Why the real Trump doctrine was never about America – and what happens now that the world knows it.

The first Trump doctrine? The last Trump doctrine? Let the next Trump doctrine be the one you actually understand for what it really is. For nearly a decade, scholars, columnists, and national security think tanks have strained to define the elusive “Trump Doctrine.” Some said it was isolationist. Others called it a Jacksonian revival, or a brute-force transactionalism that favored strongmen over institutions. Some clung to the notion that his unpredictability was part of a strategy  –  a kind of geopolitical “art of the deal.”

They were all wrong.

The Trump Doctrine isn’t a foreign policy.

It’s perhaps the ultimate grift. A con like nobody’s ever seen before.

And now, in 2025, the mask has finally slipped.

Not because of a New York courtroom.

Not because of a Congressional hearing.

But because I cracked the case, and told Parliamentary Canadians, Mexicans, Ukrainians, and members of the international press that Trump is not behaving on behalf of anybody but himself. That his negotiations are set up to enable him to skim payments off the tariff/customs duties system. How he is setting up other shadow banking mechanisms injecting himself between the American federal capital reserves and his own personal utilization.

This isn’t about nationalism. It’s about narcissism.

It isn’t about policy. It’s about profit. 

And Trump has made the United States government his personal piggy bank.

The Mirage of a Doctrine Has To Be Universally Regarded

Donald Trump literally referred to himself as the “shopkeeper” of America recently, if you can believe it.

Analysts tried to force Trump’s behavior into recognizable frameworks. In Foreign Affairs, his advisors painted him as a disruptor trying to correct global imbalances. In Geopolitical Futures, he was labeled a realist breaking with Wilsonian excess. Outlets from The Guardian to FPRI have attempted to categorize his unpredictability as a calculated feature – a new kind of asymmetric diplomacy.

But the confusion only persists if you make one fatal mistake: assuming he gives a damn about the country.

He doesn’t.

The through-line of Trump’s domestic and international behavior isn’t ideology. It’s extraction. Wherever he could skim – he skimmed. Wherever he could weaponize patriotic language to cover personal profiteering – he did. The only thing consistent about the Trump Doctrine is that it made Trump richer and more powerful, no matter the cost to Americans or our allies.

Sovereign-Backed Self-Enrichment

The Trump Doctrine is best understood as the conversion of national power into personal leverage.

This is why he would always talk about how he is personal friends with world leaders whether or not that’s true. That used to be something he could get away with saying but now everybody knows world leaders hate his guts. Like, all of them.

• Tariffs weren’t tools of negotiation. They were backdoor bribes: mechanisms that allowed him to direct cashflow, create price shocks, and reward or punish industries depending on their alignment with him.
• Crypto wasn’t a frontier of innovation. It was a digital scam ecosystem, filled with shady operators using his image and network to sell worthless coins and fake promises.
• Federal contracts, real estate deals, foreign licensing agreements – they weren’t coincidences. They were transactions that flowed upward, not to America, but to Trump, his family, and his financiers.

He isn’t just using the Presidency. He’s using the Treasury, and the image of America to conduct what is, effectively, a state-sponsored pyramid scheme.

It used to be that through it all, supporters and even some opponents of Trump convinced themselves that even though he is this kind of self-centerened mongrel, that he did deals in such a way that he only benefited when the country benefited. Though there were plenty of attempts to prove he is a “Russian asset” or “agent” of Putin, the reality is, it’s easy to make a deal with Trump.

But now, as he gets richer, the nation is not profiting.

That era is over.

So, how can he explain why he is getting richer, and we are getting poorer?

Even middle class and some wealthier people are starting to see him turn on them.

The Economic Weaponization of Government Against the People

In the Trump era, public office became a shell company.

If you invested with him or his Trust or certain associates; you get limited benefits. Any and all others who do not or oppose that system of financial control; get burnished or punitive treatment. It’s that simple. Politics doesn’t really matter to Trump unless it restricts whatever deal he has on the table – for himself.

So he’s skimming off the tariffs; and therefore doesn’t care how much they are.

He gutted oversight bodies.

He packed agencies with loyalists. 

Law enforcement is being directed not to protect the people, but to enforce his brand. 

The DOJ has became a sword for retribution.

Foreign policy is a circus of arm-twisting and bribery.

I Exposed Trump To His “Friends” As A Foe

I told the truth – plainly, and internationally. Direct email contacts to elected officials, their staff, and others. This is not just anon posting on Twitter or Reddit. These were laser-focused extremely well-written explanations of Trump’s schemes and how they negatively will impact negotiations. I provided remedies and suggestions including working directly with me – which none took up – until now. More on that later.

I told Canada that Trump’s doctrine was a hostile investment strategy months ago which was right when the tariff pauses began.

Then I told Mexico the tariffs were a protection racket.

I told Ukraine that his interest in their country was personal not patriotic, and that seemed to have put a rift between Trump & Zelenskyy; and frankly – even Putin.

There is hardly a pretense of diplomacy between Trump and foreign nations. So many confused narratives are coming out of every corner. These staged fights with bureaucracies are a distraction. Trump will move to extract every last usable piece of the American state – its assets, its data, its regulatory power – and skim off of it like a credit card thief at an ATM machine.

We’re living in the age of financialized fascism, where the dictator just needs to tie a knot between his own financial house and the national balance sheet.

Stop the Presses

A robbery is taking place right now. It’s not just bribery. There is somewhat more than meets the eyes, but that’s only because the press is too easily distracted. 

It’s time to stop pretending we don’t know what this is.

This is not nationalism.

It’s not even unpredictability.

There is no populism here.

It’s theft.

And it’s happening in plain sight