I'm sure the rest of the world would love to shoot the United States in the butt with a tranquilizer and hope we wake up less crazy. . . . or else park us safely in some zoo.
Not so sure. Yes, we all know Trump's actually a wuss. But he's also stubborn...and never can admit he's wrong. Dumb and dumber, he's hitched himself to this wagon and it's something he's believed for decades. No, I think he'll just wallow in his own illusion and continue to blame Biden. Which is great, because that absolutely won't work. That's the good news. The bad? I think Stephen Miller and JD Vance are waiting for the chance to unleash the military on the public. As this approaches failure, the danger increases. Doesn't mean we don't push it--we must. But yes, this will not end quietly or easily, no matter how idiotic it gets.
If there was something tangible and reasonable he wanted out of Canada he probably could have had it just by asking, but there is now literally zero political pressure on any Canadian leader to "make deals" with the US.
Well, there was in the beginning, Alberta's premier said "hey why don't we just secure the border and purchase more US goods to lower the trade deficit?". That might have seemed like a defensible approach at one point, but then Trump kept moving the goalposts and talking about making us the 51st state. The demands were menacing but curiously unspecific. What are we actually supposed to do? We soon realized that his demands were not meant to be satisfied, if we did try he'd just make new demands. Ah, never mind then!
Trump doesn't want tangible and reasonable things. He is a bully who wants to engage in dominance displays and have people kiss his ring. That's all he wants.
So now we're like "nope, there is no point talking to this guy and nothing we can do to appease him, our only hope is to try to stand up to him as best we can and improve our other options as best we can." We just elected Carney as the guy best able to do that. (The Liberals were down 20 points just three months ago!)
Trump is vengeful, incompetent, and ignorant, and he's surrounded and enabled by sycophants - some of whom, I'm furious to say, know better. This is a recipe for grievous national, and even global, injury.
The wee peabrain flashed on memories of "Jumping the Shark".
The phrase "jump the shark" originated from the 1977 Happy Days episode "Hollywood: Part 3," where Fonzie, played by Henry Winkler, waterskied and jumped over a shark. This moment is now used to describe when a show or other creative work has reached a point of decline in quality or popularity.
His experiences in the Apprentice, formed his idea of his role as a president - Good TV. In V.1 there were people who knew how to do good TV. In V.2 there is no one who knows how to do good TV.
This is a very strong piece - especially Lesson 2 about clearly articulating demands. Not that I don’t trust Dan, but I ran this through Chat GPT -o3. Very illuminating- basically says how right Dan is with more detail, examples.
I wonder if Bessent believes what he’s saying about bargaining. I suspect he might- he’s no game theory expert. And “keep ‘em guessing” is superficially plausible.
Then there’s this. Bessent CNBC: “I believe that it’s up to China to de-escalate, because they sell five times more to us than we sell to them, and so these 120%, 145% tariffs are unsustainable”
Again - he may really believe this. But it’s a flawed proposition - the idea that the country that’s tariffed is the one at a disadvantage in trade war. Yes, they’re losing money- decline in sales. But the country that slaps on tariffs is hurting itself.
So - guessing he’s against the tariff policy as such. But may not understand bargaining or balance of pain and resolve in trade war.
I think we have to be clear what we want. A lot of people I know just want Trump to fail at whatever he does. He could promote free healthcare and they would want him to fail. Same with reducing trade deficits. They don't care if it's good or bad. They just want Trump to fail, and that's all that concerns them.
I would very much want Trump to succeed if he said something like this:
"I was brainwashed by the North Koreans in the early sixties. I must have seen a playing card or something. I legitimately thought tariffs were taxes foreigners paid to us, and for every dollar collected from them, I could cut American taxes by double the amount. Maybe triple! I figured that pissing off every country in the world, including ones that don't exist (even some with lots of penguins), would make people love me even more than they do. (Which is an awful lot. A very awful lot, as it turns out.)
I thought the Constitution was a piece of paper - God knows I never read it or let anyone read it to me - and that I could ignore it whenever it was inconvenient. But why would I ignore it? Article II lets me do whatever I want, and I'm definitely cool with that. Now, the other stuff - the woke this and the "due process" that - we can do without, thank you very much.
But get this - I saw a different playing card, and my mind cleared up immediately! My world was upside down. Tariffs are taxes on Americans! If we lower income taxes and increase tariffs, poor and middle-class folks pay more and billionaires pay less. And no one, virtually no one, except maybe the North Koreans, likes tariffs. Boy am I glad I can reverse myself and everything will go back to the way it was. (Some of the "way it was" was stuff I did during my first term. I said then they were the best deals ever made, and I was right!)
Listen, I'm an American, at least when the Koreans aren't hijacking my brain. So I know what due process is. You can not deprive someone - and "someone" means "anyone" - of life, liberty or property without making the government prove you did what they say you did. That was in the Magna Carta in the 13th Century, for crying out loud. Of course you have a right to be present at any hearings, and to a lawyer too. That stuff might be in the woke part of the Constitution, but I think I like it more than 'You do what we tell you to do. And shut up.'" Let's call it the new MAGA Carta - due process for everyone, even the haters and losers!
I hate to think of the damage the Koreans made me do. But, I know where I'm going now. It may take a while to bounce back, but bounce back we will. I can say, almost sincerely, for the first time in fifty years, 'God bless America.' Today is the day I finally became president."
Unless you've got TDS, you'll surely agree the new Trump is just fine.
Agree except I don’t think trump’s really running things. So who’s really in charge if anyone? (Putin?) That’s one of the few plausible explanations for how to obviously do everything wrong.
Could be a product of the coalition within his economic and geostrategic advisors. Some of them want tariffs for the sake of stimulating local industry. Some want to knock down China and focus on that. Some want to blow up the existing post-Bretton-Woods regime as part of a scheme to escape the debt spiral, which means a period of deliberate inflation. Some are focused tightly on Iran, and are seeing this as an opportunity to exert leverage on other countries for that purpose. Some recognize the potential for chaos and are setting up to exploit it as a domestic political power-consolidation tool, eg dispense exceptions to otherwise painful rules. Some recognize the potential for chaos and are setting up simply to profit.
With effective leadership these things could be sequenced or synthesized into something coherent - even if malevolent. But it's just an incoherent mess.
Presumably increasing U.S. employment and increasing domestic economic activity is the goal, but protecting a small number of industries is more likely to come at the expense of a much larger number of business that will face higher costs due to the tariffs -- e.g., there are 60 times the number of jobs in industries that use steel than in the steel industry itself that will be shielded from foreign competition by tariffs that will raise the price of steel imports.
Well that's getting into the weeds. Secondary results? Who knows? All I know is for the last forty years we were told (by both parties) that trade deficits were a huge problem that needed addressing. Now we're finally doing it and are we all happy? No.
Those are primary, not secondary, effects, and likely to be felt almost immediately. Tariffs of the magnitude imposed by Trump will quickly result in loss of profitability for the businesses that use the inputs (about 40% of imports) subject to the higher taxes. Will also put many small firms that depend on imports out of business.
So glad I added Daniel Drezner’s substack to my list of paid news and news analysis sources. Well worth the money.
I'm sure the rest of the world would love to shoot the United States in the butt with a tranquilizer and hope we wake up less crazy. . . . or else park us safely in some zoo.
If there are any tranquilizers going around, let's make sure Americans get the first crack at them.
I believe the minute the shelves start to empty, trump will back down.
https://kathleenweber.substack.com/p/hurricane-coming-six-to-eight-weeks
Not so sure. Yes, we all know Trump's actually a wuss. But he's also stubborn...and never can admit he's wrong. Dumb and dumber, he's hitched himself to this wagon and it's something he's believed for decades. No, I think he'll just wallow in his own illusion and continue to blame Biden. Which is great, because that absolutely won't work. That's the good news. The bad? I think Stephen Miller and JD Vance are waiting for the chance to unleash the military on the public. As this approaches failure, the danger increases. Doesn't mean we don't push it--we must. But yes, this will not end quietly or easily, no matter how idiotic it gets.
Shelves everywhere I went shopping today are already getting more sparse.
If there was something tangible and reasonable he wanted out of Canada he probably could have had it just by asking, but there is now literally zero political pressure on any Canadian leader to "make deals" with the US.
Well, there was in the beginning, Alberta's premier said "hey why don't we just secure the border and purchase more US goods to lower the trade deficit?". That might have seemed like a defensible approach at one point, but then Trump kept moving the goalposts and talking about making us the 51st state. The demands were menacing but curiously unspecific. What are we actually supposed to do? We soon realized that his demands were not meant to be satisfied, if we did try he'd just make new demands. Ah, never mind then!
Trump doesn't want tangible and reasonable things. He is a bully who wants to engage in dominance displays and have people kiss his ring. That's all he wants.
So now we're like "nope, there is no point talking to this guy and nothing we can do to appease him, our only hope is to try to stand up to him as best we can and improve our other options as best we can." We just elected Carney as the guy best able to do that. (The Liberals were down 20 points just three months ago!)
Seems like everyone’s forgotten that CONGRESS is the branch of government in charge of tariffs. The GQP can stop this madness at anytime!
Trump is vengeful, incompetent, and ignorant, and he's surrounded and enabled by sycophants - some of whom, I'm furious to say, know better. This is a recipe for grievous national, and even global, injury.
The wee peabrain flashed on memories of "Jumping the Shark".
The phrase "jump the shark" originated from the 1977 Happy Days episode "Hollywood: Part 3," where Fonzie, played by Henry Winkler, waterskied and jumped over a shark. This moment is now used to describe when a show or other creative work has reached a point of decline in quality or popularity.
His experiences in the Apprentice, formed his idea of his role as a president - Good TV. In V.1 there were people who knew how to do good TV. In V.2 there is no one who knows how to do good TV.
"Plan? Plan? I don' need no stinkin' plan!"
I'm tRump, and you're not, so there!
This is a very strong piece - especially Lesson 2 about clearly articulating demands. Not that I don’t trust Dan, but I ran this through Chat GPT -o3. Very illuminating- basically says how right Dan is with more detail, examples.
I wonder if Bessent believes what he’s saying about bargaining. I suspect he might- he’s no game theory expert. And “keep ‘em guessing” is superficially plausible.
Then there’s this. Bessent CNBC: “I believe that it’s up to China to de-escalate, because they sell five times more to us than we sell to them, and so these 120%, 145% tariffs are unsustainable”
Again - he may really believe this. But it’s a flawed proposition - the idea that the country that’s tariffed is the one at a disadvantage in trade war. Yes, they’re losing money- decline in sales. But the country that slaps on tariffs is hurting itself.
So - guessing he’s against the tariff policy as such. But may not understand bargaining or balance of pain and resolve in trade war.
I think we have to be clear what we want. A lot of people I know just want Trump to fail at whatever he does. He could promote free healthcare and they would want him to fail. Same with reducing trade deficits. They don't care if it's good or bad. They just want Trump to fail, and that's all that concerns them.
I would very much want Trump to succeed if he said something like this:
"I was brainwashed by the North Koreans in the early sixties. I must have seen a playing card or something. I legitimately thought tariffs were taxes foreigners paid to us, and for every dollar collected from them, I could cut American taxes by double the amount. Maybe triple! I figured that pissing off every country in the world, including ones that don't exist (even some with lots of penguins), would make people love me even more than they do. (Which is an awful lot. A very awful lot, as it turns out.)
I thought the Constitution was a piece of paper - God knows I never read it or let anyone read it to me - and that I could ignore it whenever it was inconvenient. But why would I ignore it? Article II lets me do whatever I want, and I'm definitely cool with that. Now, the other stuff - the woke this and the "due process" that - we can do without, thank you very much.
But get this - I saw a different playing card, and my mind cleared up immediately! My world was upside down. Tariffs are taxes on Americans! If we lower income taxes and increase tariffs, poor and middle-class folks pay more and billionaires pay less. And no one, virtually no one, except maybe the North Koreans, likes tariffs. Boy am I glad I can reverse myself and everything will go back to the way it was. (Some of the "way it was" was stuff I did during my first term. I said then they were the best deals ever made, and I was right!)
Listen, I'm an American, at least when the Koreans aren't hijacking my brain. So I know what due process is. You can not deprive someone - and "someone" means "anyone" - of life, liberty or property without making the government prove you did what they say you did. That was in the Magna Carta in the 13th Century, for crying out loud. Of course you have a right to be present at any hearings, and to a lawyer too. That stuff might be in the woke part of the Constitution, but I think I like it more than 'You do what we tell you to do. And shut up.'" Let's call it the new MAGA Carta - due process for everyone, even the haters and losers!
I hate to think of the damage the Koreans made me do. But, I know where I'm going now. It may take a while to bounce back, but bounce back we will. I can say, almost sincerely, for the first time in fifty years, 'God bless America.' Today is the day I finally became president."
Unless you've got TDS, you'll surely agree the new Trump is just fine.
Agree except I don’t think trump’s really running things. So who’s really in charge if anyone? (Putin?) That’s one of the few plausible explanations for how to obviously do everything wrong.
Could be a product of the coalition within his economic and geostrategic advisors. Some of them want tariffs for the sake of stimulating local industry. Some want to knock down China and focus on that. Some want to blow up the existing post-Bretton-Woods regime as part of a scheme to escape the debt spiral, which means a period of deliberate inflation. Some are focused tightly on Iran, and are seeing this as an opportunity to exert leverage on other countries for that purpose. Some recognize the potential for chaos and are setting up to exploit it as a domestic political power-consolidation tool, eg dispense exceptions to otherwise painful rules. Some recognize the potential for chaos and are setting up simply to profit.
With effective leadership these things could be sequenced or synthesized into something coherent - even if malevolent. But it's just an incoherent mess.
Tariffs aren’t going to “stimulate local industry” enough to weather or be worth blowing up the world economy for most of us.
He’s just being a typical American as seen by Churchill: he does the right thing after trying everything else 😁
Maybe Trump can develop a script for a new tv show on how not to destroy stuff.
Reducing the trade deficit is Trump's goal. These negotiations will either work or not work. Hard numbers will tell the tale.
:DDDDDDDDDD
Oh, wait... you're serious?
Thanks for the thoughtful, measured, intelligent reply
Presumably increasing U.S. employment and increasing domestic economic activity is the goal, but protecting a small number of industries is more likely to come at the expense of a much larger number of business that will face higher costs due to the tariffs -- e.g., there are 60 times the number of jobs in industries that use steel than in the steel industry itself that will be shielded from foreign competition by tariffs that will raise the price of steel imports.
Well that's getting into the weeds. Secondary results? Who knows? All I know is for the last forty years we were told (by both parties) that trade deficits were a huge problem that needed addressing. Now we're finally doing it and are we all happy? No.
Those are primary, not secondary, effects, and likely to be felt almost immediately. Tariffs of the magnitude imposed by Trump will quickly result in loss of profitability for the businesses that use the inputs (about 40% of imports) subject to the higher taxes. Will also put many small firms that depend on imports out of business.
Isn't any loss temporary? Wouldn't businesses be better off, after this war is over, if there were no tariffs on either side (the stated goal)?
Then why have any tariffs that are higher than before?
How do I know? Whatever they're doing, it's supposed to eliminate tariffs altogether.
Is “reducing the trade deficit” really trump’s “goal?” 😂
That's what he and his team are saying. There's no other reason, unless you want to start entertaining conspiracy theories
Sure. Who wouldn’t believe someone who lies every time he opens his mouth?! 🤪
Well one can be as funny as one wishes. But of course this wouldn't be rational. A statement is judged on it's merit, not on the person who states it