I think this is very much an under-recognized outcome. Not least because this is what MAGA wants to see. Oh sure, they’d love to see truckloads of dirty brown people carted away in trucks. But the real prize is seeing the humbling of undocumented people like you and me, college-educated English-fluent less-brown people who don’t have documents.
MAGA doesn’t really mind migrants who stay really quiet and obedient slaves because their immigration status isn’t clean. The ones they really hate are undocumented people who achieved more and have higher status than many non-college whites. The “uppity” ones. That’s who MAGA most wants to see abused. If they don’t speak Spanish and have no ties to their home country, then even better.
If you really think this is going to happen, you don’t understand how politics work.
Trump is going to make one really big noisy tariff against China, big enough to notice, but not big enough to tank the economy. He will beat the drum about how he totally owned China. He’ll collect the political benefit, and then he’ll move on.
I honestly don’t know what to say to people who think that Republicans have finally, fatally painted themselves into an inescapable corner with rhetoric that they can’t possibly follow through on. You’ve seen how this works. You know they’re not required follow through on political-suicide campaign promises, you know the base will figure out a way to rationalize the non-delivery of such promises. Is there any person alive who doesn’t know this now?
That’s the problem. No one can accurately predict how the countries impacted by tariffs will respond. It can evolve into a difficult, expensive problem with far reaching symptoms that last for a long time.
So far, “the Republicans would never be crazy enough to do that” has a very poor record of accuracy. We were told they wouldn’t get rid of Roe vrs Wade because it would be a political disaster; they did it anyway.
These are true believers and lunatics; they don’t care if it’s a good idea.
It has. All Trump has to say is, “China is cutting us a check for $3Bn (or whatever) for tariffs,” and his stupid, uninformed, and uneducated fans will cheer.
Until they find out that they’re paying that tariff. And even then, many of them won’t believe it. “China pulled a fast one,” or some such crapola.
I was responding to the comment about the possibility of the man who will be president imposing a faux tariff on China as a show of strength and then moving on.
No one can predict exactly how benign or intensely serious that situation can become. Or how long it will last.
I totally understand tariffs.
I also understand the unpredictability of complex societal systems.
Okay, but did the economy collapse, and did Biden then rescind the tariffs to fix it? No, and no. It didn’t cost him anything politically. If you agree that tariffs contributed to inflation, then it was actually Biden and Harris who ate that political cost.
Trump will do a token tariff on China. It won’t harm the economy and he’ll pay no political price for it.
I think we’re all experienced enough to understand that no “adults in the room” will restrain Trumpian policy, however “major donor money in the room” will prevent him from making any disastrous economic choices. These people installed him in office to make them richer, not to watch him kill the golden goose, and they aren’t career bureaucrats with pensions on the line.
It’s true that Trump can’t run for President again, but he very much wants a Republican elected after him, because he’ll once again have criminal exposure for one damn thing or another.
After Alabama enacted HB 56, farmers couldn’t find workers.
“I’ve had people calling me wanting to work,” Smith said. “I haven’t turned any of them down, but they’re not any good. It’s hard work, they just don’t work like the Hispanics with experience.” …
In south Georgia, Connie Horner has heard just about every reason unemployed Americans don’t want to work on her blueberry farm. It’s hot, the hours are long, the pay isn’t enough and it’s just plain hard.
“You can’t find legal workers,” Horner said. “Basically they last a day or two, literally.”
There’s a lot of straight white guys with daughters that might unexpectedly end up pregnant. There’s a lot of straight white guys with LGBTQ kids. There’s a lot of straight white guys that maybe aren’t as straight as they let on. There’s a lot of straight white guys that are married to non-white people. There’s a lot of white guys that don’t have “their papers”. There’s a lot of straight white guys that are un/under employed and need government assistance. There’s a lot of straight white guys in poorly run VA hospitals. There’s a lot of straight white guys who are at risk of losing their jobs and insurance if their employer fires them to cover the cost of tariffs. The list goes on and on. Sure straight white guys might not have as many hardships as a gay black woman, but they’re not immune just based on being a straight white male. How well many people do over the next 4+ years is going to depend a lot on how much money you have.
Yes, there will be some crises that the trump admin will be completely unprepared to handle, both because of incompetent leadership at all levels of the admin, and because government institutions have been gutted. Could be a pandemic, could be a Katrina-level disaster that hits a red state.
And if America or its interests are threatened militarily, what then? trump likes to style himself as the ‘anti-war’ President, which sounds all well and good on the surface; he made a big point of describing Harris as alternately ‘too weak’ to deal with hostile foreign leaders and also the candidate most likely to start WWIII. But who really fits that description? trump famously lets himself be flattered and manipulated by dictators. Also his colossal laziness and tendency toward isolationism will cause him to ignore most world conflicts that don’t directly affect America. But what if America is directly threatened? I’m sure the trump admin response will be either ineffective, an over-reaction, or both.
“This looks like an administration getting ready to purge anyone who will not be a yes man,” said Carpenter, a former Army lawyer. “If you are looking to fire officers who might say no because of the law or their ethics, you set up a system with completely arbitrary standards, so you can fire anyone you want.”
