The Official "Damned Trump" Thread: Phase II

[The Architect Of Fate]

A more likely scenario 

[Thumpalumpacus]

It's like they've never read up on the Great Depression. The stock markets tanked, and then with the adoption of Smoot-Hawley on this side of the pond and Imperial Preference on the other, the two largest economies in the world made sure the Depression lasted years.

Second verse, same as the first.

[Jackalope]

They aren't sending their best.

[Goosebump]

He's actually one of the funniest presidents of all time. Remember that bit with the hurricanes and the sharpie and the nukes? That's gold. He's gonna keep being crazy weird and funny, just watch.

[Fake Messiah]

He's actually one of the funniest presidents of all time. Remember that bit with the hurricanes and the sharpie and the nukes? That's gold. He's gonna keep being crazy weird and funny, just watch.

Indeed, he's still choosing to do fun stuff instead of boring ones.



I mean life is short, so why should he waste it being around some boring dead soldiers he doesn't give a shit about, when he could be watching golf and goofing around with people who are not his friends, but are eager to kiss his ass, which for him is enough. This is what a fun guy does.

[Thumpalumpacus]

He's actually one of the funniest presidents of all time. Remember that bit with the hurricanes and the sharpie and the nukes? That's gold. He's gonna keep being crazy weird and funny, just watch.

Yeah, we're laughing ourselves to death here.

I value competence over comedy when it comes to leaders.

[Nanny]

Remember the halcyon days when the USA was the world's largest economy? Yeah, that was great.

[Angrboda]

[Angrboda]

China is America’s second-largest source of imports, after Mexico, and third-largest export market, after Canada and Mexico.

But while President Trump’s tariffs exempted some large categories of imports, like semiconductors and pharmaceuticals, the Chinese tariffs have no exemptions.

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China’s ambitious “Made in China 2025” industrial policy, which began in 2015, has made the country largely self-reliant in the production of many industrial goods, from electric cars to solar panels. While Chinese officials were caught off guard by Mr. Trump’s trade actions in 2018 and 2019 and sometimes took a few days to respond, they have moved much faster this year.

They acted on Friday, 36 hours after his latest tariffs, even though it was a national holiday.

But the Chinese economy depends heavily on exports, which is why Mr. Trump’s tariffs have caused alarm in Beijing and across the country. China’s trade surplus last year in manufactured goods — the amount by which exports exceeded imports — was equal to a tenth of the entire economy and rising.

Chinese officials said this week that if tariffs restrict their access to the American market, they will shift exports to other markets. But China already runs large and widening surpluses with most of Europe and the developing world, triggering a wave of tariffs by countries elsewhere on Chinese goods.

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China imposed a two-month freeze on shipments of rare earths to Japan in 2010 during a territorial dispute.

The Obama administration responded by calling for the United States to restart its own mining and processing of rare earths, which mostly shut down in the 1990s. But 15 years after the Japan embargo, mining has resumed in the United States but most of the ore is shipped to China for processing into valuable materials, as rare earths refining has proved technically challenging.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/busin...ation.html

[Mister Agenda]

If you recreate American industry successfully under the protection of tariffs, it will simply succumb to the pressures which eventually killed it once you remove the tariffs.   And you can't keep tariffs up perpetually, as there is a cost to them which is even worse than the cost from American industry incrementally failing, and not recovering.

Bear in mind that EU, (formerly EEC) has been charging tariffs since at least the '70s. Kind of interesting to watch Brussels shout about how much harm tariffs do while carefully not mentioning that they've been doing it since before most of them were born...

We've had tariffs as long as we've been a country. They have a legitimate place in trade policy if targeted and used sparingly. The EU hasn't been particularly screwing us over, and since tariffs are taxes on their own people, levying a bunch on our end indiscriminately smacks of getting even with the people who drilled a hole in the boat by drilling a bigger one on our end of it.