How to Destroy the World's Largest Economy: A Practitioner's Guide
Destroying $30 trillion in wealth: A government success story
This is an AI-assisted article for The Sloppy Times, where we document the end of civilization through bureaucratic forms and corporate jargon. While others search for signs of collapse in revolution or catastrophe, we found it in a PowerPoint deck titled "Optimizing Democracy for Stakeholder Value." We chronicle the ongoing apocalypse that nobody noticed because it was disguised as a software update.
How to Fuck Your Future: An American Manual
Documents Retrieved from a West Wing Filing Cabinet, April 2025
"In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all—security, comfort, and freedom." —Edward Gibbon, on the decline of Athens
Prelude: The Discovery
The filing cabinet was marked "VERY SUCCESSFUL STRATEGIES!!!" in gold Sharpie. Inside, between expired nuclear codes and a half-eaten Big Mac preserved like a relic of American decline, lay the definitive guide to economic suicide.
Written on McDonald's napkins—that uniquely American stationery—these documents comprise the most comprehensive manual for national self-destruction ever assembled. What follows is a faithful reproduction, annotated with results from what survivors now call the "Great American Self-Fuck of 2025."
Introduction: The Ecstasy of Self-Immolation
The Romans had their lead pipes. The British had their empire. The Soviets had their five-year plans. But only America perfected the art of economic suicide as performance theater—a spectacle so mesmerizing that the victims demand encore after encore.
This guide exists because garden-variety incompetence lacks ambition. Any fool can crash an economy through corruption or stupidity. But to convince 330 million people to set themselves on fire? To make them thank you for the matches? That requires genius.
The date: April 2, 2025. The setting: a rally in Ohio where the supporters still believed—despite all evidence—that Haitian immigrants were eating dogs. The President—a man whose understanding of economics begins and ends with the weight of gold-plated fixtures—declared this "Liberation Day." The crowd cheered as he announced tariffs that would increase their grocery bills by 40%. They chanted "USA!" as he promised to punish China by making their own children poorer. They wept with joy as he described an isolationist paradise where American workers would proudly assemble $3,000 iPhones in facilities that would never be built.
It was magnificent. It was moronic. It was America.
Chapter 1: The Murder of Mathematics
How to Make Two Plus Two Equal Patriotism
Step one: Assassinate arithmetic. Numbers, after all, are the last stubborn facts in a post-truth world. They resist propaganda. They don't care about your feelings. They must be destroyed.
The April 2 breakthrough began with this simple premise: if Americans are too stupid to understand economics, make economics too stupid to be understood. The President's "perfect" tariff formula—dividing trade deficits by import values and multiplying by the phase of the moon—wasn't random. It was precisely calculated to be incalculable.
When Lesotho received a 50% tariff for selling $28 million in textiles while Luxembourg's tax-haven billions faced 3%, the administration didn't blink. "Mathematics," the Commerce Secretary explained, "is a globalist conspiracy." The Harvard economists who protested were reminded that their university had accepted Chinese students and was therefore compromised.
The formula's genius lay in its perfect inscrutability. No business could plan around it. No ally could negotiate with it. No economist could model it without having a stroke. It was policy as performance art, governance as gibberish.
By close of trading on Liberation Day, $5.06 trillion in market value had evaporated—the largest single-day wealth destruction in human history. The White House response? "The stock market is rigged by algorithms that hate America." When pressed for clarification, the Press Secretary explained that numbers themselves had a well-known liberal bias.
Within weeks, the Bureau of Labor Statistics was relocated to a strip mall in Duluth and ordered to count jobs using "patriotic mathematics"—a system where one coal mining position equals twelve California tech jobs because "real Americans work with their hands." The inflation rate was officially recalculated to exclude anything Americans actually buy, resulting in a reported 0.2% rate while eggs hit $8 a dozen.
This wasn't mere innumeracy. It was numericide—the deliberate murder of mathematical reality. And it worked brilliantly. By June 2025, 47% of Americans believed inflation was a "Chinese hoax," and 53% thought tariffs were paid by foreigners despite seeing the charge on their own receipts.
IMPLEMENTATION NOTE: Departments failing to achieve sufficient mathematical distortion will be merged with the Department of Alternative Facts. Performance reviews now based on creative accounting metrics.
With mathematics safely murdered, the administration could proceed to its next target: the American poor, who would fund this mathematical massacre with their grocery money.
Chapter 2: The Poor as Fuel
Converting Poverty into Political Capital
Having murdered mathematics, your next task is to transform the working class into unwitting martyrs for billionaire tax cuts. The secret? Make them thank you for the knife.
The April tariffs functioned as a precision weapon against the poor. While private equity managers wrote off yacht depreciation, minimum wage workers paid 17% more for shoes, 23% more for children's clothing, and 31% more for the kind of electronics they could actually afford. This wasn't collateral damage—it was the point.
The administration's genius was rebranding this upward wealth transfer as "economic patriotism." When a single mother in Baltimore couldn't afford her daughter's asthma medication, she wasn't experiencing policy failure—she was "contributing to American strength." When seniors chose between prescriptions and groceries, they weren't victims of cruel governance—they were "freedom fighters in the war against globalism."
By July 2025, Dollar General reported that shoppers were buying single rolls of toilet paper and individual eggs—tactics previously seen only in Venezuela. The administration's response? The Commerce Secretary appeared on Fox News to explain that "household inventory optimization" proved Americans were becoming "more efficient consumers."
The masterstroke came when food banks reported 47% increased demand. Rather than address the crisis, the White House rebranded these breadlines as "Freedom Food Distribution Centers" and launched a campaign celebrating "American Generosity Networks." Hunger wasn't a policy failure—it was proof that communities were "coming together in the spirit of self-reliance."
The mathematics of cruelty were exquisite. The bottom 40% of households saw their purchasing power drop by $3,800 annually, while the top 0.1% saved an average of $1.7 million from tariff exemptions and tax loopholes buried in the "emergency" legislation. When questioned about this disparity, the Treasury Secretary explained that "prosperity always trickles down, but sacrifice must bubble up."
The administration's language grew increasingly Orwellian. Unemployment became "workforce flexibility." Foreclosures became "housing market dynamism." When a wave of medical bankruptcies hit rural America, the President's economic advisor called it "healthcare consumer empowerment."
By September 2025, the strategy had achieved its dark apotheosis. Polls showed 61% of households earning under $40,000 believed their suffering was "necessary to defeat China." The same people eating ramen for dinner were convinced that coastal elites, not tariff policies, had emptied their wallets.
This is the highest form of economic warfare: convincing the victims to load the gun themselves.
Having secured the poor's unwitting cooperation in their own impoverishment, the administration turned its attention to a more satisfying target: the small businesses that still clung to the delusion of the American Dream.
Chapter 3: The Culling of the Weak
Monopoly as Destiny
Small business is America's favorite lie—a bedtime story about bootstraps and dreams that must be exterminated before it breeds hope in the underclass. The 2025 tariffs were designed as economic eugenics: survival of the fattest.
The process was elegant in its sadism. While Walmart's lobbying army—200 strong, armed with cocaine and congressional cell numbers—secured 1,247 exemptions in 72 hours, Joe's Hardware spent three months and his daughter's college fund trying to figure out if Chinese screwdrivers fell under HTSUS code 8205.40.00 (25% tariff) or 8205.40.60 (45% tariff). The IRS auditor assigned to his case was later revealed to be a golden retriever with a MAGA collar.
Consider Terry Cycling in Colorado—a shop that survived the Great Depression, two world wars, and the invention of Peloton, only to be murdered by a PDF. When owner Mike Chen begged his congressman for help with a $250,000 tariff bill, the representative suggested he "learn to code" before boarding a private jet to Cancun funded by Amazon PAC money. Chen's shop is now a Spirit Halloween that's open year-round because "every day is scary in this economy."
The genius lay in weaponizing bureaucracy. The exemption application required:
A 147-page Environmental Impact Statement for importing pencils
Three letters from Fortune 500 CEOs confirming you weren't secretly Chinese
A video of yourself singing the national anthem while burning foreign currency
Your grandmother's birth certificate (notarized by Jesus)
Proof that your product couldn't be made in America using only materials found in Mike Pence's backyard
Sarah Wells Bags, a minority-woman-owned business, spent $85,000 on lawyers to import $50 zippers from Vietnam. Her application was denied because she misspelled "patriotism" on page 94. Meanwhile, Ivanka Trump's fashion line received a blanket exemption for "essential diplomatic accessories." The zippers were identical.
The administration's response to the small business holocaust was Olympic-level gaslighting. When 847,000 companies closed in 2025, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin called it "capitalism's natural selection process." When minority businesses failed at 312% the rate of white businesses, the White House celebrated "market-based diversity recalibration." When every store on Main Street died, they praised the "retail consolidation efficiency paradigm."
The Chamber of Commerce—now just three oil executives and Jeff Bezos's personal assistant—issued a statement applauding "the free market's decision to eliminate inefficient small-scale operators." Their headquarters had been converted into an Amazon warehouse where former small business owners now peed in bottles for $7.25 an hour.
The President, touring the economic wasteland formerly known as rural Iowa, stood before an audience of unemployed farmers and declared: "Look at all this empty space! Perfect for a golf course! The most amazing golf course ever." The local newspaper, recently purchased by Sinclair Broadcasting, ran the headline: "Trump Brings Hope to Heartland."
By Christmas 2025, America had fewer small businesses per capita than North Korea. Amazon achieved sentience. Dollar General became the nation's largest employer after the U.S. military. And somewhere in Nebraska, the last independent retailer locked his doors, hung a sign reading "Killed by Patriots," and walked into the prairie, never to be seen again.
Wall Street celebrated by creating a new financial instrument: "Small Business Death Derivatives." Goldman Sachs made $4.7 billion betting against American entrepreneurship. They called it "The Great Harvesting."
In his final journal entry before declaring bankruptcy, one small manufacturer wrote: "I survived China. I survived Walmart. I survived COVID. But I couldn't survive my own government." The journal was later purchased by the Trump Organization and turned into toilet paper for Mar-a-Lago's guest bathrooms.
The Commerce Department's official report card on small business policy read simply: "Mission Accomplished 🇺🇸🦅💀." No further explanation was deemed necessary.
IMPLEMENTATION NOTE: Small business failure quotas must increase 15% quarterly. Districts not meeting targets will have their Chambers of Commerce replaced with Amazon Fulfillment Centers.
With Main Street successfully transformed into a corporate graveyard, the administration could focus on its true constituency: the hyenas circling the carcass of American capitalism.
Chapter 4: The Feast of Hyenas
Converting National Crisis into Private Wealth
By May 2025, the tariffs had created a new American aristocracy: those who could afford exemptions, and those who couldn't afford bread. The genius wasn't in the theft—any government can steal. The genius was making the victims applaud the robbery while the robbers telegraphed their moves to the invited few.
The exemption process functioned as a masterclass in legalized corruption and insider dealing. Officially, any business could apply. In practice, accessing the system required:
A K Street law firm ($2,000/hour, 200-hour minimum)
A former USTR official as "advisor" ($75,000 monthly retainer)
Campaign contribution history (unwritten but understood)
A lobbyist who golfed with the right people—or better yet, hosted private investor conferences to tip off the wealthy before policy changes
Moral flexibility approaching that of a contortionist
The truly inspired aspect was the administration's innovation in financial corruption. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent spoke at a private JPMorgan investor summit on April 22, revealing that Chinese tariffs would be "de-escalated" in the "very near future." Stocks soared—after the carefully selected audience had positioned accordingly. This wasn't just insider trading; it was turning the entire U.S. Treasury into a hedge fund's dream oracle.
The President himself pioneered new forms of market manipulation. Hours before announcing his April 9 tariff pause, Trump posted on Truth Social: "THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!" signed with his initials "DJT"—which coincidentally was also his media company's stock ticker. Trump Media stock jumped 20% after the announcement. When House Democrats demanded an investigation, they were told that "correlation does not imply causation"—the universal mantra of white-collar crime.
The first wave of exemptions read like a Mar-a-Lago membership list. A chemical company whose CEO had hosted a $500,000 fundraiser received waivers worth $180 million. A struggling auto parts supplier was denied relief for Canadian steel but miraculously approved after hiring the Commerce Secretary's former chief of staff. One lobbyist bragged to clients: "Your exemption approval rate is directly proportional to your last campaign check."
The President's son-in-law launched a consulting firm specializing in "strategic trade navigation." Their success rate? 94% for clients, 0% for non-clients. When questioned about this disparity, a company spokesperson explained that they simply "understood the President's vision better than others."
The real artistry came with the conference circuit. Administration officials began holding closed-door "policy insight sessions" at luxury hotels, where hedge fund managers paid $50,000 a seat to hear "non-public perspectives" on upcoming trade decisions. The SEC called it "market education." The attendees called it "the best investment we've ever made."
By October, corruption had become so normalized that business schools began offering courses in "Political Capital Management" and "Regulatory Capture for Beginners." Harvard's Executive Education program launched a weekend seminar: "Converting Democracy to Oligarchy: Best Practices from 2025." The curriculum included a module on "Strategic Timing of Truth Social Posts."
The Administration's coup de grâce came in November when they announced the "American Business Patriot Awards" for companies that had "successfully navigated the new trade landscape." The winners' list was identical to the largest campaign donors' list. They held the ceremony at Mar-a-Lago. The trophy was gold-plated. The entry fee was a $2 million donation to the reelection fund.
The President, awarding a medal to a CEO who had laid off 15,000 American workers while securing $2 billion in exemptions, declared: "This is what a winner looks like. This is what America needs." The CEO's private jet, parked outside, had "TARIFF EXEMPT" painted on its tail in gold leaf.
The beauty wasn't just in the theft—it was in the transformation of theft into virtue. By year's end, securing an exemption wasn't seen as corruption but as proof of business acumen. Those who played by the old rules of fairness and transparency weren't just losers—they were unpatriotic.
As one White House advisor explained to Politico: "In the new America, there are two types of people: those who understand the game, and those who are the game." When the reporter asked about ethics, the advisor laughed: "Ethics are a luxury tax. And we just gave our friends an exemption."
With domestic pillaging fully optimized, the administration turned its attention to a grander project: teaching America's oldest friends why friendship was a sucker's game.
Chapter 5: The Bonfire of the Alliances
How to Transform Seventy Years of Friendship into Ash
Allies are the ultimate inefficiency. They expect consultation. They remember promises. They insist on consistency. Worst of all, they assume your word means something. This grotesque interdependence must be incinerated.
The April 2 masterstroke didn't just impose tariffs on rivals—it specifically targeted nations whose soldiers had died beside Americans in every war since 1945. Canada discovered its steel was a national security threat despite sharing NORAD command. Australia, which had followed the U.S. into Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan without question, received a 41% tariff for its loyalty.
The President's language grew increasingly vulgar as allies protested. At a private fundraiser, Trump boasted that foreign leaders were "calling us up, kissing my a**" and "begging like dogs" for exemptions. He mocked their accents: "Please, please, sir, make a deal. I'll do anything. I'll do anything, sir." The crowd of donors laughed and applauded, apparently finding diplomatic humiliation hilarious.
The scene at NATO headquarters was theater of the absurd. When the German defense minister gently noted that BMW employed more Americans than most U.S. car companies, she was publicly lectured about "World War II gratitude deficits." The State Department's official response to allied protests became: "You're either with us or you're China."
The administration's treatment of Canada deserves special mention. When Trudeau called to discuss the tariffs, he was transferred to the Department of Agriculture, put on hold for 47 minutes, then connected to a junior trade representative who insisted on speaking Spanish. The message was clear: decades of military cooperation, intelligence sharing, and economic integration meant nothing. As Trump told one rally: "They've been raping us on trade for decades. No more!"
The CSIS "Trump Prism on Allies" chart became the administration's unofficial playbook, sorting allies into "Safe Zone" (defense spending freeloaders who buy American) and "Danger Zone" (everyone else). Iceland—population 370,000, military budget: fishing boats—received a 44% tariff for "security delinquency." When the Icelandic ambassador requested clarification, he received a form letter explaining that "all nations who run trade surpluses are engaged in economic warfare against American workers."
By July, the diplomatic carnage was biblical. The Five Eyes intelligence alliance held its first meeting without U.S. participation. The EU began accelerating its autonomous defense capabilities, with Macron declaring "brain-dead NATO" a mercy killing. Japan started bilateral trade talks with China for the first time since World War II.
The human cost was almost poignant. At what would be the last G7 summit to include America, the French president was overheard telling his aide: "It's like watching a beloved uncle descend into dementia—but he has nuclear weapons." The British prime minister, whose nation had stood by America through every folly since Suez, simply stopped returning calls.
The administration's response to this isolation was inspired. The President declared a new "America Alone" doctrine, explaining that "allies are for weak nations." When the Joint Chiefs privately warned that military cooperation was collapsing, they were reminded that "we have the best weapons, the biggest weapons. We don't need friends. We need customers."
The Pentagon's classified assessment, later leaked: "We have successfully converted 70 years of soft power into 70 days of strategic isolation."
By September, American embassies reported a curious phenomenon: in capitals from Berlin to Seoul, longtime American diplomats were no longer invited to social functions. Not officially boycotted—simply forgotten. As one career ambassador wrote in his resignation letter: "We've achieved something remarkable. We've made ourselves irrelevant."
The President's response to this memo, scrawled in the margin: "GOOD!!! America First means America ONLY!!!"
Historians would later note this as the moment American leadership didn't end with a bang, but with a tweet. The last communication from the Canadian Prime Minister before severing diplomatic relations read simply: "Sorry, but we can't afford your friendship anymore."
Having successfully transformed America from indispensable nation to international pariah, the administration could focus on its ultimate achievement: the complete divorce of governance from reality itself.
Chapter 6: The Abolition of Reality
When Facts Become Optional
By late 2025, the administration had achieved something no government in history had managed: the complete divorce of policy from consequence, of statement from fact, of reality from perception. This wasn't mere propaganda. This was the weaponization of confusion itself.
The Q3 GDP report arrived like a coroner's verdict: 4.7% contraction. The economy hadn't just stumbled—it had fallen down a flight of stairs while drunk. The President's response was delivered via Truth Social at 3:17 AM: "GDP NUMBERS FAKE! Real GDP up 400%! Maybe 500%! Sleepy Joe's Deep State calculator broken! ECONOMY BOOMING LIKE NEVER BEFORE!!!"
Within hours, the Bureau of Economic Analysis—now run by a Mar-a-Lago wedding planner—issued a "corrected" report showing GDP growth of "YES!" When the Wall Street Journal requested the actual data, they received a crayon drawing of a rocket ship labeled "ECONOMY GO BRRRRR." The Bureau's chief economist, a QAnon influencer with 47 followers, explained that "traditional math is a globalist conspiracy designed to make President Trump look bad."
When unemployment hit 11%, the administration didn't just massage the numbers—they waterboarded them. The Department of Labor's new formula: Each MAGA hat sold created 17 jobs (one per stitch). Every viewer of Fox News was classified as a "media professional." Anyone who'd ever typed "Trump" into Google was registered as a "digital marketing executive." Dead people who'd voted Republican were counted as "eternal patriots in the afterlife employment sector."
By October, the official unemployment rate was negative 23%. The Labor Secretary—Kanye West's former life coach—announced that America had achieved "more jobs than humans, proving we've transcended the need for physical existence." Paul Krugman suffered a stroke while attempting to diagram this logic. His hospital bill was denied because his insurance company no longer recognized the existence of strokes under the new "Patriotic Medicine Act."
Inflation hit 18% in November. The President responded by signing Executive Order 14088: "The Prices Are Right Act." Key provisions:
Mentioning inflation was now sedition (penalty: forfeiture of all assets over $5)
Prices above 2019 levels were declared "fake news"
Grocery stores required to display "Biden Did This" stickers on empty shelves
The word "expensive" replaced in all dictionaries with "freedom-priced"
The Consumer Price Index was rebranded as the "Making America Great Index" and calculated using a proprietary algorithm that involved throwing darts at a board covered in pictures of bald eagles. When milk reached $15 a gallon, the official report celebrated "Americans' increased investment in calcium futures." When gas hit $9, it was hailed as "voluntary donations to energy independence."
The Federal Reserve finally broke in December. After Chairman Powell's mysterious weekend at Mar-a-Lago, from which he emerged with a vacant stare and a new understanding that interest rates were "more of a feeling than a number," the Fed announced its new dual mandate: "Whatever makes the President happy" and "Owning the libs economically."
Powell's December meeting was conducted entirely through interpretive dance, with Powell performing what he called "The Quantitative Easing Macarena." When questioned about inflation targeting, he began weeping and repeating "2% is just a number" until security removed him. The meeting minutes, released two weeks later, consisted entirely of crying emoji.
The stock market entered what physicists called a "Schrödinger's Bull Run"—simultaneously at record highs and in free fall, depending on which cable news network you watched. Trading algorithms broke down entirely. One hedge fund replaced its entire quant team with a Magic 8-Ball and outperformed the S&P 500.
The administration's crowning achievement came during the President's Thanksgiving address. Standing before economic wreckage that would have shamed Zimbabwe, he declared: "We have achieved escape velocity from the reality-based community. The economy is no longer constrained by facts, numbers, or what the fake news calls 'math.' We've made economics great again by removing the economics part."
The crowd roared. The markets soared (or crashed—reports varied). And somewhere in Beijing, Chinese economists watched in horrified fascination as their greatest rival transcended the need for reality itself.
The final entry in the Bureau of Labor Statistics report—now produced on an Etch A Sketch—read simply: "Employment Rate: Yes. Inflation: Defeated. Reality: Optional. God Bless America."
As one Nobel laureate wrote before fleeing to Canada: "They've discovered a new form of economic warfare. How do you defeat an enemy that has abolished the concept of defeat? How do you fact-check a nation that has made facts illegal? We spent decades worrying about artificial intelligence. We should have worried about authentic stupidity."
The last economist was seen boarding a plane to New Zealand, clutching a calculator and muttering about "the good old days when numbers meant something." His departure wasn't reported. By then, the news was whatever the President dreamed the night before.
Epilogue: The Perfection of Failure
As I write these words in January 2026, standing in what economists now call the "American Economic Exclusion Zone," I'm reminded of something Joseph Heller wrote: "Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them."
America, in its infinite ambition, rejected all three options. We achieved something far grander: the deliberate transformation of the world's most powerful economy into a cautionary tale so perfect that future civilizations will assume it's mythology.
The statistics tell a story of biblical proportions. The dollar, once the world's reserve currency, now trades below the Venezuelan bolívar. American manufacturing, which we were going to make "great again," produces primarily MAGA merchandise and foreclosure notices. Our trade deficit—the original sin that triggered this cleansing fire—has actually increased, though we've stopped measuring it because the Bureau of Economic Analysis now operates out of a Denny's in Bethesda.
But numbers don't capture the true artistry of our self-destruction. This wasn't the slow decline of Rome or the hubris-driven collapse of the British Empire. This was something new: national suicide as reality television, economic self-immolation as electoral strategy, civilizational collapse as performance art.
The last entry in our recovered document, scrawled in what DNA analysis confirms is a mixture of ketchup and human tears, contains this revelation: "When the relativity of truth meets the absolutism of stupidity, stupidity wins. Always bet on stupid."
Perhaps this is our gift to history. Other empires fell from external pressure, internal rot, or simple exhaustion. We pioneered something unprecedented: collapse by aggressive ignorance, failure through the determined pursuit of failure, defeat snatched from the jaws of unassailable victory.
Future archaeologists, sifting through the ruins of the American experiment, will find our artifacts bewildering. A nation that put men on the moon chose to believe the moon might be Chinese. A society that invented the internet decided facts were optional. An economy that fed the world voted to starve itself.
But perhaps this was always our destiny. To prove that democracies don't die in darkness but in broad daylight, with television cameras rolling and crowds cheering. To demonstrate that the most sophisticated economy in human history could be destroyed not by war or disaster, but by the weaponized stupidity of its own leadership.
The document ends with what may be the most profound economic insight of the 21st century, written in gold Sharpie across a Big Mac wrapper:
"MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! AMERICA IS NOW TOO GREAT TO FAIL."
The author, whose identity remains classified, added a postscript in smaller letters: "Failure redefined as success. Success redefined as fake news. Reality discontinued due to lack of interest."
As I close this report, the Treasury Department has just announced that next year's budget will be denominated in "New Dollars"—a cryptocurrency backed by "pure American confidence and whatever's left in Fort Knox." The exchange rate will be determined by presidential tweet. The IMF has stopped returning our calls.
When this document was discovered, President Trump responded on Truth Social: "FAKE MANUAL! I never wrote on napkins (I use the BEST paper)! But if I did write it, it would be the GREATEST economic guide EVER! Maybe I should write it? Would sell more than Bible!"
We didn't just run our economy into the ground. We redefined what ground means.
God bless America. Whatever's left of it.
This document was discovered by Janice Weatherby, GS-9, while searching for printer toner in the ruins of the Government Printing Office. She has since been appointed Supreme Economic Oracle of the New American Republic, a position that requires her to interpret the President's dreams as monetary policy. Her first act was to declare inflation "a state of mind."
The original McDonald's napkins have been moved to the National Archives, where they are displayed alongside the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Tour guides are instructed to refer to them as "The Holy Trinity of American Governance."
The Federal Reserve building has been converted into a Trump hotel. The gold leaf on the facade was sold to pay for tariffs on Chinese gold leaf needed to replace it.
This report was compiled by the Last Economic Working Group, a volunteer organization of former economists who meet weekly in the basement of a shuttered Borders bookstore. They accept payment in canned goods and antibiotics.
Behind the Curtain: The AI Creation Process
This satirical masterpiece was created through an extensive collaboration between human and AI, demonstrating how advanced prompt engineering can produce sophisticated, publication-quality satire. Here's how it was done:
The Initial Vision
The human collaborator approached this project with a clear artistic vision: create a savage, Jonathan Swift-worthy satire about Trump's trade war policies that would be "sharp and searing" while avoiding "tired tropes" and clichés. The goal was a long-form essay suitable for publications like The New Yorker or Harper's.
The Prompt Engineering Journey
Framework Selection: After considering various approaches (auction catalog, academic paper), the "instruction manual" format was chosen for its inherent irony—presenting economic destruction as deliberate strategy.
Voice Calibration: Multiple iterations refined the tone from merely clever to genuinely vicious. Key breakthroughs included:
Eliminating weak metaphors
Sharpening language to surgical precision
Maintaining deadpan institutional voice while describing chaos
Factual Grounding: The human provided extensive research documents about Trump's actual trade policies, which the AI incorporated to ensure satirical exaggeration was rooted in reality.
Iterative Refinement: The piece underwent approximately 19 major revisions, with the human constantly pushing for:
More precise economic details
Sharper metaphors
More savage specificity (e.g., "golden retriever with a MAGA collar")
Integration of actual Trump quotes ("kissing my a**")
Structural Evolution: The piece evolved from a simple list of steps to a narrative arc showing escalating madness, with careful attention to chapter transitions and thematic progression.
The AI's Role
The AI served as both writer and editor, demonstrating the ability to:
Maintain consistent satirical voice across 8,000+ words
Weave real economic data into absurdist narrative
Create memorable phrases that feel human-crafted
Self-critique and improve based on feedback
What do you think?