Seems more like 1896.
I think he has a group of looney sycophants around him (authoritarians always do) and then there are the looney tech bros like Musk. The tech bros want some sort of bro-ocracy in which they are the lords of their fiefs, complete with their own space programs and private armies. Trump is just the front man for their bro coup.
Posted on another thread:
Navarro is scum, but he absolutely, positively knows the tariffs will hurt the US economy. So it’s back to “he can profit from this.”
Someone always profits from tariffs. It’s rent-seeking writ large.
Edwards: Why the big secret? People are smart. They can handle it.
Kay: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.
That is certainly the motivation for the venal Trumpsters, but I agree with @madmonk28 that the broligarch contingent having longer scope plans that are basically a return to the glory days of pre- Westphalian sovereignty and the kind of technocratic anarcho-corporate city-states drawn straight from a Neal Stephenson novel.
Stranger
And then there are the old school oligarchs who thought Trump would mean them being able to dump more poison in the water and maybe bring child-labor back, but had no idea how far off the rails this would go.
That’s likely true in the case of Elon Musk and maybe Bezos and Zuckerberg. But it really can’t explain 95% of the people supporting this, because they AREN’T billionaire broligarchs.
Spite. Tariffs hurt people, they like hurting people. The cruelty is the point.
I’d like to refer back to a couple of earlier posts of mine that … I think … may explain my view of, at least, the sales pitch we’re being given for what Trump is doing and why:
I get the vision that he’s selling us. I buy nothing in his approach, and put zero stock in the likelihood of any success that realistically outweighs the pain I see the country poorest Americans enduring.
Meanwhile, I see it as a redistribution of wealth from those at the bottom rung – always most hurt by regressive taxes (which this is) – to those at the top (via extension of Trump’s tax cuts) – the ones who basically decimated the middle class to begin with.
It’s just lovely, isn’t it??
Kumbaya …
The wealthy are going to be worse off too, both economically (because at best they’ll get a bigger part of a smaller pie for a net loss), and because of the general loss of quality of life hitting them too. Not as hard, but money can’t buy you something that doesn’t exist anymore or isn’t available. They just won’t admit it even (or especially) to themselves, because that means admitting both that psychotic selfishness isn’t actually the most profitable choice, and that other people than themselves actually matter.
Gradually work towards replacing income taxes as much as possible with a consumption tax (tariffs). Consumption taxes hit lower income earners the hardest as opposed to the “progressive” nature of income taxes which normally hit the wealthier harder.
I don’t think there is some grand master plan. People keep looking at the stupid things Trump does and speculating on the secret clever motive behind it; but it always turns out that he’s really just as stupid as he seems. Trump really does just want to hurt other nations with tariffs and thinks they are the ones who pay it, and that’s all there is to it.
He really, genuinely is just stupid.
I’ve mentioned that I’ve worked for Private Equity- I’m not a PE guy, I’m a pharma guy, but twice I’ve worked for properties owned by PE. One I was a middle manager with no real access to the people who owned the fund, but my second stint was at a senior enough level that I actually got to know some of the millionaires and billionaires that owned the fund.
I was thinking that those guys will love this. I don’t think Trump has the brain power to orchestrate this as a goal, but in a recession a lot of public companies will be cheap LBO targets. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I don’t think there’s enough concentrated money to take the whole economy over, but we’ve seen a trend over the last couple of decades towards fewer public companies and more private companies.
This. I look at my stupid in laws and the stupid Trumpists who live in their town and they have no real concept of economics. Or maybe some Libertarian tech/finance bros who who only think in terms of being able to code or day trade being the eight of human accomplishment.
But the whole thing is based around an ideology of stupid and Trump is the center of it.
- America is great
- Other countries are screwing us with their free trade
- Government wastes our taxes and does nothing
- Immigrants commit crimes and are trying to steal our jobs
- Everything else is woke nonsense.
I don’t see there has to be more to it than that.
Yup. I’m getting boned.
My wife and I are buying a house to retire to in 4 days. We have to, health issues on my part. The altitude we live at is getting me.
it’s mostly a straight trade when we sell our current house but things are getting tricky.
Thank you. I should set a shortcut key that pastes a paragraph like this, because, in this forum and elsewhere, I still find people trying to find some master plan.
Trump’s an idiot.
He doesn’t understand tariffs, trade deficits and other associated concepts like VAT*. He says as much frequently, for decades, and his policies have been based on his idiotic understanding of the world.
In terms of the second question of this thread, of why those around him are letting him do it, I think this is Trump cashing in his political capital. He owns the party and the MAGA faithful. They spent years saying that evidence of election fraud will come “soon”, and now they are quite prepared to say a golden economic age is coming “any day now”.
But this was a particularly bad unforced error. A lot of people are starting to notice their faces feel strangely painy. So I think the next dumb thing Trump attempts, there’ll be the first tentative attempts at pushback.
* Don’t worry if you don’t know about VAT; if you don’t live in a country with it, you have no reason to. It only matters if, say, you’re a world leader using it as a justification for your economic policies.
Yeah, the VAT thing is just beyond the pale. It’s irrelevant, and now I’m hearing all these MAGA dipshits saying “They only charge the VAT on US goods!”
Ugh. This is why we’re doomed.
It’s just really hard to believe that someone that dumb can have that much power. Also that people who are not that dumb support the dumb powerful one. But we have had lot of training in rational thought and forget that most humans don’t, and how unnatural rational decision-making (as opposed to tradition-based, rather than as opposed to irrational) really is.
Well there are systemic failings that have led to this.
The US, remaining more religious than most developed countries has retained a deep skepticism of critical thinking, science…intellectualism generally. Of course helped along all the way by corporate interests, that would prefer people to be dismissive of regulations or threats like climate change.
And then there has been a rot in the republican party going back decades; that it became pugilistic and the Democrats had to be demonized, often literally. It didn’t matter if you hurt America as long as Democrats got it in the eye.
And of course now it has snowballed as outlets like FOX have found that peddling ignorance to an ignorant audience is a great money-spinner.
So yes, there are many factors influencing how we got here. But understanding why Trump does X doesn’t need such a complex analysis – he’s a idiot.
Never forget – this is a guy who thinks that magnets don’t work underwater.