100 Days of Ruin
Chapter II: The Tarantella of Tariffs
It was not, at first, a crash.
It was a quivering, a crackling —
like a sheet of ice fracturing underfoot,
while the fool dancing atop it shouted about "record crowds" and "tremendous strength."
In the early days of Mad King Trump's second reign, the stock market, for a time, played along.
The courtiers cheered, the headlines sang —
until the first wave of tariffs hit like a hammer dropped from a drunken god’s hand.
The rot had long been hidden behind banners and bluster.
When the first volleys of tariffs were announced — 60% upon China, 125% the week after, and then 145% with frantic exceptions (Apple, but only somewhat) — the economy stumbled as if struck behind the knees.
Liberation Day, they had called it — the grand announcement of tariffed freedom. But the bond market, like an old banker muttering into his teacup, knew better. The invisible hand did not lift; it struck.
The stock tickers, so long enchanted, now flickered like candles in a gale. Farmers blinked at warehouse doors swinging shut. Retailers drafted apology signs for empty shelves.The Dow Jones, once paraded like a victory float,
lost 9,000 points in a single month —
the worst single-month plunge in American history.
And above it all, the King stood grinning, deaf to the moans of the timbers,
blind to the cracks widening beneath his feet, his sycophants - Bessent and Lutnick bleated:
Markets are stronger than ever
The maths don't lie
The American Dream isn't cheap flat screens
But the House was falling.
And no decree, no slogan, no golden curtain could halt its ruin.
It was not a clean break. It was a sickening, twisting descent — like the fall of the House of Usher, not with a scream, where every stone and beam, once proud, now groaned and shifted in protest against its own betrayal and with the slow horror of inevitability.
