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

Officially, Presidents are not allowed to keep gifts given to them by foreign countries, even on state visits. Naturally he'll find a way to break that rule too.

Hardly the actual release of Alexander?

Edited. So nope, not that

It sounds completely bonkers though. How can Trump lower the price of drugs by signing an executive order? The US government doesn't manufacture drugs and is not responsible for the prices that drugs companies charge. At a bare minimum, it sounds like this would require an Act of Congress.

We have heard this all before, you’ll also note the complete lack of plans and process on how it will be done. Just a tweet to distract him getting a blatant bribe.

This is nothing.

I hope the news in the next couple of days will quell the raft of people, that called him a warmonger, far from it ,they will have to pick something else to moan about.

What he can possibly do, I think, is to say that the US government and its agencies will not pay more for pharmaceuticals than is paid by overseas governments. Despite the largely private nature of US healthcare, the US government is quite a large purchaser of pharmaceuticals, as part of the Medicare and Medicaid programs, so it does have considerable heft in the market.

Oversimplifying a bit, big pharma largely finances its research and development of new drugs with the fat profit margins that it charges in the US. The rest of the world then gets the drugs for the cost of production, plus a margin.

If the US pays the same price as the rest of the world, how is big pharma going to finance research and development of new drugs?

So, if Trump does succeed here, a likely consequence is a squeeze on research and development of new drugs. Leaving asid the long-term consequences for global health if pharmaceutical research and innovation is slowed down, much of the R&D work is in fact done in the US, so US pharma operations are the ones most likely to be adversely affected.

Calling for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and threatening to use Greenland would tend to do that...

Once again, this sounds like it can't actually do anything.... I'm assuming you will never discuss this again if it's unsuccessful.

Mod warning:

Post deleted and next time you attempt an attack to another poster it will be a ban.

Thank you.

US-China taariffs agreement,

1. It's just for 90 days, so the regime of acute, investment-destroying uncertainty continues
2. At 30%, US tariffs will still be very high by historical standards and hugely damaging. The 145% stuff was more like a total trade embargo
3. A marvellous headline on the BBC website: "US and China reach agreement to slash tariffs by 115%" . That would imply negative tariffs. I know what they meant to say, but this innumeracy is revealing.

Turns out Trump had no cards and had to fold

I can only imagine the next-level spying tech the Qataris are going to load that plane up with.

Also, what is it called when a government directly interferes in the free market? Oh yeah, Socialism. Donny the Trot, eh?

The Airforce One planes are from the early 90s, they needed replacing anyway but from what I read the delivery time of a new jet from Boeing was years away and the Americans were unwilling to buy a non American plane off Airbus. They've been in the market for a suitable used Boeing for a while.

Both sides will decrease their tariffs by 115% for 90 days. The Swiss talks were designed to save face for Trump. The only other option for him was to capitulate to 25% unilaterally. He had no choice but to do this anyway if China had not agreed to talks because of severe internal economic pressure.

This agreement will take it to US charging 25% and the Chinese charging 10%. In other words, we are back to where we were before Trump initiated this Trade war a few months ago. The Trump administration has achieved nothing in their stated goals. Today will be fun because we know Trump is going to go on record to say this is exactly what he wanted to achieve and he has won. But it's a total capitulation. He rushed these tariffs through because it was a "national emergency". Is it not a national emergency anymore?