Donald Trump the Megathread part II - Mod Warning added to OP 10/1/26

See, the reporter's follow up to Leavitt's bullshit should have been "Well, don't you believe that it would be of great benefit to the US consumer and that they'll understand the effect that Trump's tariffs are having on their spending?"

These bastards need to be cornered and their lies exposed and challenged every. single. time.

At the outset of orange man`s ramblings on tariffs 66% believed that the country supplying goods would pay the tariffs, which really doesn`t say much for their even basic understanding of how tariffs work. But even in spite of fox et al they now seem to be getting the message, even if 38% of them still appear to believe the country suppling will pay the tariffs.

BBC article today is an eye-opener. 90% of Republicans approve of Trumps policies so far. That is nothing of incredible given how horrendous he has been.

Good article on RTE too talking about Democrats trying to get any sort of attention when the media is just wall to wall Trump/Trump/Trump. I just took at look at NBC news front page yesterday and every story was Trump related, imagine every story on RTE focused on Martin or Michael D day in day out..

But that begs the question as to how many former Republicans are now Independents, or some other label. Of course the diminishing band of declared Republicans will support DJT.

But I'm shocked that the GOP has not lost even more support.

I teach high school students in Vietnam, who have been taught by their maths teachers etc. that the reciprocal tariff is a result of a 92% tariff Vietnam puts on goods from America.. What. Nonsense.

I did an entire lesson, with all the maths involved, to teach them how all this actually works. It is astonishing what people just believe to be true. It was the best series of lessons I've ever taught because it was relevant, blew the students' minds, and I taught it well and with obvious authority. I made it fun and got them really engaged. I threw in demand curves for the nerds and worked out the dumbass tariff rate calculation on the board for the doubters.

This insidious idea that other countries pays the tariff meant not a single student in any class got the right answer to "After the tariffs, now how much does Vietnam sell the coffee for." Every random combination of numbers was given using the number 46 apart from the arbitrary $1 that was written clearly on the board before the tariff.

They couldn't remotely grasp the idea that this was an import tax paid by Americans because it made no intuitive sense. I had even explained "import tax" at the start, knowing they would understand it, but would still be unable to link it to the tariffs. Americans are the exact same and that's why Amazon labelling the tariff is so damaging. It exposes the entire idea as being complete and utter dumbassery. It would make Americans look at the maths of it all, and like my students, realise something unintuitive was happening.

If this election was anything for the cons, it was a resounding failure on all accounts. Them getting more seats is a very distant booby prize when they were projected to win over 200 seats at one point.

And for Pierre to not even win his seat, the icing on the cake. It’s a great time to be living in Canada, and now with a stable leader.

Great result all around.

So the question is: did Leavitt come up with the words in the quote that Amazon acted in a hostile political way? Will there be an explanation from the White House Press Office that Leavitt's words should not be taken to be a White House statement that Bezos was behind the "hostile political" act against the Trump administration?

Trumps WH? They neither explain or retract.

It was said. The headlines are now how Amazon are anti-US. No need to talk about the impact of tariffs.

Who cares what the PR person says? Their job is to deflect and spout a line for their boss.

I think at some point we should stop with this moderate/former Republican thing and I think that point was last year. After Trump kerb-stomped Nikki Haley in the 2024 primary, you'd think the notion would have been decisively repudiated. They're like the political equivalent of dark matter - it's claimed they exist in large quantities, yet no empirical method can detect them. It's like this - if they dislike Trump enough to leave the party or disavow him or whatever, then they can vote for the other candidate. If not, they can fukk off.

Trump's been around so long, now, that we should have a reasonable analysis of where his political capital comes from. Yes, he may have turned off some old school Republicans, but he's also pulled in a lot of new voters. The critical thing about Trump is that he has always been able to appeal directly to the public instead of relying on the Republican party's media machine and he doesn't care about protocol, so he's not going to 'wait his turn' like every other career politician. He's no qualms or scruples about hijacking the party and this is why they can't get shot of him. There is no candidate they could put up who would be more popular. Going back to the Nikki Haley example, if such a person existed, maybe they could have defeated Trump in the primary with the aid of all these mythical disaffected/former Republicans?

If Canada became the 51st state, it would almost certainly lean democrat because Canada has a more progressive political culture than the U.S. overall. So that would be like adding another California to the electoral college in terms of population and giving the democrats a major advantage in federal elections. Just another example of Trump not taking more than 2 seconds to think of the ramifications of his proposals. It'll never happen anyway.

Looks like the tariffs are starting to hit now.

It will be interesting watching MAGA react.

He has to be on something, no one could possibly go on like that normally, even the supporters in the background are losing the will to live.