesque retreat, by giving him a way to boast, “I would have stayed until we got the uranium and got the strait fully open, but congress chickened out; so what could I do? They told me I have to get out. It’s really too bad. We would have changed the world if we stayed in. Iran was ready to make a deal. They were, in fact, dying to make a deal. Iran would have no nuclear weapons—no nuclear weapons—but now who knows what they have?” (It’s so easy to hear it now as “the news before it happens” if Trump wants an escape hatch from a war he is losing.)
Now here is Trump’s biggest threatened wrecking ball move for the US: Listen to what Trump screamed out at the Fed in all caps on Truth Social:
LOWER THE RATE OR I’LL STOP TRADING WITH COUNTRIES WITH WHICH WE HAVE A DEFICIT.
We now know the Fed did the exact opposite, as reported today, and nudged rates upward a merely symbolic amount.
While I’m betting he will chicken out, think of what his threat would do if he actually carried it out. Take a look at the nations with which we have the largest trade deficits, with whom we would have to cut off all trade (if Trump even has the authority to do that); but let’s just judge him by his word: (If he doesn’t want to be judged by the stupid things he says, he could always just stop saying them.)
As Lau Vegys, founder of SNAFU Investing and a writer here on Substack says,
China. Mexico. Canada. Germany. Japan.
We’re talking about some of America’s largest trading partners. Hundreds of billions of dollars in trade every month.
Actually stop trading with them and the consequences would be enormous. Supply chains would seize up. American companies would lose suppliers and customers. Prices on all kinds of imported goods would jump. Investment would almost certainly get postponed as companies tried to figure out what the hell was going on.
In other words, crazy.
And that’s just the short list of the biggest players. Trump said he’d terminate trade with every nation with which the US has a trade deficit. In 2025, the US had a trade deficit with 97 nations. That is a lot of totally terminated trade if the current number remains close to that. (I recently reported that the trade deficits with many nations increased during Trump’s first year and a half.)
Do all that just to get lower interest rates at a time when inflation is rising and when HE is claiming the economy has never been better? Talk about an all-out insane temper tantrum if the smelly diaper-baby emperor doesn’t get his way! But HE said it … on HIS platform, so he can own this nationally suicidal idea as his own brainchild. I would never think of giving him the benefit of the doubt and saying he’s just bluffing with really stupid ideas after all he has done that has already proven to be stupidly destructive.
America buys oil from Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Middle East. The oil exporters accumulate dollars. And instead of spending all those dollars on American goods, they recycle a lot of them back into American financial assets, including U.S. government debt.
The broader trade system worked in much the same way.
And that has a pretty obvious implication for Trump’s threat.
Actually blowing up those trading relationships would risk damaging the very system that has helped finance America for decades. Fewer dollars flowing abroad means fewer dollars naturally coming back into dollar assets. And using access to the American market as a weapon gives countries one more reason to reduce their dependence on the U.S. in the first place.
It certainly seems to me Trump is intending to demolish the petrodollar. Everything he has done from tariffs, which diminish need for dollars, to this oil war, has made that more likely. His latest retreat from Saudi Arabia doubled down on that, since they are the core of the petrodollar. Maybe that is the scheme by which he sees his own cryptocurrency becoming the national currency. I don’t know how though. I can’t see how his twisted mind is thinking this would help him since his stablecoin is pegged to the dollar. Maybe someone smarter than I in the intricacies between petrodollars, treasuries and stablecoins can explain how that would help him.
Otherwise, I am stuck with this is just the most lame-headed threat against the US economy I have ever heard because the only outcome I see is you, first, destroy the US economy, taking the dollar out with it, and then find some way to jury-rig your own currency into its place through your Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent who has been a big advocate of the Treasury cryptocurrencies and the Treasuring buying them.
If Trump never intended to do this and was just making a vain threat to cajole the Fed, we should know that by Thursday since the threat had no effect on what the Fed did today. Vegys thinks there is no way Trump ever intended to do something like this because it is too insane. However, I think Trump does insane things all the time. His war with Iran is insane. I don’t think sane presidents go around making almost daily insane threats like “We’re going to take Canada and use sanctions and tariffs to strong-arm them; we’re going to take Greenland with military force if necessary; I’m renaming everything I like after me; I’m renaming Lake Ontario as “Lake America” because that will sure teach Canada; I’m going to put myself on Mount Rushmore, I’m hitting you with this tariff; I’m taking it off: I’m hitting you with it twice as hard; I’m taking it off again; I’m going to hit you with it three times as hard. ” etc. It’s all totally insane all the time, and it makes our whole nation look like it has become unhinged and cannot be trusted by anyone. So, I would never say Trump will not do something this destructive.
If he does do it, that may be the last necessary swing of the wrecking ball to bring it all down into rubble. Imagine our nation suddenly unable to buy the millions of things we buy from all those countries and our own corporations unable to sell to any of those countries. Those are almost all top-tier global economies that Trump would be completing walling the US off from. It’s utterly insane, but when has insane stopped him?
However, I don’t think he has the authority to do it, so surely congress would finally stop him at that point … wouldn’t they? Or his Supreme Court would … wouldn’t they? Who can say anymore even about those guys? The inmates are running the whole asylum.
So, yeah, he has proven to be quite the extraordinary wrecking ball for the whole world. And one thing is certain. The destruction already done, even if nothing worse happens, has barely begun to play through in terms of our experience of it. That will take months to fully catch up to us, then years to dig out of (IF nothing more blows up, which is not what I am betting will happen).
