Axes, Taxes, & the Trap — Trump in the Age of Usury
President Trump told the country this week that tariffs might soon generate enough revenue to abolish federal income taxes altogether.
No more April 15th?
No more IRS?
Just tariffs–chop chop chopping like a pair of scissors–to slice away the debt and refund the very people being robbed in the first place.
Trump told reporters in a Cabinet meeting that “at some point in the not too distant future you won’t even have income tax to pay” due to revenue produced by his administration’s tariffs.
“Whether you get rid of it or just keep it around for fun or have it really low, much lower than it is now, but you won’t be paying income tax,” Trump said.
The president did not elaborate on the details of eliminating income taxes for Americans, including whether there would be an income limit. Earlier in the Cabinet meeting, the president stated that the government is “going to be giving back refunds out of the tariffs because we’re taking in literally trillions of dollars” and asserted that the national debt will also be reduced.
Do we believe it?
Modernism has taught Americans to crave deliverance without discipline, political salvation without personal conversion. Even if we enter the illusion and base a discussion of this on the false premise that politics can fix the ancient and entrenched evil of usury–even if we do all of that–we are still left with the fact that Trump has been running his mouth about this for a long time. We’ve had it covered perhaps more on a historical and spiritual level than even a political, hitting every nuance superficially to help paint an ever-sharpening picture:
Trump, Taxes, and the Exodus We Need (June 2025)
He Told Us in 2011 (April 2025)
LET IT RISE: Trump’s Tariff War Isn’t Just Economic Strategy—It’s an Exorcism -Parts I & II- (April 2025)
G Edward Griffin Talks ‘The Creature From Jekyll Island’ (March 2025)
Modern America and the Ancient War Against Financial Enslavement (March 2025)
On Usury and Other Dishonest Profits: An Increasingly Relevant 1745 Papal Encyclical (Feb 2025)
USAID, the Sovereign Wealth Fund, and the Emergence of Trump’s Pain (Feb 2025)
Trump, Trudeau, and Tariffs–Too Good to Be Good? (Feb 2025)
Trump’s ‘Unserious Stuff’ Recalls SCOTUS 1895 Ruling, and Some Other Things… (June 2024)
Read all of that? Probably not, I understand. But woven through all of it is the prime contagion of Modernism–the belief that man can redesign reality itself, rewrite the moral law, and bend the world to his appetites without consequence. We have to grasp is that taxes on a people are not, at their root, an economic or political thing–they are spiritual, indeed religious.
Trump’s pitch (again) is compelling. Once upon a time before he was elected I was calling these “limited hangouts,” where lightning rod topics resurfaced from time to time to win a whole new batch of Americans into the ongoing project of awakening.
Practicing this mind discipline myself has led me straight to a deeper understanding of my faith and a more repentant, sincere love for the person of God. That I can testify to. But there is a problem with the continual putting off of true change and true justice we continue to witness in politics, particularly when promises like the child trafficking issue have not been fulfilled.
Maybe it’s the cynicism of a writer who stuck with Trump even during the DeSantis excitement, hoping he would do for everyone what he did for me–teach me how to locate the enemy–only to start implying here and there, through the demands of my own Catholic faith, that Trump himself might be one of them.
Trump’s pitch and politics is older than American fantasy, the la-la land of freedom without repentance, prosperity without the sacrifice of the Cross, reform without conversion.
The Golden Age without the holy pickaxe to mine it.
The Issue Goes Deeper
America’s financial crisis doesn’t begin with income tax. It begins with what one Catholic commentator calls one of the three heads of the unholy trinity: usury. Not the honest creation of wealth, but its inversion–the slow replacement of productive God-fearing work with materialistic, debt-based profit; the trading of honest labor for a false leverage, the substitution of justice with wicked financial schemes designed to extract from the many for the comfort of the few you will never see on one of those screens.
And that is how they fund all their wars and psyops on people distracted by things like Lane Kiffin and LSU (guilty).
The Catholic Church has warned about this from the time of Christ. It is why he ran through the temple with a whip as he did. It is why the Herodians and Pharisees tried to trap him with the question of the Caesar coin. Simply put, money is used by evil people to enslave us–and they’ve done it since time immemorial.
Benedict XIV’s Vix Pervenit condemned any profit whatsoever extracted merely from the passage of time, warning that such gain–untethered from honest labor or production–would corrode nations and dehumanize entire populations. Modern, Godless America treats that warning the way it treats most things ancient and Catholic: as a relic to ignore until it becomes prophecy.
Or they’ve never even heard of it.
I’m not casting stones at Protestants. Most self-professing Catholics are just as guilty.
Here’s Benedict XIV:
I. The nature of the sin called usury has its proper place and origin in a loan contract. This financial contract between consenting parties demands, by its very nature, that one return to another only as much as he has received. The sin rests on the fact that sometimes the creditor desires more than he has given. Therefore he contends some gain is owed him beyond that which he loaned, but any gain which exceeds the amount he gave is illicit and usurious.
Here we are. Prophecy and warning are now the news cycle.
Debt has become the vacuum left by unholy offering after unholy offering. Interest payments are the incense. And the political class–on both sides of the controlled dialectic–are the priesthood of a counterfeit religion that offers the devotions of spending, printing, borrowing, pretending.
Here is an example of such pretending, one I saw right before press time. It is classic Hegelian Dialectic, something else I’ve covered at length in this space. The classic “create a problem for the people to fear for the precise reason of riding in on a white horse to solve it”–for the good of the people, of course:
In other words, when they engage is said surveillance to save us from the radicalized, guess who else they’ll be surveilling?
Not to mention the money it’s going to take…
We’ve seen this plotpoint already with 9/11 and the Patriot Act.
Trump’s tariffs and income tax talk may well be strategically brilliant, particularly for Americans’ well-being, as I have absolutely prayed for before, documented in the above list of articles. It all may offer breathing room from the enslavement. But tariffs and axes to taxes cannot heal a nation and a people committed to–not naming it for what it is–financial enslavement as its operating system. The exorcism I spoke of in two of the listed articles needs our cooperation. Trump’s words and maybe-fixes cannot uproot a culture convinced that endless debt is a normal state of existence. They cannot restore the moral imagination required to distinguish between legitimate profit and parasitic profit.
They certainly cannot free a people who refuse to recognize that Modernism–the great dissolver of order, hierarchy, limits, and meaning–reconstituted our economic life long before it remarrowed our liturgy, our schools, our politics, even the bones of the Church itself. Modernism taught America to confuse desire with rights, consumption with freedom, growth with goodness. Usury was perhaps the bloodstream Modernism needed–the electric infusion that made the illusion feel sustainable–and the Great American Pursuit appear right–perhaps even ordained.
I have debt. I am raising my hand, my friends, not pointing the finger.
So yes, Mr Trump and Republicans, abolish the income tax if you can.
But don’t pretend that solves the real problem. And don’t pretend all of this may not just be the latest in a long line of narrative plot points intended to “save us.”
RELATED: Pius X’s Acerbo Nimis & Occupied America’s Assault on Truth
Final Word
A nation that won’t confront the spiritual architecture of its economy–an economy built on the harvesting of human insecurity–will never be free. Tariff math might change the surface, but only the repentance spoken of by the Jonases and Joels of the Old Testament can change the foundation. Trump, for all his frighteningly spot-on instincts, is still trying to fix the symptoms while avoiding the disease: a moral order inverted, a financial system designed to enslave, a right-left political dialectic that keeps the public fighting over the rate of extraction rather than the existence of an extractor at all.
And the reason it’s frightening is that it is quite possible he is a pivotal component of the whole thing. It is quite possible that his is the false hope always necessary in true, wicked manipulation.
America won’t be saved by Trump or economics or politics.
Not while Modernism or Progressivism or Liberalism or whatever you want to call it still supplies the script–teaching a nation to worship desire and feelings, to kneel before debt and dopamine hits, and mistake license to think whatever we want for liberty.
If America is to be saved at all–if she is to remember what freedom even means–it will come only by returning to the truth and beauty of Christendom, what Old Spain tried to establish in New, that older civilization which understood, long before this land existed, and despite its many sinners falling time and time again, what happens when a people surrender themselves to interest instead of virtue. Old Europe was not dismantled by accident or because of some rise out of darkness; it was dismantled because it testified to another economy entirely–an economy of order, hierarchy, sacrifice, and justice–and its ruins now stand as warnings carved in stone.
It was only when they shook hands with the same enemies America faces today that they found themselves in trouble.
Modern history is all too willing to remind us of that.
In the end, the contest before us is not between parties or personalities but between two incompatible visions of human life: one that treats the person as collateral, one that treats the person as an image of God. This is today’s face of Genesis 3:15. Tariffs and axes to taxes may rearrange the numbers, but they cannot mend a moral architecture built on extraction, exploitation, and engineered dependence. A nation can delay judgment, but it cannot escape the consequences of the gods it chooses to serve.
We need that exorcism, that exodus from Egypt.
Until then, every reform is a stay of execution–not a cure.
