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

In my opinion, other trading blocks need to make a stand against the stupidity and ignorance of this Trump administration. If that involves creating closer trade with the likes of China, then so be it. It's not the Europeans that created this mess. Trump needs to be humiliated because it's the only currency that his GOP can/will understand. Total and utter humiliation.

Doubt people are "celebrating" (what is to "celebrate" about any of this lunacy for a sane non Trump supporting person?) but forgetting about the tariffs, there are headspinning foreign policy shifts in US relations with Europe going on under Trump. Maybe Americans don't care about it or appreciate it, but I think it is to the front of a lot of minds over this side of the ocean.

They could well become a hostile power quite similar to China, (or even Russia being very pessimistic), but one with hooks dug extremely well in, and large amount of political/economic/military control over all of us. The policy shift looks permanent too for the Republicans, when you see the contempt, almost hatred for Europe and the EU in Trump's cabinet and of course from Musk (i.e. it is far from just Trump).

Pizzacakecomic has some good summations of the idiocy of MAGA.

Possibly. I can imagine the effect Trump's tariffs had on US Pharma stocks and shares, at both national and international levels.

That is an awful lot of money the US government is extracting from consumers and businesses through import taxes while at the same time cutting back on investment in public services and infrastructure. Didn't they have a tea party in Boston over something like this a few hundred years ago?

Is this a real clip?? It's not a AI deep fake?

The guy is bragging about deliberately crashing the global stock market, costing trillions in lost investments to pension funds, college funds, just so he can personally earn 2 billion dollars (plus plus plus)

This is the logic of the disaster capitalists. Crash the global economy, cause a decades long recession and mass poverty that affect millions and drop the value of the economy by trillions, just so they can make a few hundred billion extra for themselves.

Is the American education system that bad where they don't even know what a tariff is or is it just another case of selective amnesia to put the square peg of Trump's baseless proclamations into the round hole of reality?

I'm guessing it's a mix since Trump's opponents all seem to know what a tariff is and how it works and I don't think there is a total 1:1 incidence of being badly educated and being a Trump supporters, though he does love the poorly educated people also.

But it's amazing - I don't recall him even trying to offer an explanation on how he planned to impose tariffs on the importer rather than domestic consumers. It was only when the reality of tariffs was too much to ignore that he said it'd be a little painful for a time.

This week, we have seen trillions 'lost' from the value of global stock markets.

What we’ve just witnessed isn’t a mysterious vanishing act of wealth. It’s a massive, predictable transfer of value — out of pension funds, mutual funds, and retail investors’ portfolios, and straight into the hands of private hedge funds, high-net-worth individuals, and the politically connected.

The vast majority of people don't own any stocks or trade them personally, if you own stocks and shares, you likely own them through a managed fund, one that is regulated to only take on medium to low risk investments, which exclude short selling of banks, currencies and triple a rated treasuries.

Crashes don’t destroy wealth. Every asset is owned by someone, every debt is owed by someone. When the stock market crashes, everyone who lost money in the crash, lost that money to someone else.

Who got the trillions of dollars that were wiped out of the stock market this week?

A lot of it has genuinely vanished. It was paper wealth.

The stock market goes down for 2 broad reasons:

1. Stocks are sold and money kept in other assets instead, gold, bonds, cash etc

2. Stocks value decreases because there is less demand

Essentially the 'price' a stock is at is the price buyers are willing to pay.

When a downturn happens, its both. Money is taken out but a lot of the value is vanished because of the price people are willing to buy

So if $3trillion is wiped out, a full $3trillion hasn't physically gone somewhere else.

Insert South Park meme - aaaaand it's gone

Trump is a failed businessman and a former reality TV spoofer. How anyone thinks this obvious chancer could be some sort of economic genius and global trade visionary is anyone's guess. He talks in simplistic soundbites, but it is all economic nonsense.

He has surrounded himself with fawning sycophants for a reason.

To be fair, they have enough donkeys so I don't see how #16 is a problem

Any chance they could do like what the Portuguese did with Salazar in his later years, keep him locked up in Mar a Lago and let him pretend to be president without any negative outcomes and put an actual adult in charge?

He managed to bankrupt casinos, which really takes some doing. It takes a special kind of business genius to manage that. And now all of a sudden he's an economic/business genius according to MAGA. I just cannot fathom how people can believe the sh*t that these people are shovelling.

Trump might have no plan.

But the fu*kers behind him do…and it ain't pretty.