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

There was a guy on James O'Brien the other day who was launching a Kickstarter for a board game. The company is in the UK, but the game is made in China, and many of the potential backers are in the USA. People like that are in for a world of hurt. The demand in the USA will fall off a cliff.

Plenty of manufacturing orders were placed with Chinese companies long ago and are going to be shipped on time to get hit by the tariffs. Nobody priced any of this in when placing orders or setting retail prices. And while that's part of the risk of doing business, these costs are beyond any reasonable safety margin.

Like i said here recently - any US software / downloadable stuff you want .. maybe now is a good time to buy OR wait for the EURO value to get even better. I seem to remember a time whan €1 was about $1.40 .. will we get there again?

The euro is above 1.14, trading at its highest level in over three years. The dollar has lost 5.5% of its value against the euro since Liberation Day. That means buying European imports will now cost Americans 15.5% more. 10% for the tariffs and 5.5% due to dollar depreciation.

Not sure if y'all remember a great game called HALF-LIFE and HALF-LIVE 2 from the 90s. I could see these Overwatch Voice announcements across cities and towns happening in the US soon:

I know there is no point responding to Trump with logic, but if he can’t stop the war now, how exactly would he have prevented it in the first place ?

If you take Fox News as an example, it's like a different world if you go back and watch their output from 2008, to pick a year in the 'before time'. OK, yeah, they were still heavily biased towards the Republicans and a mouthpiece for Rupert Murdoch, but at least there was some semblance of civility or reason. John Stewart could sit across from Bill O' Reilly and have a respectful debate.

What has happened since then is that their audience became radicalised through social media where absolutely anything goes because you can be essentially anonymous, and conspiracy theories became wildly popular. Right wing news media in the states have had to echo the talking points found online because they know that if they don't, the audience will drift over to the first network that does . This is absolutely not helped by having a president who will actively tell his supporters to change the channel if one network particularly displeases him. And the networks do this because they exist solely to garner ratings and profit.

Do the anchors on those networks believe what they're saying? Probably not. Do they feel guilty? Eh, maybe. But any guilt felt they can drown out with the material pleasures that a massive salary brings.

Just reading about how apparently Trump officials contacted the Chinese to warn them against retaliatory tariffs, but they went ahead anyway. Never thought I'd say it but fair play to the Chinese. I hope they laughed down the phone while they were at it.

Oh brother!

No.

The Fox News audience because radicalised by Fox news. They did adapt or tag on to the rot they created the rot.

The type of headline/soundbite only mentality that created Twitter is a red top mindset. They were also printing absolutely fake stories about the "woke" GLC back in the 80's.

It looked better in 0i8 because Murdoch was just easing people in.

Judging by Trump's social media reaction the other day, he genuinely thought he could bully the Chinese into submission and was shocked when they instantly hit back with large tariffs of their own. He has taken on a big opponent here - looks like they are totally up for a battle with him.

Its equal parts ridiculous/terrifying

These media outlets and individual personalities have huge influence, and they're prepared to voluntarily defenestrate themselves for Trump.

I thought I saw a clip where trump said inflation was at virtually zero...

What's been happening since the rise of Facebook in the late 2000s has been a whole other level to what the likes of Fox News had been doing prior to that, and this isn't to say that what Fox News had been at that point was particularly noble, but they at last participated in some basic shared realities and ground rules. Now, they have to act like Trump is God.

Like, they would call the 2008 election for Obama without too much fuss. They didn't necessarily like it, but nor were they going to put themselves in the position of openly questioning the validity of the election result with no hard evidence and open themselves up to litigation, as happened in 2020. That's something they did in 2020 because they had to pander to insane online conspiracies about it. Fox News did, at first, try to distance itself from this in notable incidents such as cutting away from a Trump presser about the 'fraudulent' election, but they since got on board with it using some slightly more oblique language to avoid another lawsuit, ie 'election security.

In other words, they no longer set the agenda. They have to follow whatever buzz is lighting up MAGA spaces online and cravenly attempt to get ratings off it.