By Prince Kapone | Weaponized Information | April 2025
Manufacturing Negotiations, Manufacturing Consent
On April 25, 2025, Donald Trump claimed in a Time Magazine interview that he had spoken with Chinese President Xi Jinping and secured “200 deals” on tariffs. Trump bragged that the United States was like a department store — he could set any price he wanted, and China would comply. There was only one problem: China’s government publicly denied that any such negotiations were taking place. No calls. No meetings. No deals. No negotiations.
This wasn’t a diplomatic misunderstanding. It was an imperial hallucination. A desperate fantasy cooked up to mask the naked reality: the United States is not winning. It is flailing.
Technofascism and the Propaganda of Strength
In technofascist regimes like Trump 2.0’s United States, truth is not a prerequisite for governance — myth is. Trump’s hallucinated negotiations serve a deeper purpose: to manufacture an illusion of omnipotence for a crumbling settler empire. This is how crisis is managed under technofascism: by weaponizing mass media, lying openly, gaslighting the working class, and scapegoating external enemies (China, migrants, the Global South) for a capitalist system in terminal decay. Trump doesn’t need real victories. He needs performative ones — because in the absence of material gains for the people, imperial fantasy must fill the void.
Hyper-Imperialism in the Pacific Theater
The U.S. war machine isn’t negotiating peace. It’s preparing new fronts. Trump’s fake trade talks are merely cover for real economic and military escalation against China. Even as Trump was boasting about phantom negotiations, the U.S. Navy was expanding joint exercises with Japan and the Philippines in the South China Sea. New economic coercion measures were being floated in Congress. Taiwan was being further militarized as a forward base for U.S. imperial containment.
Hyper-imperialism — as diagnosed by the Tricontinental Institute — isn’t about negotiation. It’s about total domination of logistics, trade, finance, and sovereignty across the globe. China’s refusal to bow is treated not as a diplomatic challenge, but as a casus belli. Thus Trump’s imaginary diplomacy covers the material preparation for imperial war.
Monopoly Capital and the Real Drivers of Conflict
Beneath the rhetoric lies the real engine of conflict: monopoly finance capital. Wall Street and its military-industrial adjuncts demand growth — new markets, cheap labor, extractive access. But under conditions of capitalist overaccumulation and environmental crisis, such growth is increasingly impossible without war, plunder, and economic strangulation.The U.S. debt crisis is spiraling. Consumer debt has crossed $19 trillion. Corporate bankruptcies are accelerating. De-dollarization movements are gathering steam across the Global South. Trump’s “trade deals” are not about prosperity. They are about temporarily masking collapse through externalized conflict. The empire does not negotiate from strength. It lashes out from weakness.
Class War and the Colonial Contradiction
While Trump invents trade victories, U.S. workers continue to be crushed under inflation, wage stagnation, healthcare collapse, and mass eviction. Meanwhile, China — labeled the “enemy” — continues investing in infrastructure, scientific research, and regional development partnerships across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The real class war isn’t between “Americans” and “Chinese.” It is between the settler-imperialist ruling class and the global working class. Trump’s lies seek to obscure this fundamental truth by redirecting working-class anger toward external scapegoats rather than internal parasites. But the contradictions are sharpening. The lies are wearing thin.
The Collapse Will Not Be Negotiated
Trump’s phantom negotiations with China are not diplomatic errors. They are symptoms of a deeper disease: the existential crisis of U.S. settler imperialism under technofascist decay. The empire cannot negotiate its way out of collapse. It can only lie, lash out, and escalate — until it is either dismantled by internal revolt or shattered by external multipolar resistance. China’s refusal to even acknowledge Trump’s fantasies is not an insult. It is a signal: the world is moving on. The gringo empire is losing its grip. And no amount of manufactured consent can change that. The task before us is clear:
Weaponize truth.
Organize resistance.
Prepare for rupture.
This report draws from Reuters, Time Magazine, Telesur, the Tricontinental Institute, official Chinese Foreign Ministry statements, and independent revolutionary analysis.
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