The Official "Damned Trump" Thread: Phase II

[The Architect Of Fate]

Trump wants to Tariffs the penguins now 

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...ld-islands 

An old friend from the TTA days who is currently traveling the globe taking fish pictures, posted about this and I thought he was joking.  Turns out - not so much.

smh

If only it was a joke .....

[Belacqua]

A little background on what tariffs do, for those of us who aren't economics experts:

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2025-04-03/Am...Z44/p.html

The US simply cannot be the victor in a war of economics with China, and free trade is not seen as a winning strategy. The US has thus returned to "fair trade", where tariffs have once more been weaponized to defend national industries from more mature competitors, primarily from China. Tariffs and the threat of tariffs are also used to renegotiate trade agreements. US-centric globalization is over, supply chains are repatriated, and economic nationalism is back. But will the US be successful?

Temporary and moderate tariffs can be a reasonable instrument to enhance competitiveness, yet they come with significant risks. The US insistence on dominating and preventing the rise of China, rather than accepting a new international division of labour between equal great powers, has resulted in the tariff instrument being used too aggressively and thus, making the US destined to fail.

This writer is good at putting things into a wider international context. If he's right about Trump's reasons for doing the tariffs, it certainly looks as though they will fail, and do significant harm to Americans.

[Angrboda]

I think the underlying issue is aptly expressed in the movement's namesake. Make America Great Again. That U.S. industry, if recreated as it was at some point in the past, will duplicate the competitiveness that it had at that once upon a time. But the reality is you can never go home. American industry evolved to where it is today because selective pressures revealed a competitiveness that was diminishing over time, due to a change in the international environment. You cannot reduplicate that earlier success by remaking American industry in the mold of that earlier time because its success depended upon a global environment which no longer exists. 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.

I think that Trump is a victim of the same type of simplistic thinking that infected voters in 2024. There was the presumption among Americans that once the pandemic subsided, things would just spring back to the way they were before the pandemic. Once you remove the cause, the effect should disappear. But that's an overly simplistic and optimistic view of reality. In a similar vein, Trump, and the Maga believers in America First believe something similar, that if you just recreate the factories and companies and jobs that existed when America was ostensibly great, we will go back to being great. There's an even more insidious aspect of this being the idea that if we are returned to that former greatness, it only takes good stewardship to ensure continued greatness. Just as the stewardship which prevented things from springing back to normal was bad and the root cause of trouble, so good stewards can overcome whatever obstacles past stewards failed to adequately resolve. I suppose in a sense, it becomes a narrative in which, if America's greatness is not returning, not remaining, or not continuing, then the fault lies with those in the liberal wing of society who, through an inability to see the clear course toward success, are stuck repeating bad ideas and failing to successfully steward the country.

[arewethereyet]

^Let's say we were able to recreate the manufacturing businesses like they were some years back. Making potential foreign countries mad and adding tariffs to the goods made would simply mean an abundance of things made in the US that have a limited customer base. Warehouses and yards filled with goods that can't be sold is not going to help anyone, except maybe for a short window of time.

[Mr Greene]

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...

[arewethereyet]

[Jackalope]

In a similar vein, Trump, and the Maga believers in America First believe something similar, that if you just recreate the factories and companies and jobs that existed when America was ostensibly great, we will go back to being great.  

I couldn't help but think of cargo cults when I read this.

I'm not saying it's the same, but it kinda rhymes.

[arewethereyet]

Got the following notice today regarding the wording to get rid of offensive language in the I-9...at least offensive to tRump and the Magats....Pain in the ass for HR and payroll people everywhere...thank goodness our government is laser focused on the important stuff.


The new Form I-9 has the following changes:

The term “noncitizen” was replaced with “alien”
The term “gender” was replaced with “sex”

[Alan V]

I guess we have just seen that a president with stupid ideas can cause stock markets lose $3 trillion in value in one day. Poof!

[Fake Messiah]

22 weeks apart.



The Economist Op-Ed: "Donald Trump has committed the most profound, harmful and unnecessary economic error in the modern era. Almost everything he said - on history, economics and the technicalities of trade - was utterly deluded."

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Trump’s new tariff math looks a lot like ChatGPT’s

Economist James Surowiecki quickly reverse-engineered a possible explanation for the tariff pricing. He found you could recreate each of the White House’s numbers by simply taking a given country’s trade deficit with the US and dividing it by their total exports to the US. Halve that number, and you get a ready-to-use “discounted reciprocal tariff.” The White House objected to this claim and published the formula it says that it used, but as Politico points out, the formula looks like a dressed-up version of Surowiecki’s method.

In case you weren’t sure, Surowiecki calls this approach “extraordinary nonsense.” So why did Trump’s team use it? Well, like plenty of people who’ve realized their homework is due in three hours’ time, it seems like they may have been tempted by AI.

A number of X users have realized that if you ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Grok for an “easy” way to solve trade deficits and put the US on “an even playing field”, they’ll give you a version of this “deficit divided by exports” formula with remarkable consistency.

https://www.theverge.com/news/642620/tru...laude-grok