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Notes -
Trump tariffs McDonald's:
BBC article for a more detailed overview.
Highlights or lowlights include:
I'm not an economist, but I don't think it's a good idea to throw out tariffs with such clear absence of rigor. The only saving grace is that Trump is fickle, so if enough people yell at him from his in-group, he might pivot in a week. If not, bloody hell.
This makes it even worse. Running world super power on feels, making the fate of the world depend on how well the Imperator slept today, is unsatisfactory.
This shows once again that populism, meant as politics without theory is not a solution.
Answer to bad map is good map, not throwing away all maps and just running around in circles.
There is a theory, you just don't like it.
In fact I find this criticism unsettling because Trump's love of tariffs is about the only position of his that is purely ideological. The man is a mercantilist, campaigned on mercantilism, told everybody of his fondness for McKinley and his policies in multi hour podcasts, has openly held this opinion since long before his first presidential bid and somehow people still think he's a headless chicken running around without an agenda.
At some point I'm going to have to start assuming people just don't listen to him.
He's prone to lying (and unserious, unnecessary lying at that) and people feel they have to sort of piece together what they think he means this time.
The things Trump says are sufficiently horrible that SOP for his supporters ever since 2016 has been saying "Take him seriously, not literally" and calling out people who take him literally as TDS sufferers. And now he is in power his opponents who are not doomposters have been using the same approach as cope. The only people for whom "Trump is just as bad as he says he is" is a comfortable thing to believe is the minority of his supporters who are straightforwardly malignant, and professional Blue Tribe doomposters.
Trump said he would blow up the global economy with tariffs. His opponents said he would blow up the global economy with tariffs. His non-retarded supporters said "Lol TDS - of course he won't actually do that." He is now blowing up the global economy with tariffs, and his non-retarded supporters are split between the ones still claiming that he doesn't mean it and this is a madman strategy negotiating move (and repeating his lies about the tariffs other countries impose on the US in order to do so) and the ones trying to reverse ferret into "Actually blowing up the global economy is good."
The model "Trump is as bad as he claims to be, but the damage was limited in the first term because of GOPe moles in the administration" has an increasingly good track record of making correct predictions. But most people don't want to make correct predictions, they want to appeal to readers. And right now everyone who can read wants to believe that Trump is not as bad as he appears to be - so there is a lot of demand for theories where Trump does not mean what he says.
The amount of time spent on using Trump's trade policy as the reason why he's horrible was approximately zero. Probably because it would make his opponents look schizophrenic or sociopathic.
Ok bro, so are you taking that bet about Trump's third term, or not?
Right, it's been mostly about how he's a fascist or how taking down DEI is evil or taking down government organizations that have turned into permanent patronage machines is evil or how he shouldn't expel gang members from the US or a million other things he's doing that either are actually good or at least are normal bad politician things only declared unprecedented because Trump. Some of his dumber economic ideas (like no tax on tips) his opponents instead adopted.
If the Democrats had credibly run on better economic policies, it would have been a very different election, but also a very different Democratic party.
In Trump's first term, he did pretty well economically. Big corporate tax cut, and while his tariffs were still dumb there was usually some sort of reason behind them. Sometimes he even got the concessions he claimed he wanted. This new tariff structure is just ruinous, to everyone.
I'm no sure it's such a hot idea either, but the victory lap was unwarranted, imo.
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