Donald Trump the Megathread part II - mod warnings in OP, Updated 18/03/25

Too late. The damage will have been done. Like the soy beans, people find other avenues and don't go back. We had the same with Brexit. Necessity forced supplier to look further afield and they are probably the better for it. Britain are still losing today.

America as the world leader is done. Even it's neighbours won't bother with it in future as it's electorate are unreliable and selfish.

Good point. The idea that the US can simply reset its relations with the rest of the world and revert to 'normal' once Trump is out of office (or has checked out of this world) doesn't hold up. Also, it seems a majority of its population have gone down the right wing conservative and protectionist / isolationist rabbit hole, which would be very difficult to undo.

It's another red state easily targeted by retaliatory tariffs. It also gets worse, it's an assembly plant... All the engines are shipped in from..... Germany!

I also wonder how many just in time operations will be affected.

Remember with Brexit it turned out that when a car was manufactured the parts could be made all over the place and would only be assembled in a final place.

So part A is manufactured in the UK. It's send to the continent where it's added to parts B & C to make part D which is sent back to the UK to be added into a car.

Under Trumps new tariffs, are there situations like that where parts on a car could be taxed multiple times?

Trump crypto down almost 20% today. Ponzi alert!

And as I've said before, crashing the economy feeds into the long term goals of Trump's political backers.

Of course, this sounds extraordinarily counter-intuitive. Why the fk would any government deliberately crash their own economy? Won't they be sent packing by an angry electorate? In a normal sane country, yes, but millions of Americans have essentially been radicalised to vote for Trump no matter what. They'll take economic pain if it means they get to watch so-called liberals cry (i.e. anyone to the left of them on the political spectrum - a lot of ground, there).

It was an underreported story last month that one of the informal guests of honour at one of Trump's inaugural balls was none other than Curtis Yarvin. If you've not heard of Yarvin, he is credited as one of the more influential thinkers making up the neo-reactionary movement known as the 'Dark Enlightenment'. Essentially, this school of thought posits that liberal democracy has had its day and that it's time for countries in the West to move to authoritarian models of government where rulers are unaccountable and the land is divided into medieval-style city-state kingdoms, but with futuristic technology.

This is to point out that while Trump himself may be an ignorant blowhard, the people behind him are not. They have a specific idea of how the world should be. They have a plan how to get there, and their ideas are influenced by writers such as Yarvin.

I think the specific idea of crashing the US economy feeds into the theory of accelerationism where you shock the current system with enough force to bring it down and allow you to more easily implement radical policies.

I blame the democrats for all this mess ..They should have read the room come up with proper policies . Cut back on all that woke nonsense and for the average American ..

"d the US currently doesn't have much issue servicing it's debt"

I am no economist.Is there a chance that the cost of servicing the US's debt could rise with a trade war?

They might print more dollars (is the Fed in charge of that decision) but that would cause inflation (runaway inflation?-sound familiar?)

Trump thinks he is smart with his only one winner in any deal and negotiation. So his policy is to stiff everyone . That’s work if u refuse to pay a contractor as u just get another ..Only there is just one Canada

I don't think we've seen the impacts of Brexit fully, yet. Still more to come.

The impacts of Dictator Trump's policies will come sooner.

There are plenty of fascists coming behind Trump who are a hell of a lot more competent. They will be more polished than Trump but will do the same if not worse than him, just more stealthy.

The Democrats really need to get their **** together and spend the next 2 to 4 years highlighting every failing of Trump and MAGA and how it effects their pockets.

Unfortunately the need to put a back seat to what the right consider "woke". The only vectors of attack the Republicans have is economy and "woke". They masterfully took a minority issue like trans and made it the culture war of our time despite the fact that most people wouldn't meet a trans person from one end of the year to the other. In saying that the far left played right into magas hands. They overshot the landing by amplifying untenable positions like biological men in women's sports. It was like red to a bull and you can't underestimate the damage that did when though it's such a fringe position. Biden did far too much tweeting about trans issues. He was badly advised. It was not the time for soap boxing.

It indicates to me, that his advisors are people who do not particularly care if the american economy is successful.

They are a mixture of idealogues who want to bring in a libertarian system like Milei is doing in Argentina, and kleptocratic oligarchs who want to divert state resources into their own pockets, and if this means the state gets saddled with crippling debt and a recession, and civil society falls apart, it doesn't matter because they'll have accomplished their goals of gaining control over the assets of, weakened or not, still the wealthiest country on earth