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

Naw. The USA priced themselves out of manufacturing 40 years ago. A weak dollar won't help US export trade in goods one iota. Services maybe but not goods.

Thought he was on a short ban and not to quote him for now(?)

It's not that easy to evade tariffs

To rent the phone to a US customer, Apple still has to bring the phone into the US. It's the importation that attracts the tariff, not the sale to the customer.

Similarly, if the phone imported doesn't belong to Apple, but is leased from an overseas entity like Foxconn. It doesn't matter who owns it; it's being imported, and it will attract a tariff, for which the importer is liable.

Same goes for the idea of importing a nearly-finished phone, and then adding one more component. The government can tariff nearly-finished phones as easily as they can tariff actually-finished phones.

Tariffs are a very old form of taxation, and smuggling is just as old. There's a reason smuggling exists; it's very difficult to avoid tariffs by any other method.

I take your point about the tariff applying only to the cost of the phone as imported to the US, and not to margins and value-added in the US. That's true for all tariffs. Nevertheless companies who want to maintain their return on capital (and that's all of them, because the share price will fall signficantly if they don't) will need to add an additional percentage to their domestic costs also in order to do that. If this proposal does go ahead the risk in the retail price of an iPhone in the US may not be a full 25%, but it will pretty certainly be more than 12.5%.

Some detail on the new powers CFTrumps admin will gain if the Senate passes the Big BS bill as is; government officials can ignore those pesky contempt citations.

" A provision in the proposed spending bill would restrict the authority of federal courts to hold government officials in contempt when they violate court orders.  Without the contempt power, judicial orders are meaningless and can be ignored."

(https://archive.ph/G8QHx)

As the gov't has been ignoring judges warnings wrt to the expulsion of immigrants who shouldn't have been expelled, the courts next step would be to cite the officials (lawyers) who ignored the rulings. Now, they won't be able to.

Your posts get more hilarious over time. The EU including Ireland are playing a blinder. As is China.

The only reason he is so angry is because nothing is going his way. He hates that the EU is so strong as a bloc and he can't bully individual countries.

All he is able to do is bark insults like a mad dog but with no teeth to bite. He is full of shite and everyone bar his followers know it.

The EU and our own gvmt are obviously playing very diplomatic publlicly even though I would love to hear them come out and insult him back. But I guess that's part of the strategy to not play his public game.

Just keep doing as we are doing . He will just flip flop like he always does.

There have always been "Kermits" out there in the wilderness.

I can just imagine Conor Cruise O'Brien's Sunday Indo columns if he was still alive. He would be lapping all this Trump tariff stuff up like mana from heaven.

He stole Marisa Tomei.

Possibly one good thing came out of this. The chefs and staff at the White House got off without blame for the catering. It's a good thing that the pasting he's got lately about using the White House as a personal marketing venue may have sobered him up a bit.

This is f**king outrageous stuff

What a massive failure by the press.. yet again.

Soft selling chaos and racism instead of calling out trump for what these planned ambushes really are, is why America is doomed until the press (if ever) gets its act together

Think that's crazy? Hold my beer.

This lad is talking to God and compares to Moses.

What's crazy is, what the hell is that doing on IMDb?