The Trump-led Republican Party is crashing into a wall, which will probably end that Party.

8 July 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

The failure of the Republican Party is now so obvious that all intelligent analysts see it as disastrously harming not only the American people but publics throughout the world. The key reasons why I say this have already been stated by others, and here they are; I think they made the case very well:

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https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/07/trump-caves-again-over-tariffs-uncertainty-increases.html

https://archive.ph/P8BmL

July 07, 2025

“Trump Caves Again Over Tariffs - Uncertainty Increases”

On April 2 U.S. President Donald Trump declared a 'Liberation Day' by introducing tariffs on nearly all imports to the United States.

I adred [dared] to predict:

The 'invisible hand' of the markets will respond to Trump's moves by showing him a very visible finger.

The following days confirmed my take.

The tariff rates Trump announced were basically picked from hot air. The whole idea behind them were [was] based on the weird theories of Steve Miran, the Chairman of Trump's President Council of Economic Advisors. They did not make sense.

By April 9 the markets hit back:

Treasury yields spiked on Wednesday as investors bailed out of what has been perceived as the world’s safest instrument on expectations of crumbling foreign demand as tariffs take effect. ...

Yields settled down after China called for dialogue with the U.S. on trade, and then moved right back near the highs of the day after China said it was increasing its tariffs on the U.S. to 84%. ...

“Something has broken tonight in the bond market. We are seeing a disorderly liquidation,” said Jim Bianco, president and macro strategist at Bianco Research.

Shortly thereafter Trump had to pull back (archived):

The economic turmoil, particularly a rapid rise in government bond yields, caused Mr. Trump to blink on Wednesday afternoon and pause his “reciprocal” tariffs for most countries for the next 90 days, according to four people with direct knowledge of the president’s decision.

Trump's unsteadiness on tariffs increased the uncertainty of economic decisions. Uncertainty is a poison, suppressing real economic activities.

The Federal Reserve Bank St. Louis produces hundreds of economic statistics. It includes several which are measuring uncertainty:

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That FRED graph included only February. The doubt about Trump's economic policies had pushed it that high. The consequences of his tariff games were not yet visible.

Here is the current FRED overview graph of economic uncertainty. The index has reached a new record high:

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When Trump had pulled back and announced his 90 days pause on tariffs, he and his advisors were hopeful that other countries would come to negotiate:

PETER NAVARRO:

… So that’s what we set, knowing full well, knowing full well that a lot of countries would come right to us and want a bargain. We've got 90 deals in 90 days possibly pending here.

Up to today, two days before the 90 day pause on tariffs expires, no trade deal was done. There are three new 'framework agreements' - with the UK, Vietnam, and China - which are more or less just letter’s [letters] of intent but not agreements.

With the tariff pause ending, and no trade deals done, the Trump administration is forced to extend its tariff pause:

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday that the U.S. will revert to steep country-by-country tariff rates at the beginning of August, weeks after the tariff rate pause is set to expire. ...

CNN host Dana Bash responded to Bessent on Sunday, saying, “There’s basically a new deadline,” prompting Bessent to push back.

“It’s not a new deadline. We are saying this is when it’s happening,” Bessent said. “If you want to speed things up, have at it. If you want to go back to the old rate, that’s your choice.”

On Friday, Trump, too, referred to an Aug. 1 deadline, raising questions about whether the July 9 deadline still stands.

The Trump administration is also moving the goalposts. Instead of negotiating trade agreements with individual countries the administration will just send out letters of, so far, unknown content:

Trump said Friday that the administration would start sending letters to countries, adding, “I think by the 9th they’ll be fully covered.”

“They’ll range in value from maybe 60% or 70% tariffs to 10% and 20% tariffs, but they’re going to be starting to go out sometime tomorrow,” Trump said overnight on Friday. “We’ve done the final form, and it’s basically going to explain what the countries are going to be paying in tariffs.”

Trump said in a Truth Social post late Sunday evening that tariff letters would be delivered starting at noon on Monday.

There is only one country who’s [whose] people will have to pay those tariffs and the [that] is the U.S. itself.

There is little reason for other countries to react in any other way to the U.S. than by imposing symmetrical tariff measures. For many of them U.S. markets are no longer important enough. That is why most countries have simply ignored the matter:

Bessent also said Sunday that “many of these countries never even contacted us.”

The whole Trump strategy of imposing tariffs to regain industrial activity and to impose its political aims on other countries have [has] failed. China and the EU, the U.S. biggest trade partners, have not flinched. Others have followed their example.

Meanwhile the damage imposed by heightened trade uncertainty continues to accumulate. People are already paying higher prices.

A year from now, when the 2026 midterm elections come up, the damage from tariffs will be what really matters.

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Thie following is a 1,394-word abbreviation of the 3,000-word July 4th MR Online article “The Empire’s Strategic Failure: How the US-Israeli Assault on Iran Accelerated Imperial Decline” by two scholars at the University of Tehran, Taha Zeinali and Sara Larijani:

The June 2025 US-Israeli military assault on Iran …, despite achieving short-term tactical victories, represents a profound strategic failure that has accelerated the US-led imperial decline and strengthened global anti-imperialist forces. Rather than cementing Western hegemony, this illegal act of aggression has exposed … a declining empire desperate to maintain unipolar control [which, I, Eric Zuesse, might add, had also been Hitler’s goal — achievement of the world’s first all-encompassing global empire or “hegemony,” control over the world by one “pole” — and which goal Truman then adopted for the U.S. on 25 July 1945 and has been the U.S. Government’s top goal ever since] through increasingly aggressive military adventures.

The Unmasking of the ‘Rules-Based Order’

The weaponization of diplomacy as cover for military aggression represents a fundamental breach in the international order’s trust architecture. By launching the aggression after announcing the sixth round of US-Iran talks in Muscat — with full prior coordination between Trump and Netanyahu — the West transformed diplomatic engagement from a tool of conflict resolution into a tactical deception for pre-planned strikes. …

Furthermore, the fraudulent nature of the Western “rules-based order” stands fully exposed in the diplomatic theater that followed the attacks. In a spectacle of Orwellian inversion, European powers rushed to blame the victim while exonerating the aggressor. France’s Foreign Ministry condemned “Iran’s ongoing nuclear program” and reaffirmed “Israel’s right to defend itself,” while the United Kingdom’s foreign secretary called on “all parties, especially Iran, to exercise restraint” — conspicuously omitting any criticism of Israel’s illegal strikes. Germany’s response proved most revealing: the foreign minister “strongly condemned the Iranian attack on Israeli territory” even before Iran’s initial retaliation, while Chancellor Friedrich Merz later declared, “This is dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us. … I can only say, I have the greatest respect for the fact that the Israeli army had the courage to do this.”

This diplomatic reversal — where victims become perpetrators — exemplifies Edward Said’s concept of Orientalist logic in Western discourse: Muslims must always appear as irrational aggressors, even when defending themselves from unprovoked attacks. The United Nations Secretary-General’s weak call for “all sides to avoid escalation” without condemning the aggression and attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is striking, showing how international institutions … [are now] using false neutrality to legitimize imperial violence. Notably, in 1981, UN Security Council Resolution 487 “condemned the military attack by Israel on the Iraqi nuclear installation as a clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations” and demanded Israel “refrain from such acts or threats of aggression in the future.”

This [new] blatant double standard crystallized a permanent rupture in Iranian consciousness. …

Nuclear Proliferation: The Empire’s Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

The weaponization of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s technical assessments represents a masterclass in imperial manipulation. The IAEA director’s June report became a strategic weapon for Israeli and Western aggression. One day after the IAEA’s politically motivated comprehensive report accusing “Iran of failing to meet obligations,” the United States and Israel launched their long-planned assault. In this regard, [IAEA head] Grossi’s biased verification became stage-setting for military treachery, as Israel and the US used IAEA processes to justify pre-planned aggression, demonstrating how UN institutional and technical bodies become complicit when US-led imperialism weaponizes their “findings.”

Consequently, by allowing its reports to trigger violence instead of preventing it, the IAEA demonstrated that its assessments serve hegemonic interests rather than non-proliferation. …

The US-Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities, while achieving short-term tactical gains, paradoxically accelerate the very proliferation they claim to prevent through three reinforcing mechanisms. First, by targeting peaceful facilities under IAEA monitoring, the attacks transform a transparent, internationally supervised program into an opaque one beyond Western control. …

Normalizing Catastrophe: The West’s Moral Numbness

The Western public’s complicity in normalizing attacks on nuclear facilities — acts explicitly prohibited under international law — represents a catastrophic moral failure that will inevitably boomerang against Western interests. This ethical numbness, which is already evident in the silence regarding Gaza’s genocide, has set precedents that fundamentally compromise global nuclear security. By legitimizing strikes on safeguarded nuclear infrastructure, Western states have created a playbook that any actor can invoke, transforming their own nuclear facilities into legitimate targets under the logic they themselves have normalized. …

This boomerang effect extends beyond tactics to fundamental security vulnerabilities. Western support for indiscriminate quadcopter attacks that kill civilians alongside intended targets has legitimized a form of warfare where the distinction between combatants and non-combatants dissolves. The precedent of attacking nuclear facilities—once considered the ultimate taboo — means Western nuclear infrastructure now operates under the constant threat of similar strikes, justified by the very logic Western states championed. The complicity of Western publics in endorsing these violations of international law has not merely eroded moral authority but created tangible security risks that will haunt their societies for generations. …

The Boomerang of Regime-Change Strategy

Beyond targeting Iran’s nuclear capabilities, Israel and the US pursued regime change through targeted assassinations of military commanders and systematic attacks on civilian infrastructure. …

Israel then deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure, particularly IRIB’s television studios, seeking to create chaos that would trigger popular uprising. This calculated terrorism altogether killed over 600 civilians but produced the opposite effect: unprecedented national unity transcending political divisions. …

Political Suicide of the Opposition

The opposition’s support for foreign military attacks ultimately proved to be politically fatal. Pro regime-change figures who backed the US-Israeli assault — explicitly or implicitly — found themselves utterly isolated from Iranian public opinion. Their alignment with forces bombing Iranian civilians was widely viewed as treason. Opposition figures who had cultivated international profiles through Western media and funding, Nobel prizes, and cultural awards saw decades of credibility vanish overnight. By calling for regime overthrow while foreign bombs fell on their countrymen, they committed what analysts termed “political suicide,” permanently destroying their viability as political alternatives.

Iran Transformed

The civilian casualties and infrastructure damage also intensified anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiment across Iranian society, gaining renewed emotional resonance as direct responses to military aggression. This emotional shift strengthened pro-resistance elements within Iran while discrediting those who had advocated for diplomatic engagement with the West with the hope of normalization of relations.

The regime change strategy thus achieved the inverse of its intended effects. …

The Myth of Israel’s Impenetrable Air Defense

The US-Israeli war on Iran exposed the economic unsustainability of imperial military dominance. Israel expended interceptor missiles faster than production capacity, forcing reliance on increasingly expensive US munitions. Iran’s asymmetric response using relatively cheap drones and missiles demonstrated how “the cost-benefit curve is upside down” when “$10,000 one-way drones” threaten “$2 million missiles.” The economic arithmetic of imperial decline manifested starkly in the conflict’s cost dynamics. Israel expended interceptor missiles faster than production capacity, each $3 million Arrow interceptor defeating a $10,000 Iranian drone — what one analyst called an “upside-down cost curve” that guarantees bankruptcy through victory. This mirrors historical patterns of empires exhausting themselves through military overextension, from Rome to Britain.

Iran’s missile offensive revealed three critical realities: sophisticated tactics penetrated Israel’s Iron Dome and Arrow systems, proving that even the most advanced and expensive air defense systems leave critical infrastructure exposed to residual strikes. Iran has weaponized cost asymmetry, as Iran’s inexpensive drones and missiles forced Israel to expend multimillion-dollar interceptors at unsustainable rates. …

Catalyst of Multipolarity

While providing limited direct military support, China and Russia’s diplomatic solidarity signaled hardening geopolitical divisions. China’s condemnation of “violations of Iran’s sovereignty” and Russia’s denunciation of “absolutely unprovoked aggression” marked the consolidation of alternative power structures. …

The war of aggression represents what critical analysts identify as the “desperate phase” of imperial decline. …

The aggression definitively confirmed that the West seeks Iran’s destruction, not accommodation. No diplomatic engagement or restraint could shield Iran from US-led imperial violence. This brutal clarity accelerates Iran’s pivot toward comprehensive integration with China, Russia, and North Korea — forging an Eastern bloc united against US hegemony. …

Iran as Vanguard of Global Resistance

Rather than isolating Iran, the attacks enhanced its credibility as the primary force resisting Western domination. The act of aggression validated Iran’s consistent argument that accommodation with imperial powers remains impossible, strengthening anti-imperialist factions throughout the region. …

Strategic Implications for Forces

The June 2025 aggression, like previous imperial adventures, has accelerated rather than arrested processes of imperial decline. By choosing military confrontation over diplomatic engagement, the US and Israel validated arguments that Western imperialism respects only strength. The attacks have proven nuclear deterrence remains the ultimate sovereignty guarantee; air supremacy cannot achieve political transformation; high-tech militarism has inherent limitations; and imperial violence represents weakness, not strength.

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The implications of all this (and of Trump’s and Congress’s slashing all federal Departments except greatly expanding both the Defense Department and the Homeland Security Department though those are the two federal Departments that Americans show in polls to the most want to be CUT) are that probably by the time of next year’s mid-term U.S. elections, when all of the U.S. House members and one third of the U.S. Senators will be again facing the voters, the Democratic Party will be swept back into power in the House and maybe also in the Senate, so that Trump will again be impeached but this time on valid grounds, which wasn’t the case last time, and so Trump will face a much higher probability than he did last time of being actually removed from office and replaced by his Vice President, J.D. Vance, who, in the following 2028 Presidential election will — as having been a loyal follower of Trump — be an easy mark for the Democrats to defeat so as to install another Democrat as President. But this would not solve the problem for the American people and for the peoples of the world, because BOTH Parties are controlled by their respective megadonors, all of whom are among the approximately 1,000 U.S. billionaires; and, so, all U.S. Administrations and Congresses — regardless of Party — continue the neoconservative, internationally hyper-aggressive foreign policies, and the neooliberal or “libertarian” domestic polices, that are bipartisan among the billionaires and are destroying America and increasingly endangering the entire world. Replacing the personnel in the Government is no solution when the rot runs throughout the Government, including the President, the Congress, and the Courts. The change needs to be far more fundamental, and I have made here a proposal of what I think it would need to be.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.