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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2798 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 6, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Is Trump actually just cooked now? There is absolutely no way his tariffs don't cause major pain through huge inflation (the thing people voted for him to fix!), layoffs, and the return of stagflation. I mean these tariff numbers are absolutely eye-popping.

2 arguments I can steelman for the tariffs:

  1. Give it time, the incentives will slowly lead to a resurgent manufacturing sector.
  2. These tariffs can be re-negotiated and Trump is using door-in-the-face technique to extract favorable terms.

For 1, maybe true but almost certainly would take years if not decades. Meanwhile stock market is 50% of peak, boomers' retirement and everyone's 401k has evaporated in a puff of smoke, layoffs that ripple through almost every industry as consumers pull back on spending and the engine of America's economy (aforementioned consumer spending) grinds to a halt. In other words Trump is toast because nobody is willing to suffer through that for 4 years, let alone 4 months. Republicans get annihilated in midterms unless Congress takes back tariff powers from the executive. The one thing you can't do in America is fuck with the economy, it's the raison d'etre of the entire thing. And this can't be blamed on vague macro factors or credit default swaps, it's entirely traceable to Trump and his tariffs and everybody and their mother knows it. Even a child can understand what a tariff is conceptually.

For 2, also maybe true. But the uncertainty will lead to R&D pullbacks, depressed investment, and FUD all over the place as long as Trump is in power. This argument and scenario is the optimistic case. But even here you're again fucking with the American raison d'etre. Stability, certainty, relative lack of political shenanigans with the economy are a large part of the reason everybody and their mother wants to invest in America. If you take that away all of a sudden America doesn't seem so attractive anymore. Economy probably chugs along but either way it's nothing like Trump's first term and voters again have a very obvious catalyst for their economic malaise.

Honestly I don't see how Trump or Trumpism survive as a political force. DOGE was a farcical disaster which didn't even touch SS, medicare, or the military and consumed massive amounts of political capital, and now Trump is basically going full retard and strapping on his suicide vest as he wages jihad on the American economy. Trumpism's political capital is deep in the red now, and we haven't even begun to feel the tariff pain. If he actually keeps the tariffs and Congress doesn't wake up and take that power back, I'm not even sure the guy makes it to 2026.

Is Trump actually just cooked now?

Betteridge's law of headlines? It seems like we ask this question every few months about some new problem and it is never true. I've been wrong about it over and over, so I'm going to take the pro-Trump side here:

Trump maintains an iron grasp on the GOP. It resembles a holding company structure: he might not ever have a majority of the country, or a supermajority of the GOP, but he has a sufficient die-hard MAGA base within the GOP primary electorate that he can exercise total control over the GOP, and in a two party system every time the GOP is in power Trump is in power. The non-MAGA GOP political establishment lacks either the ability or the courage to get rid of Trump, no other figure within the MAGA movement has anywhere near the gravitas or the cojones to betray him. The core MAGA base is essentially immune to being persuaded by outside information, having constructed their own information ecosystem, and as long as they control every GOP primary, no one will turn against Trump.

In MAGAland, we're about to enter the era of the Woke Capitalist Wrecker. Most of the "facts" involved will be sufficiently mediated by human intervention that they can easily be blamed on ideological foes. Stock market going down? Woke (((Financiers))) are manipulating prices to try to force a panic and foment opposition to Trump. Companies aren't hiring because Woke executives want a recession to drive down wages for real Americans. Woke Capital is refusing to invest in obviously profitable American manufacturing because of their opposition to Trump. It's all a plot, and as soon as True Patriots are put in charge of the economy, things will turn around, the Trump Plan cannot fail, it can only be failed or betrayed. We may even see actual threats against executives, or even a few attempts at investigations of woke capital for political interference.

Alternatively, we might get the Same Puppet with New Strings. Trump might not lose power, because of his totemic importance to his base, but he could jettison a pile of advisors, and bring in new ones, and totally reverse his policy choices. It's happened before: Trump might not be cooked, but this flavor of Trumpism might be.

Finally, we might just be stuck in a two player game where somebody has to win. The Conservatives stayed in power in the UK longer than their expiration date, because Corbynite Labour was persistently unelectable. The Democrats don't seem to have much of a message here, and a timely rape or riot could throw enough culture war fog into the mix to cause the Democrats to trip over their own dicks and fail to capitalize.

So, I think there are plenty of scenarios where Trump isn't cooked. He could get out of this in a lot of different ways.

I mean my hunch is he lost in 2020 to Biden in large part because of Covid economic woes which were largely not his fault. In 2026 if we’re in a recession that’s directly attributable to him and the Republicans who enabled him, so the fallout will be much worse, and if Congress flips that will basically hamstring him until 2028.

But just a hunch and I don’t follow politics as closely as many of you so curious what people think of this.

I mean not to relitigate, but the economics of COVID was the least concerning part.

Stock market going down? Woke (((Financiers))) are manipulating prices to try to force a panic and foment opposition to Trump.

Comments like this don’t help dispel that impression:

With uncertainty emanating from DC, some on Wall Street say it’s time to send an unambiguous message to the president and his team: Don’t buy the dip.

Stocks are cheaper than they were a week ago, so it’s only natural investors may take a break from the sell-off and load up on some bargain assets. But going into dip-buying mode risks rewarding Trump for playing chicken with the global economy. Like training a puppy, you sometimes need a negative correction if you want it to stop peeing on the rug.

”We need this market to crash — to keep the pressure on the administration,” Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research, told my colleague Matt Egan on Monday. That is a frankly shocking comment from an analyst as prominent as Yardeni, who also happens to have a Ph.D in economics from Yale.

Oh I've no doubt there will be plenty of evidence.

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