(Substack)—The effects of President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” moves are starting to be felt. The aftermath of the announcement itself is already making a huge impact across the globe and we’re only in the initial phase of tariffs being rolled out. Around fifty nations had contacted the White House by the weekend and a handful of deals have already been been proposed. Meanwhile, the stock market is crashing and legacy media is giddy over it all.
Now, the hard part begins.
As he noted Monday on Truth Social:
Oil prices are down, interest rates are down (the slow moving Fed should cut rates!), food prices are down, there is NO INFLATION, and the long time abused USA is bringing in Billions of Dollars a week from the abusing countries on Tariffs that are already in place. This is despite the fact that the biggest abuser of them all, China, whose markets are crashing, just raised its Tariffs by 34%, on top of its long term ridiculously high Tariffs (Plus!), not acknowledging my warning for abusing countries not to retaliate. They’ve made enough, for decades, taking advantage of the Good OL’ USA! Our past “leaders” are to blame for allowing this, and so much else, to happen to our Country. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
The Trump administration is playing multiple games of chicken. In these game of chicken, there are four possible outcomes.
- The opponents back down and do President Trump’s will
- President Trump backs down and tries to salvage the situation
- Both sides back down and meet in the middle to negotiate terms of a draw
- Neither side backs down, causing a collision
On paper, the odds seemed stacked against him because he needs to get all five opponents to back down in order to claim full victory. In reality, President Trump and America can come out on top if the victories and “draws” (which mean both sides get some of what they want) are more impactful than any defeats.
Here are the five opponents, in no particular order, playing chicken against President Trump right now:
- Wall Street – The crashing stock market is not an indicator of results of the tariffs. Their an indicator of the reactions to the tariffs from those who will benefit when the stock market falls and then rises again. Wall Street is shorting the market now knowing that they’ll be betting on it again at some point in the future. Sadly, they’re okay with smaller investors, especially those with their retirement accounts locked in the stock market, sweating through the ups and downs while hedge funds manipulate the outcomes to fit their desired timing.
- The UniParty Swamp – RINOs like Congressman Don Bacon and Senator Chuck Grassley are using this opportunity to try to take back power from the executive branch over tariffs. Their track record of fiscal failure for decades should preclude this, but in our low-information political world the RINOs and Democrats will point to short-term market drops to cover for their long-term self-aggrandizing.
- Corporate America Outsourcers – It isn’t the foreign companies affected by tariffs that are a threat. In fact, they present the biggest opportunity for investment into the United States. It’s the domestic companies that rely on cheap foreign labor and low-quality foreign parts who pose the biggest risk to tariffs from a corporate perspective. Some will take this as a signal for them to bring their infrastructure back to their home nation. Many of them will fight behind the scenes to subvert President Trump at every turn.
- China – This may be the hardest challenge for President Trump to overcome because of one factor: the Chinese Communist Party’s pride. They don’t like to lose but unfortunately their hand is far weaker than President Trump’s. They need us far more than we need them but they desperately want the rest of the world to think it’s the other way around. At question is whether or not they’re willing to commit economic suicide for the sake of bravado, and unfortunately it could go either way with the Xi regime.
- Europe – Our friends and semi-friends in Europe are going to push back but there’s a good chance they may recognize the opportunity President Trump is providing them. Of all those who will be impacted by the tariffs, Europe is the one that can benefit the most. They can and should break free from their own globalist ambitions and acknowledge that they can be far more self-sufficient if they stop relying on the rest of the world. This is unlikely, of course, but not impossible. If they choose to fight President Trump on this, they could very easily make it personal and allow it to metastasize into a full-blown confrontation with America economically and culturally.
The keys to victory for America in the so-called “trade wars” are a steady hand and a resolute stance. Wall Street will do whatever is in its best interests, which means that a handful of wins for the President could turn the market around quickly. Corporate America will fume but they’ll get over it. China and Europe are wildcards.
It’s the UniParty Swamp that poses the biggest immediate threat because they can drive sentiment with moves that make it look like they can reverse President Trump’s tariffs. If Wall Street, the American public, and the world believe Congress can put an end to President Trump’s maneuvers against his will, they will prolong the pain that is going to be felt.
President Trump said Sunday, “Sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”
Short-term financial impacts from the tariffs are the medicine of which he speaks. I hate using graphic visuals to make a point but if we stay with President Trump’s analogy, then what the UniParty Swamp is trying to do is to make America “purge” the medicine before it can take effect.
It is possible that Rep. Bacon and his RINO allies can get tariff clawback legislation passed, forcing President Trump to veto it. But even if they cannot take back the power to reverse the tariffs, they’ll be sending a message of disunity that will give the other four groups playing chicken against President Trump the excuse to keep going.
The UniParty Swamp knows this. They WANT President Trump to fail. They NEED him to fail to benefit themselves, their portfolios, and most importantly the anti-American interests that control them. This is why it’s extremely important that Americans let Bacon, Grassley, and the others know that we support the President’s plan and we want him to see it all the way through. Only then can we defeat the globalists; I noted in a recent segment of my show that they’re the real targets of all this.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
