Trump's economic blueprint is hiding in plain sight

The Trump tariff plan has rocked the stock market and economists around the world, with the president notoriously labeling the implementation of his tariffs as Liberation Day, while others called his reciprocal moves a “huge mistake.”

Many have argued that Trump did not actually implement reciprocal tariffs at all, though. Look no farther than on X, where even though the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, is one of Trump’s top advisers, a White House post about the tariffs was slapped with a Community Notes label that said the numbers the administration used were not based on actual foreign tariffs at all.

Instead, the correction claimed the numbers were likely based on trade deficits and theoretical tariff amounts combined.

Although it is worth noting that Trump did reveal that the numbers consisted of “the combined risk" of all foreign tariffs, “non-monetary barriers,” and “other forms of cheating,” the administration soon changed its tune to focus solely on Chinese trade.

After the White House announced another pause on tariffs for all but China, tariffs for which were raised to 125% (a number that may have changed by the time you read this), Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went so far as to say that this was the president’s plan from the beginning.

“This was the president's strategy all along. You might even say that he goaded China into a bad position,” Bessent told reporters.

Bessent then said China’s 84% retaliatory tariffs had exposed the communist nation as “bad actors.”

While billionaire Bill Ackman called Trump’s latest shift “brilliantly executed,” some have argued that Trump’s economic plan is a case of writing on the wall and is following the work of former Hudson Bay senior strategist Stephen Miran.

Miran, Trump's top financial consultant as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, was appointed by the president-elect in November 2024. Miran was also a Treasury Department adviser during Trump's first term and later worked at investment firm Hudson Bay Capital Management, where he published a guide on global trade in November.

The document, titled “A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System,” contains many aspects congruent with Trump’s current plan, especially in relation to tariffs.

While the document first noted that Trump proposed 60% tariffs on China during his campaign (the real number turned out to be 34%), the document did note a 10% base tariff on the rest of the world, which panned out correctly.

More accurately, Miran’s piece said the tariff plan would be deeply “intertwined with national security concerns.”

This indeed happened on Liberation Day, when Trump declared it a national emergency for the United States to “reindustrialize.”

'China's the big the big player in this whole tariff war.'

The initial tariffs and national emergency were all too easy to predict, according to Danny Polishchuk, a stand-up comedian who made his first economic predictions in January based on Miran’s document.

"He's gonna tariff every f**king country on earth," Polishchuk said. "[Trump] is trying to just totally redo the entire global financial system to benefit America, because the way that it's currently designed was to not benefit America.”

Polishchuk, who has a degree in economics from the University of Guelph, told Blaze News that while media members have been speculating for months, Trump’s plan has “been in this paper the whole time.”

Before Trump’s move to rescind tariffs on all but the Chinese, Polishchuk also accurately predicted that China would be the focus of the administration moving forward.

“China's the big player in this whole tariff war; they're bigger than anybody else,” he explained.

“I don’t think Xi Jinping wants to seem weak,” Polishchuk continued. “It’s a situation of who is going to blink first.”

The Miran document also floated the idea of using tariffs to force China into a deal, an idea Trump endorsed soon after China retaliated.

“A deal’s going to be made with China,” Trump bluntly said. “I just want fair.”

Purposely tanking?

Like a last-place team looking for better draft picks, the Miran document suggested that currency could be purposely tanked to get a better deal. It further suggested that the United States under Trump could attempt to devalue its own currency to make paying off its debts easier, as well as make the prospect of bringing manufacturing into the United States a cheaper endeavor.

As the U.S. dollar is the world’s reserve currency, the “overvaluation” of the dollar has “weighed heavily on the American manufacturing sector while benefiting financialized sectors of the economy in manners that benefit wealthy Americans,” Miran wrote.

While this was theorized in November, Trump himself shared a post early in April about “purposely crashing the market,” something investor David Bahnsen said is a noted strategy.

Bahnsen is the managing partner and CIO of the Bahnsen Group, a firm overseeing more than $4 billion, per Bloomberg, and he spoke to Blaze News about the reflections of the document in Trump’s policy.

“The reason one wants to weaken a currency is to pay a bill with less money,” Bahnsen said. “It is a tool for politicians to excessively borrow and pay back the borrowed money with money that is worthless. That's why there's an advantage,” he explained.

Bahnsen said the method is advantageous to the country with the trade deficit — in this case, the United States — because that country holds the deficit dollars in its own accounts and currency, which then can be manipulated.

Summarized, currency manipulation, or tanking one’s currency value, is done to “either to pay back bills with depreciated dollars or to pay a foreign country for goods and services with depreciated dollars.”

Bahnsen added, “China doesn't like that.”

The Mar-a-Lago Accord

The general thrust of the paper, as Bahnsen put it, is focused on the “excessively strong” U.S. dollar that is being used as a competitive disadvantage in terms of global trade. This is something that President Trump very likely agrees with, the investor claimed.

However, it is the ethics behind the tactic of “currency manipulation” that Bahnsen did not think that Miran specifically addressed; also that Americans need to come to terms with the fact that their government is sometimes the one that is manipulating currency.

“We're hardly blameless on this front ourselves,” Bahnsen stated.

At the same time, both economic experts explained that Trump is striving for what has been referred to as the “Mar-a-Lago Accord.”

The term has seen extremely limited mainstream usage but is mentioned in the economic document as a potential Trump plan to get trading partners to help strengthen their own currencies while decreasing the value of the U.S. dollar simultaneously.

As alluded to previously, this would theoretically boost U.S. manufacturing by making American exports cheaper and imports more expensive.

This speculative strategy seemingly only works with the positioning power that the United States holds, something even Chinese state media seems to recognize.

At the time of this publication, the South China Morning Post has the most detailed reference to the Miran document of any mainstream outlets and warns that it could turn out poorly for the Chinese.

When referring to the Plaza Accord struck with Japan in the 1980s, the Chinese outlet admitted the new American plans could have heavy implications on the Chinese economy and even cited a source that claims China may surprisingly end up agreeing with the implications of the Mar-a-Lago Accord.

“Beijing will make decisions based on its own interests rather than simply follow a U.S.-led accord,” said Ding Shuang, chief Greater China economist at Standard Chartered.

However, the economist added, “In bilateral trade negotiations, China may out of its own interest — and in line with the spirit of the Mar-a-Lago Accord — keep the yuan relatively strong, but it will not agree to a significant appreciation.”