When you put it that way, it sounds like a Mike Judge film.
Stranger
Exactly, Trump is a symptom, not the disease. He could drop dead tomorrow and we’d still be in a very bad state. I don’t, however, consider America to be the developed world.
The system is designed that way. Just as a few centuries ago idiots would end up in power because they were born aristocrats Trump is given power because he’s rich, white, evil and stupid. Trump is the sort of person our entire society is built to support, enable and reward.
He’s not supposed to. Congress and the Courts are supposed to stop him.
Problem is – the enforcement power of the courts is uncertain even if (which is also uncertain) the Supremes don’t cave, and Congress is refusing to use theirs.
What this means in effect is not that the President has more power. It’s that the agenda is also the agenda of Congress.
The ‘agenda’ of Congressional Republicans is to draft off of the MAGA movement, even those who are explicitly not MAGA supporters. They are in total abeyance of not only their basic duties as legislators but also as representatives of the majority opinion of their electorate, and of course any sense of principles or mores.
Stranger
Right. Like I said.
It doesn’t seem very certain to me. His posts implying that after the fact have the air of the kid who has just kicked the ball over the fence and into the neighbor’s window saying “yeah I totally meant to do that”. There is no 12D chess a play here, no evil genius behind the scenes with a master plan, just a confused narcissist who thinks he’s an economic genius, and is surrounded by incompetent sycophants who aren’t going to tell him otherwise, .
It’s not totally impossible he did mean it. But if so the most likely explanation IMO is he is literally just trying to get revenge for all the mean things America did to him over the last four years.
If that’s the agenda of Congress, then Congress is supposed to pass bills to accomplish it. They’re not supposed to let the POTUS rule by edict instead.
Don’t think for a minute I’m giving him any kind of xD chess credit.
But to build on your analogy, the kid who intentionally kicks the ball over the fence in the middle of the game, or intentionally deflates the ball in the middle of the game, knows he’s going to put the game in turmoil, no matter how stupid he is.
This is a truly startling Rachel Maddow piece on how Trump got the idea of tariffs. Holy shit.
Though, to stretch it even more, the kid in question has been boasting about how he’s the greatest footballer ever and better at taking free kicks than Beckham and Ronaldo combined. He’s been telling everyone how he’s gonna toepoke this ball as hard as he can and send in a perfect curving arc into the top corner of the goal (despite everyone telling him thats not how free kicks work).
In those circumstances I’m gonna assume that kid is just crap at football when he toepokes over the fence into the neighbor’s window, not that he has a cunning plan to ruin game.
I wish Youtube would automatically play Rachel Maddow at 2X speed, and even at that she is almost intolerable. She takes so long to get to any kind of point, and then you wonder if it was worth it for how obvious it usually is. In summary, Trump doesn’t understand anything about economics so he recruited a dishonest and craven idiot to advise him on “trade and manufacturing”.
Stranger
Today we get this, from someone worth $520 million:
ETA: I realized the preview doesn’t show the punchline. He says Americans getting close to retirement aren’t worried about what the markets are doing.
So I sent Mr. Bessent the following email. I don’t know who, if anyone, will read it, but I cannot sit by and not even try.
Scott.Bessent@treasury.gov
if anyone cares.
The American people do not want to hear someone worth half a billion dollars opine on what we think when we look at our savings and investments. The fact that you are so utterly out of touch as to think a two day, 10% decline in markets wouldn’t upset someone getting close to retirement is, in a word, moronic.
You know better. You know we aren’t going to miraculously remake the American economy. You know that for every factory job that might be created in what- 5 years?- we will lose one that we have in other sectors right now.
You know full well that 41% of the revenues of the S&P 500 constituent companies come from overseas. Markets that are making it quite clear that they do not want American brands.
You are a Trump sycophant and toady. If you had a shred of integrity you would be doing everything you can to convince the halfwit president this is a bad idea. One can only conclude that you’ve decided that whatever this is, it’s worth it for you personally. I hope you sleep well at night, on your half-billion dollar mattress, knowing that some people won’t survive financially to see the other side of this disaster.
You should be ashamed, but I suspect you’re not.
Additionally all Trump’s previous statements on the stock market show an understanding of the stock market where it is the be all and end all of the economy and whether it goes up or down is all that matters about a president’s economic record. I am skeptical in the extreme that was just a ruse where he was just waiting for his second term to crash the stock market for… reasons.
I agree. It’s why I quit watching her as a regular thing. She repeats herself and meanders, stretching what could be a ten minute piece into a half hour. It always seems like she’s talking down to her audience. Now I cherry pick what looks interesting from Youtube. And I avoid any opinion piece with !!! in the headline, as they’re as bad as the right wing glurge.
That’s Trump’s MO. I’ve been told it’s an integral part of his negotiating strategy and he writes about it in his book (I haven’t read it). Basically create as much chaos and pain as possible so if you want to do business with him you have to give him favorable terms.
That’s basically what he’s doing with these tariffs. It’s the international trade equivalent of threatening to kick the ball through the neighbor’s window if you don’t let him be the team captain.
But people have a remarkable ability to rationalize to themselves why they weren’t taken in by a moron.
That’s what they have chosen to do by legislation. They passed laws giving Trump the power to do this, and he is. They chose this, and they could choose to change it.
Depends what you mean by “total collapse.” If these tariffs remain up - which, again, Trump has said they will, so let’s play with that - the world will have the worst depression since the 1930s. Is that collapse?
I think one difference is that Congress can end this any time it finds its testicles. In the 30s the tariffs were by legislation, making them much harder to end.
If Congress gets some courage to end this, I’ll be shocked.
I’m also unclear as to whether they do this themselves, or need a veto-proof supermajority.