Donald Trump seems determined on a remake of "Margin Call"

His trade war has morphed into a financial crisis resembling the 2008 crash. Way to go Donald.

That was then…

As stock markets tumbled across the planet, Donald Trump coined a new term for those Republicans who don’t have the stomach for trade wars. “Panicans”, he called them. They don’t have the bottle. Lily-livered coupon clippers who don’t see the logic in welcoming a collapse in asset values—not because of an economic crisis, a pandemic, or a war, but because The Donald wants a final solution to America’s massive debt pile, currently $36 trillion. Oh, and he also wants to show he’s the biggest swinging dick in the geopolitical changing room.

But the thought occurs that the political leader he is really emulating is the Bolshevik Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. I can think of no leader since then who has sought to crash their national economy so eagerly as the Russian revolutionary did in 1917. A hundred years ago, that event plunged the global capitalist system into an existential crisis which reverberated across the decades and really only ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990.

Of course, Lenin didn’t think he was destroying the Russian economy; he thought he was liberating it from the chains of capitalist exploitation. Donald Trump thinks he is freeing America from the chains of the global market. Marxists assumed that, once the workers had taken over the means of production, the economy would flourish and wealth would be spread to all workers. That’s also what Trump believes—sort of. By taking over the means of trade, imposing autarky and forcing capitalist companies to relocate to America, he is also trying to restore industrial wealth to the workers of America. Except he isn’t. Anyone who has seen the film Margin Call, about the 2008 financial collapse, will know exactly what is happening right now across the financial world.