What They Call Strategy Is Just a Mask for Cowardice
Governance without compass, compassion, or consequence
By: Dino Alonso
There is a peculiar kind of cruelty in how the powerful play with the lives of the people they are meant to serve.
They do not kill with blades. They kill with indifference in briefings and smirks on trading floors. They call it policy. They call it national interest. But it is neither. It is chaos masquerading as command. It is gamesmanship where there should be governance.
This administration—so obsessed with optics, so allergic to truth—tells the American people that the tariffs that could gut their wallets are temporary. Tactical. Necessary. As though suffering should be comforted by a calendar.
They say they are bringing jobs home, but offer no blueprint for the house. They declare war on foreign goods while kneecapping domestic producers with uncertainty. Today the tariffs apply. Tomorrow, maybe not. Next week, again. This is not a strategy. This is whiplash as national policy.
Elizabeth Warren called it a “red light, green light” game. But games imply rules. This is caprice weaponized—power exercised without discipline, without foresight, and most damning of all, without accountability.
And what does that reveal?
It reveals the truth they do not speak at press conferences:
That this so-called economic nationalism is not about lifting the worker.
It is about controlling the headlines.
That this trade war is not a plan.
It is a performance—with no script, no ending, and no conscience.
The President does not govern. He provokes. He pokes at nerves, markets, and allies, hoping the noise will pass for leadership. Meanwhile, the real cost is paid by people who don't get exemptions, who can’t hedge risk, who can't wait for a presidential mood swing to decide the price of their groceries or insulin.
And the officials who carry out this policy—who sit in well-lit rooms and speak in practiced tones of temporary relief—know better. That is what makes it vile. They understand that instability is not a tool for growth, but a slow poison. They know the small business owner cannot plan a year in advance while policy is changed at the speed of a news cycle.
They know. But they speak anyway.
Because to speak plainly would mean to admit the truth:
That this administration governs not for the governed, but for the applause.
Not for the future, but for the flicker of stock tickers in the moment after a tweet.
“Not everything that is faced can be changed,” I once said, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
But how do you change a government that refuses to face itself?
This isn’t about tariffs. It never was.
This is about a country being taught—quietly, dangerously—that truth is whatever a man in a suit says it is today.
That markets are more sacred than people.
That policy is a weapon, not a covenant.
And if we do not resist this—if we do not call it what it is—then the next exemption will be for truth itself.
And the people will be left with nothing but silence—and the ruins of a democracy that once knew how to mean what it said.