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

trump supports woke pope?

trump always supported the woke pope....

He's just doing what he always said he was going to do and has always done.

Trump did? When did he do that?

If somebody survives any war, Trump would be last person on the planet that deserves to be thanked or praised for it.

All Trump has done in the last 100 days is emboldened Putin and Netanyahu.

…And turned Ukraine upside down to shake down any loose change it had.

Always a tweet

He shouldn't be allowed an antibiotic as they cause autism too. It's for his own good

On this EO about Pharma prices.

1st, yet again an EO. No law, Congress not involved.

2nd, a point I saw made elsewhere is that there is nothing in the EO about consumer prices. So what happens between the distributer, pharmacy, hospital etc and the end consumer?

There is nothing in the EO about it.

So really simple to get around. Pharmaceutical company drops price from $100 to $10. But instead of selling to a distributor it creates a new warehouse company to buy at $10 and sell to the original distributor for $100.

This is, as usual with Trump, nothing more than a PR stunt.

Weirdly despite all the messing, chaos and fear, the Dow Jones index has recovered. It's up 0.04% since start of year. It's also up 7.55% year on year. I did not expect that. I thought confidence would be shattered for a long time.

In global terms, for anyone outside the US, it's still well down. The Dow is calculated from stock prices quoted in USD, and the USD index (measures the USD against a weighted basket of currencies) is still down 7% or 8% since start of year.

There can be a lot of confidence taken from fact the market put manners on trump in very short order. There will be plenty of theatrics over the next 90 days or whatever pretending to have changed the world order, but it seems highly unlikely Trump will be brave enough to try anything tariff related again having seen what happen last month.

With his big economic implosion neutered, we now appear back to the status quo…a republican administration with the crazy put back in the straight jacket. Markets like that.

He’s a few months in but already feeling a bit like a lame duck. Anything he does either never happens at all or gets reversed within days…just 3.5 more years..

No offence, but yiz are too glib for my taste.

Where we are now is that the US has near-universal tariffs of 10% on imports of everything from everywhere, except imports from China for which there is a 30% tariff. That give the US a trade-weighted average tariff of about 13%, which is four to five times higher that its trade-weighted average tariff before Stupid Thursday. Before all this drama that would have been seen as wildly protectionist and massively economically destructive. This is the highest US average tariff since the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which basically gave the world the Great Depression.

Plus, we are still uncertain as to what will happen in 90 days' time. Arguably the uncertainty level has gone up, not down. "Trump would never be so stupid as to do the exact thing that Trump has already done" is not an argument that I find particularly compelling.

It's good news that, this time, Trump has decided not to drive off the cliff and has contented himself with just driving into a ditch instead. But if you think rationality has returned to the US policy process, and the days of being governed by ignorance, malice and whim are over, I think you may be disappointed.

It's almost as if they're a stupid people.

Absolutely. There’s almost a complete correlation between people who use the work “woke” and absolute bellends.

I have no doubt that the US will continue to governed by ignorance, malice and whim. And I have no doubt Trump will inflict incredible social damage and economic damage (in certain areas).

But from a purely global market perspective, the base case that has been established now is, above all else, Trump will roll over on his most core policies if the market doesn’t like them. He needs to be popular too much, and Americans hate falling markets.

In terms of the current tariff levels. Either the market thinks they can be handled…and if they can’t…and economic cracks start to appear…he’ll just roll over on them too. Thats why US markets are back where they are. They just don’t believe Donald Trump anymore - who does.

Of course uncertainty exists, it always will, but it seems unlikely that there will be anything but de-escalation from this point. He’s clearly in climb down with maximum face saving mode now.

id love to see some future dem admin stop him from using that jet, but the cnut will probably get away with it!

They've just broken a construction record by putting up an apartment block in 28 hours.