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Trump’s “Dirty 15” Tariff Hit List: A Global Economic Purge to Fund His Fascist Empire

T.J. Johnson Apr 2, 25

🔥 A “Liberation Day” for Tyrants

Donald J. Trump is no longer just playing president. He’s constructing a full-blown autocratic state—one tariff at a time. His latest gambit? A sweeping set of “reciprocal tariffs” cloaked in populist nationalism but engineered to implode the global trading system and redraw economic boundaries along lines of loyalty to his regime.

Trump has scheduled the rollout for what he grotesquely calls “Liberation Day”—a date that will live in infamy for any nation with the temerity to trade on equal footing with the United States. Beneath the theatrical slogans and faux-patriotic bluster lies a strategic economic blitzkrieg: a coordinated, data-obscured tariff assault designed to punish resistance and reward subservience.

🤐 The “Dirty 15”: Vengeance Without Accountability

The fog of war is deliberate. Trump’s trade plan is cloaked in ambiguity, absent transparency, and devoid of objective criteria. And yet the shape of the beast is beginning to emerge. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—an unelected financier elevated solely for his allegiance to Trump’s economic revanchism—appeared on Fox Business to unveil the ominously named “Dirty 15.” This blacklist of countries, according to Bessent, represents the 15% of global economies most reliant on U.S. trade while imposing what the regime deems “unfair” tariffs.

He refused to name them, of course. Naming names is dangerous when your policy is based on vengeance rather than metrics. But the Commerce Department’s data leaves little to the imagination: China, the European Union, Mexico, Vietnam, India, Germany, Canada, Japan, South Korea, and more—all global players, all now implicitly cast as enemies of the Trump economic state.

⚖️ Fake Math, Real Authoritarianism

Make no mistake: this isn’t a negotiation tactic. It’s economic subjugation masquerading as strategy.

Kevin Hassett, Trump’s economic hatchet man, offered a stunningly unserious justification: these countries are responsible for the U.S.’s “entire trillion-dollar trade deficit.” That kind of anti-intellectual nonsense plays well on MAGA media, but it’s economic illiteracy. Trade deficits aren’t theft; they reflect consumer preferences, supply chains, and production efficiencies. But to this regime, facts are fungible, and economics is merely another cudgel of control.

📉 Tariffs as Weapons in a Global Coup

These tariffs aren’t operating in isolation—they’re the latest salvo in a broader authoritarian assault on the global order. They follow a parade of previous measures: blanket tariffs on China, retaliatory taxes on Canadian and Mexican goods, sweeping levies on steel, aluminum, and automobiles, and targeted strikes against pharmaceuticals and key industrial imports.

This is not “America First.” It’s democracy last.

And the timing is no accident. With his digital dollar dream—Musk Bucks, or what insiders rightly call SKUM Bucks—Trump and his fellow oligarchs are laying the financial scaffolding for a new kind of regime: one where every purchase is monitored, every transaction scored, and every dissenter financially neutered. Today it’s China. Tomorrow, it’s you.

🧾 The Trump-Musk Doctrine: Obey or Be Erased

This “Dirty 15” doctrine is not about tariffs. It’s about testing how far Trump can go before the rest of the world—and this country—surrenders. This is how authoritarianism metastasizes: not with tanks in the street, but with tariffs in the spreadsheet.

It’s a textbook purge—an economic McCarthyism where allies are reclassified as threats and loyalty is measured in blind compliance with MAGA's capitalist-fascist creed.

And let’s not forget who’s enabling this. The media, ever pliant in the face of spectacle, is normalizing this madness under the guise of trade policy. The billionaire class, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, is licking its chops at the prospect of a transactional world order where human rights and democratic values are expendable, but quarterly earnings are sacred.

We are witnessing the monetization of repression.

🛑 This Is the Line in the Sand

The stakes couldn’t be higher. This isn’t just a fight over tariffs—it’s a fight over whether the global economy will be ruled by law or by fear, by institutions or by despots, by citizens or by sovereign billionaires.