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The US-Canada trade war is
offonoffonoff! Retaliatory 50% tariffs on steel and aluminum that is. The rest are still on.Even if Canada agreed to become a US state, Congress wouldn’t go for it because it would permanently cede every national election to the Democratic Party. Surely someone has told Trump!? Disregarding statehood as the {only way to stop this}, I’m guessing steel factories take longer than 4 years to build. An agent of chaos indeed!
So, what is the off ramp? The US annexes Canada and changes its name to Canada? Border state republicans take away Trump’s
toystariffs until he can play nicely? Global depression? Or the continuation of flip flopping tariffs to placate boredom?https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/11/trump-raises-canadian-steel-aluminum-tariffs-to-50percent-in-retaliation-for-ontario-energy-duties.html
Is this an example of the introduction of aesthetics into political life? How about this? I'm pretty sure I could provide additional examples, but let's start with these two.
Could you lay out a general case for what the "dislocation of politics from materiality and its fusion with aesthetics" means? My understanding would be that politics stops being about concrete facts and rational analysis, and instead becomes about nebulous, likely irrational beliefs. Would that be accurate?
It seems to me that this perfectly describes a large majority of politics for as long as I've been paying attention, which is decades, plural at this point. I strongly dispute the claim that any of this is a novel creation of Trump or his supporters, and assert that the reason you are noticing it is some combination of less-polished execution and a more acute situation.
I understand that my claim here is isomorphic to a low-effort dismissal, but that is not my intention. To the extent that this is an accurate description of a real problem, the problem did not even remotely stop with Trump, and it certainly will not end with him.
Trump represents a difference in kind. Whether he is a fascist is the sort of question that generates more heat than light and so is not a terribly interesting question, but certainly his actions and rhetoric toward a US ally and fellow Liberal democracy are totally illogical, nonsensical, amoral, and speak to a man who has an extremely inaccurate model of the world and/or thought processes that are not coherent. This is not an alike thing to e.g. Having a snappy propaganda-esque poster of yourself made as per your counterexamples. Previous presidents/administrations have been anchored in reality (and morality) in a way that Trump et al are not. Donald Trump is showing himself to be everything his opponents feared, and everything his proponents denied. At this point I think everyone who was ever accused of TDS is owed an apology.
I know that you see Trump as your last, best hope against woke and progressivism, and so you use your intellectual horsepower and debate techniques honed here in themotte to carry water for him. But there is no intellectual basis for trumpism, and your attempts to create one is nothing more than sanewashing. Tracingwoodgrains had the right of this: as true as it is that Harris was a soulless avatar of The Machine, Trump was unworthy of defeating that machine.
I know that you will never agree that Trump is a piece of shit, if for no other reason than you see it as bad tactics. But I would hope that, at least, when you are alone with your thoughts, you might idly wish that your philosophy had a better spokesman.
Let me try to cut right to the chase. I can confirm much of what you say here.
Yes, I do wish that my philosophy had a better spokesman. Certainly. I'm concerned about how Trump's behavior has seemingly become more erratic since his first term. I wouldn't say I'm "alarmed" yet, but I am concerned. I don't in any way support his aggressive rhetoric towards Canada. Maybe he's going senile, maybe this is just what he always would have been like in the absence of guardrails, I don't know. It's not ideal.
But nonetheless my support for him remains. The anti-woke vote is always the correct vote, full stop. That's basically the long and short of it. I mean, these people literally can't help themselves. They can't stop themselves from hating white people. They're running around with their hair on fire about the collapse of the rules-based global order and yet they still manage to find the time to get their jabs in at white people. Any action which decreases the cultural and institutional power of these people is ipso facto correct, even if it's risky.
So, yes, I'd prefer a more competent figure at the helm. But if Trump's the best anti-woke option we've got then so be it.
I had a brief look at that article and honestly couldn't help thinking there's something weird about calling a country independent while also implying it's unconditionally entitled to international aid to keep hundreds of thousands of its own citizens dying from AIDS.
Yeah, if this were the peak of the Cold War, an antagonistic nation would probably spurn Western aid.
Heck, if you swapped the name of the President in the headline, you could even argue that we "punished South Africa for independence" during Apartheid. Now, granted, the main consequences of the embargoes on South Africa were things like "Israel is one of the only countries they can trade with" and "there's basically no foreign-made shows on TV besides The Sweeney," and possibly not things like "AIDS will ravage the population."
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