Bright Brief - Tariffs, Tantrums and Trump Cards

Don’t Break the Players … Break the Game

In a recent feature that was far more esoteric and introspective than analytical, I appealed to one of my favorite quotes delivered on the end of a master’s pen:

“When you know the way broadly, you can see it in all things.”

Well, when it comes to the latest major chapter in this utterly fascinating War of Stories that doubles as an Actual revolution against the forces of collectivism that have reigned over would-be sovereigns the world over for generations, the way is a fascinating and bicameral mix of broad and specific, expansive and precise.

And to discover that signal, one of the best ways I’ve found to calibrate your own cognitive cypher is to analyze the human cyphers operating in the current battlspace, as, the more comfortable you get with ascertaining their various methodologies when it comes to fifth-generation warfare and all its many-layered components, the closer you’ll get to guessing their micro endgames; when stitched together, the various intentions of the players on the board—these cognitive cyphers to awakening who double as characters in the War of Stories I chronicle in these digital pages—give some approximation of the board itself, and where the game is headed.

I believe Narrative Wars have been waged since the dawning of human civilization, and I believe we’re in the midst of one now, just as I also believe we’re winning it, because we have better writers, better characters … and because we represent the infinite player on the board that is the battlefield.

And while he’s far from the only player on the board, Donald Trump remains the most signal-soaked, and the one most capable of simultaneously affecting the Narrative AND the Actual … often all at once.

Donald Trump is THE cognitive cypher not just for the American Golden Age, but for the Global Awakening, and there's not an ounce of hyperbole in that claim, if you've been examining the Info War at least partly through the lens of a War of Stories.

Put simply, as I've argued before, Trump (with patriots behind him) has been wielding the Hegelian Dialectic simultaneously AGAINST the enemy's System of Systems and FOR the Collective American Mind.

This is because, contrary to popular belief, there is nothing inherently wrong with the Hegelian Dialectic. It's not a rule of nature, but rather one of mass and micro human psychology. While it's often distilled down as the 'Problem, Reaction, Solution' theorem, the original described an observational process wherein a presented Thesis was reconciled with an ensuing Antithesis before coalescing into Synthesis.

This is how story structure functions, and the best writers understand it. It's also why the (thankfully dying) modern trend of narrative subversion of audience expectations is inherently unsatisfying. In other words, it's not because stories have 'gone woke' that they're failing; it's because they're no longer satisfying the innate desire observers of all stories have in seeing resolution that retroactively imprints onto the first two acts of the story being told.

Catharsis is the term most often used to describe the ideal feeling an audience can be left with in the wake of a story properly told, but the story doesn't have to have a happy ending to reach it. It simply needs to fit, even if (perhaps ESPECIALLY if) the audience didn't put all the pieces together in real time.

Looping back to Trump, we know he's served as both an actuator FOR and representative OF a new era of American Awakening and emergent dominance back on the world stage, but let's not ignore the secondary point, nor its implications.

We were told in the most infamous info dissemination program of all time that the awakening (and the cure) would spread worldwide.

Well, Trump ALSO served to lay out the thesis for an awakening on a macro scale that extends far beyond our redefined (and REAL) Pax Americana.

The real TRICK here, and the reason Trump's Dialectic is going to have such a lasting legacy is the fact that the enemy has been baited into making up the second leg (and the core) of that dialectic.

You see, Trump could lay out all the First Principles arguments he wanted, but without the enemy bridging the gap from Problem to Solution (Thesis to Synthesis) by fully defining themselves in opposition to Trump's agenda, which is to say, the agenda of sovereignty, multipolarity, PEACE and prosperity, that dialectic would ring hollow.

Consider this as you watch the heart of the collapsing collectivist empire pull out all the stops to ensure its own destruction while the world watches AND awakens.

It may feel like it's been going 'very slowly' for a while, but I think we're on the cusp of the 'all at once' phase, and it will be worldwide.

(I wrote about the specific structure of Trump’s Hegelian Trick in my most popular feature of the year. Consider checking it out.)

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But then, if that’s the warfighting—in more ways than one—philosophy of Trump, what is his latest deployment, and how is it kicking off the very cascade I’ve been describing and projecting for the better part of this accelerated Info War era?

An ‘operation,’ you say?

Allusions to sick ‘patients,’ of which our nation’s economy is a prime example?

These were just a few of Trump’s signal-saturated messages delivered during the week that was as his grand Tariffian agenda was laid out in all its glory (for us,) and devastation [for them.]

After all, as I’ve said before, when they tell you Trump is a threat to ‘their Democracy,’ they're not lying. And so, when they tell you Trump is a threat to ‘their Economy,’ they're being oddly, insufferably, maniacally consistent.

The thing is, their economy has never been OUR economy, and in order to break away from it—in order to break the habit without killing the patient—Trump had to deliver the extraordinary.

After all, extraordinary problems require extraordinary solutions, and make no mistake, we ARE experiencing the beginning stages of the solutions to some of the biggest problems the Deep State’s System of Systems has saddled us with.

But then, if all of this is such a good thing, why is the entirety of the Media Industrial Complex and, admittedly a HUGE portion of the normie layers of the Collective Mind reacting with such emphatic trepidation?

And why does Trump himself seem to be celebrating a bloodbath in the very stock markets he once took so much pleasure—and credit—in propping up?

We explored some of the how at length in my long-form previewing this whole ‘operation,’ and I’m happy to report that said preview piece can also serve as a follow-up in and of itself, so cleanly did Trump’s Actul map onto his projected Narrative.

Observe:

Consider this as you see globalists rage at the dying of the light:

Power is power. Not the threat of it. Not the illusion of it.

The thing is the thing.

Trump knows it ... now, so do they.

From the on-shoring of domestic production and manufacturing to the unleashing of domestic energy projects, rapid declines, if not outright purges of tax protocols—also known as government theft—to the aforementioned dismantling of the very administrative state that once presided over the opposite, draining the swamp isn’t all about exposing political corruption, but rather the truth of the web of lies such corruption rose out of the primordial sludge to defend and perpetuate.

And yeah … I’d say it’s going pretty well so far.

But then, surely you haven’t missed that the mere NARRATIVE deployment of Trump’s tariffs have already visited immediate and overwhelming effects on the Actual, as a flood of Fortune 500 companies shift plans rapidly in order to re-shore production pipelines—which double as employment pipelines—to the United States, while companies like Elon Musk’s Tesla inversely shock the normie hivemind by revealing what some of us have known all along … and that is the fact that they’re ALREADY sourcing and building all US-sold vehicles in the US, proving that it is actually possible, and that what WAS a high-cost move is now looking like the shrewdest bit of business posturing going.

Again … almost like it was planned this way.

From Apple to every car manufacturer under the sun, and even to the biggest foreign semiconducter manufacturer in the world, TSMC, Trump isn’t using a carrot OR stick approach … he’s using the carrot AS a stick

In other words, in the new American reality, if you want access to the US market … you’re going to need to join it.

What Trump’s Tariffs are signaling is the convergence of unfiltered and unabashed strategic dominance coupled with a mass psychological deployment playing out on multiple layers of both reality and the Collective Mind at once, as American citizens are buoyed with the promise of rapid economic acceleration (to the upside, for once,) while foreign citizens are in the midst of a Psych 101 maelstrom that has quickly shifted from the Denial phase to the Anger phase.

First, they were told—both by the corporate globalist media and their own ‘elected’ collectivist leaders—that the tariffs wouldn’t be arriving, THEN that said tariffs and all the pain they’re sure to cause THOSE countries are the Orange Man’s doing (can’t argue with that,) before we see the steady shift into the Bargaining phase as said leaders first attempt (and fail) to negotiate on globalist terms with Trump (ie: with the American people, who have no incentive to capitulate) before said negotiations turn inward, focusing on the rising ire of their own respective populations, who will begin to wake from their slumber on a more rapid timeline than you might expect, after a brief stopover at the Depression phase.

(There’s MUCH more where that came from in the original piece, which you can read below … AFTER you’re done with this one.)

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This might help you begin to understand why Trump is not only refusing to shrink in the face of the System’s breathless panic masquerading as an all out assault on his Golden Age agenda … but is rather welcoming it.

That’s right, as

Jon Herold

,

GhostofBasedPatrickHenry

and I discussed on a recent episode of the Devolution Power Hour, Trump WANTS the System to go all in … because he already has.

And he’s got the winning hand.

As much as I talk about SIGNAL in these digital pages, I often say that COUNTER SIGNAL is even more illuminating, and that’s what the first half of 2025 is all about, in my estimation: Trump implementing the Sovereign agenda of a reawakened and reignited American Republic charging full speed into its actualization that doubles as a remembrance while the System paints itself in active denial of and opposition to those ends.

In essence, the panic you’re currently seeing—and yes, that many you know are probably experiencing at the advent of the Golden Age—is a feature, not a bug of the coming victories, which will be too numerous to count, as Trump has promised time and time again.

Liberation Day, then is a bicameral Actual & Narrative deployment whose net effects are operating on multiple layers of the mindscape, reality and even time simultaneously.

Let me take a crack at explaining how:

First, from an Actual perspective, Trump’s Tariffs are set to visit immediate and long term effects onto the current global trade matrix, with their most damaging effects disproportionately impacting globalist corporations while its most beneficial impacts will inversely boost domestic players.

Rest assured, major and minor companies will collapse under the weight of this trade war, which is really an accelerated sifting away from a global corporatocracy built on margins that can only have resulted from globalist labor arbitrage. The System has branded this levered arbitrage racket as a free market, when it’s been anything but.

That said, while some go belly up, many more will see boosts in market share at a proportional rate that’s inversely correlated to the energy being drained from the globalist system.

What’s more, many of the largest companies are already in a mad scramble to shield themselves from the worst of the downstream effects, hence the recent flood of announcements regarding massive US infrastructure investments by international corporations.

And this trend is only just beginning.

Companies are already racing to fall in line, betraying the seeming unity of the system of systems as the very profit structure that allowed for their infiltration over invasion is now accelerating its opposite: exfiltration over extinction, and there’s no way to stop the trend, as the System of Systems was built atop incentive structures that are now being wielded against it.

Put another way, we’re not trying to destroy these companies; we’re transforming them into assets FOR the American people.

On a Narrative level, Liberation Day is acting as both a declaration of war on the System while exposing its ubiquity and pervasiveness to layers of the Collective Mind as yet unaware of its scope.

While Americans begin to experience a rapid boom cycle on the back of the transition, foreigners in globalist states will experience the opposite trend, which is already provoking a collectivist death spiral wherein interdependent players like Canada and the EU lock arms in a desperate bid to combine stagnant, eroding and leveraged forces in order to stave off the reckoning of an emergent real economy that is draining the life from their false one.

And so, while we’re already seeing capitulation on a corporate level, who blinks first on a nation state level bears watching, as only true sovereigns will survive the transition.

This too will form a cascade.

Liberation won’t happen all at once, but since its end state is inevitable, and since [their] ability to thwart it is nonexistent, the world is being let in on Trump’s secret, and one the Deep State already knows, and fears accordingly:

The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.

Until it is, stay Positive, stay Based and most importantly … stay Bright.

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Bright Retrospective

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AFTER you’ve done your homework by revisiting the pieces linked above, whether you’re new here or a returning and long-time member of the Bright Army, taking a trip back into the ‘Weapons of the Future’ series might equip you well for the coming arguments—aka. sifting—as Trump’s Trade War escalates, accelerates and ultimately exemplifies the America First Agenda.

This series starts with ‘The Bridge’ and continues with ‘The Switch,’ but honestly? My favorite of the bunch happens to be the latest, which attempts to define a new American Future by taking a look at the past I believe they stole from us, and that we’re in the very beginning stages of taking back.

‘Amerigeddon’ might be my favorite feature I’ve had the pleasure of pulling from whatever ether I’m attempting to tap into in these musings, and I hope it provides you with the mix of hope and resolve I took in writing it, and helps you to weather the slings and arrows to come, whether they be Actual or Narrative.

And as always, if you DO get anything out of these writings, please consider supporting the work I do and the growing family it helps to support by upgrading to a Paid Subscription to Burning Bright, as every one that comes across the wire removes just a touch of the anxiety inherent in wading into the Info War as I have.

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