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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   33673 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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China has retaliated with 84% tariffs on US goods:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/live-blog/2025-04-08/trump-tariffs-stock-market-updates

Trade war is now on for real.

The trade flow diversions across the globe, who will receive what runoffs and to what effect, will be the most interesting part of these interesting times. One of the most pressing macro-economic questions of the trade war is 'who in the world is supposed to absorb the Chinese exports no longer going to the US?'

One of the limits of a lot of the recent discussion has been that it focuses on the Trump tariffs as a bilateral or even unilateral effect, i.e. how bad this will be for the US specifically. Part of that is understandable- the way you generally try and end a trade war is to sap political willingness from the pursuer, and convince them it's worse for them than pursuing. Totally normal, and I'm not implying that's necessarily wrong on any sort of factual or ethical level, though such arguments do have an incentive to exaggerate. (You can probably find plenty of online threats of, say, the EU cutting the US service exports at the knees in retaliation- instead, the EU so far as gone after certain red state good exports, a fraction of the fraction. This is a strategy tailored for political effect, not maximizing cost, which is what discussions/threats over the service economy exports would have been. However, those are focused more in Blue states, so...)

But what those types of arguments don't address is that the mountains of trade goods and oceans of trade flows will go elsewhere, and when they do that will cause second and third order trade conflicts that don't directly involve the initial party.

Take the US goods exports to China. On page 5 it breaks down various categories by share and volume of trade. While no category measured in the billions of US dollars should be considered 'small', note what some of the larger categories are. Food products. Oil and gas. Basic chemicals. Other forms of input products.

A lot of these are relatively fungible goods, but also where global demands itself is relatively static. If China refuses to buy, say, oil and gas from the US, that doesn't mean that china does without and stops all things that previously used the US export. It means China pays for an equivalent amount of oil and gas from somewhere else, possibly outbiding other market equilibriums for the privilege. Which takes that oil and gas off the market, and leaves the customers who would want them available for... the US oil and gas not going to China.

Now apply this to other categories. If you price-out, say, medical equipment via tariffs, then either you go without or you go elsewhere. If you go elsewhere, then you're taking from that status quo. The American goods are, nominally, available to fill the void. There may be complications- quality standard disputes, language and labeling barriers, etc.- but the underlying fundamental demand (the people who had been willing to buy Good X before China came in and bought it), and the potential supply (the American goods no longer going to china) exists.

At the end of the day, economic actors don't either produce to make maximum products or not produce at all. They will continue to produce as long as even decreased margins are preferable to no income. As long as it makes economic sense for the producers to keep producing rather than shut down, the goods will continue to be produced for the market while substitute transactions are sought. This is why input-producers, such as Russia, are often able to survive disruptions with major established trade partners as long as they have the ability to get their goods to global markets. The former-importer still needs to import something like the no-longer imported [thing], and the former-exporter can now export to whomever the former-importer is buying up the [thing] from.

This substitute process is generally not economically efficient. It costs more, in absolute and opportunity costs. It often gives less profit due to higher transaction costs (though politically-influenced deals are a wild card). This is less beneficial to most people involved, though the intermediaries who can make the connections can make a killing. There will be all sorts of compliance costs to try and access the demand that opened up when China bought out [thing] from [elsewhere], whether it's relabeling to new languages or trying to regulate regulatory approval or whatever else. Not all businesses will be able to survive that transition, and will be bought up or close down when they otherwise would have carried on. The people who say this entails high economic costs are not lying.

But that economic inefficiency does not change that an absolute mountain of goods are about to be redirected and crash into national markets that are magnitudes smaller in scale, and upset the political-economic equilibrium in different ways.

It also is not an argument that is specific to the US. A point was made that the US goods to China were in some respects relatively fungible. People gonna eat and put gas in cars to go to work or fuel factories. Demand for these is relatively inelastic. If China buys food and gas from elsewhere, then elsewhere will want to buy food and gas to make up what they would have been consuming but China purchases.

But if the US isn't buying from China due to the trade war...

Above I linked a product to show the US exports to China. If you looked at it, did you notice anything that ought to have been there, but wasn't? I'll link again. Can you spot it? It breaks down exports by type, exports by US state sending to China, exports volumes...

Can you find the word 'import', and find where it is used outside of the context of what China imports from the US, i.e. US exports?

Here is another (Biden-era) product of exports and imports by category.

Three of the top US import from China categories include-

  • Machine appliances ($268.5 billion)
  • Textiles ($50.3 billion)
  • Misc. Manufactured Items ($69.4 billion)

$388 billion dollars, or $388,000 million dollars, is a significant-but-not-overwhelming amount to the scale of the US economy, which in 2023 the world bank estimated was over $27,360,000*... million USD.

*Edit: used wrong box in first post, corrected. Same point to argument.

But if you sort that wiki-list by size and scroll down, that $388,000 million starts to match and then even exceed, by multiple magnitudes, the GDPs of the smaller countries in the world. Which- if the China-originated formerly US-bound trade flow of manufactured goods has to go elsewhere- are not going to be the only places that good surplus will redirect. After all, countries can't subsist on nothing but machine appliances, market saturation will be reached, which means going to the next markets and so on.

Except, some of those countries like having their own manufacturing economies of their own. And would want to protect their own markets from Chinese dumping. When even the EU is in internal conflict over the implications of the forecasted wave of Chinese products no longer going to the US...

Manufactured goods aren't necessarily fungible in the same way that production inputs are. Arguably if the Chinese had the same sort of tariffs overall as everyone else, they'd keep (or even slightly grow) the same general market share of American imports for these categories as long as it remained a roughly even playing field with everyone else. But the nature of the US-China trade war in particular vis-a-vis the rest is that as the US and China put higher tariffs on eachother, then every exporter-to-the-US isn't hitting the same impact. Americans will still buy goods, even if at higher prices, just not as efficiently. Which also means that those manufactured goods that previously would have gone to [place] because China had such a share of the US market are now subject to go to US as the China market share in the US is up for grabs.

Which also means that there's fewer goods in [other markets] even as China's manufactured goods are looking for a place to go.

Anti-dumping practices exist for reasons, but it's less obvious that it isn't the US most at threat of price-dumping. And while the World Trade Organization has historically tried to discipline anti-dumping practices, the WTO dispute resolution mechanism (i.e. judges to make rulings) wasn't exactly resurrected before Trump came back. Which is to say, there's no WTO authority to make a formal and binding judgement against you, the national politician, taking actions in your national (and domestic political) interest.

None of this is an argument that the US will 'win' a global trade conflageration. Whether you think that's because there is no way to win / that Trump won't cut any deals / whatever reason, this isn't an argument about what will happen for the US. The US outcome is separate from the point.

The point is that the more that China's trade-to-the-US is diverted by the US-China trade war, but still produced by the economic incentives within China to keep producing, the more that will put China into its own trade tensions / conflicts with other states, as it seeks to have them absorb the consumption of China exports that the US no longer is. It's not like China has no cards to play- the rare earths mineral supply chain has been a topic of concern for years, as China has used it to coerce and punish neighbors on various issues.

And that will have its own interesting follow-on effects, both for the success and political dynamics for pressuring countries to accept the export flood not going to the US, but also the impacts to states that resist those pressures. But also the impacts on relations between those countries who took the Chinese exports and their neighbors who might not want the same sort of deal and now face overflow from their neighbors who they previously had a tolerable equilibrium with.

That is the sort of global trade issues that I feel have been under-recognized in the last week's focus on arguing about the American-specific element of the Trump tariffs. It's not all about the United States, and the longer the trade system upheaval goes on, the less proximal the US (and Trump) will be to future, predictable, trade conflicts.

Realistically, there aren't $500B of goods in the warehouses awaiting delivery to the US. The produced stock is not that large.

What I find curious in these arguments is the idea that China rigidly produces some “goods”, as in a fixed nomenclature, rather than it operates factories and employs people who can do much of anything with their capital.

China can absorb this production capacity, but it needn't be the civilian China. They can use the tried and true way of defense spending. Their trade surplus with nations other than the US allows enough margin for that.

One of the most pressing macro-economic questions of the trade war is 'who in the world is supposed to absorb the Chinese exports no longer going to the US?'

Chinese manufacturers will have to find some country, somewhere, that has a GDP roughly comparable to the USA, a growing middle class of hundreds of millions of people, and room to shift from savings to consumption.

The effects you highlight are real and interesting, but the country that will absorb most of the displaced exports is China itself. And that is going to be difficult and straining, even destabilizing.

Chinese manufacturers will have to find some country, somewhere, that has a GDP roughly comparable to the USA, a growing middle class of hundreds of millions of people, and room to shift from savings to consumption.

The effects you highlight are real and interesting, but the country that will absorb most of the displaced exports is China itself. And that is going to be difficult and straining, even destabilizing.

And questionable. I agree it would be the ideal solution for China, but it runs into the issue of the implications of the Chinese property market earlier this decade: the population does not have the room to shift from savings to consumption, due to the literal rooms the household savings were being invested in falling out due to the property crisis.

This was an economic issue that was particularly affecting the middle-class, which had the spare money to try and invest. Hence the relevant policy decision during the post-COVID period to double-down on export-led growth post-COVID, which has somewhat contributed to already-ongoing deflationary pressures that will get worse if no-longer-exported products further suppress prices, feeding into the 'prices will keep going down, might as well hold out' dynamic that creates deflationary spirals.

Right. Trump boosters don’t seem to understand that these tariffs, while recessionary, aren’t going to destroy the Chinese economy. The CCP is already embarking on an extensive plan to fuel domestic consumption. It may well succeed. The economies of South and Southeast Asia are still rapidly industrializing and buying Chinese machinery and cars. China itself is still getting richer.

Most importantly of all, the Chinese have suffered extreme hardship within living memory. Even 25 years ago, they were poorer than any American has been in a long time. The CCP can survive. Americans haven’t suffered true hardship in a century. They haven’t suffered geopolitical humiliation in 200 years. They aren’t prepared. The political system is much more fragile.

Sure, the US losing global hegemony means the end of the US, at least in practice(I would consider federal state failure to be the end of the US if not resolved in <5 years). But does the US actually stand in danger of losing global hegemony? Europe and Japan and SK know they can't go it alone(although they plausibly could if they stand together without the US, but who's going to coordinate that). Avoiding having to kowtow before Russia/China may be more valuable than whatever it is Trump demands.

is a significant-but-not-overwhelming amount to the scale of the US economy, which in 2023 the world bank estimated was over $105,435,000... million USD.

27 trillion, not 105 trillion.

Wrong box copied from for the intended argument, thank ye.

Part of that is understandable- the way you generally try and end a trade war is to sap political willingness from the pursuer, and convince them it's worse for them than pursuing.

The problem is the tariff boosters don't care. They believe in some unicorns-and-rainbows benefit from tariffs that's never going to happen, and they'll continue to believe in it even as it doesn't happen.

People gonna eat and put gas in cars. Demand for these is relatively inelastic.

Unfortunately not. People can eat less and put less gas in cars, because prices have gone way up and/or availability has gone way down. This is called "poverty".

The problem is the tariff boosters don't care. They believe in some unicorns-and-rainbows benefit from tariffs that's never going to happen

I don't think that tariffs are going to result in a magical surge for the US economy, no.

I am happy to accept a net reduction in wealth, even a significant net reduction, as long as we get something in return. A weakened China, a more self-sufficient US, manufacturing jobs for the working class. Something.

If we just get literally nothing in return, not even pain for our enemies, then yeah, that would be a bit silly and that should ideally be avoided. But the PRC online army is calling us bitches and saying that we'll back down because we can't take the pain. So we may have to keep going even if it turns out to be purely self-destructive. Because the one thing you can never do under any circumstances is look like a bitch.

I am happy to accept a net reduction in wealth, even a significant net reduction, as long as we get something in return. A weakened China, a more self-sufficient US, manufacturing jobs for the working class. Something.

We might get a weakened China, in as much as we'll weaken the entire world. I'm not sure why you want manufacturing jobs for the working class -- what difference does it make if they bust their butt in a shoe factory rather than an Amazon warehouse? But you won't get it. Nor self-sufficiency.

what difference does it make if they bust their butt in a shoe factory rather than an Amazon warehouse?

There is one, and it's that one of these can be transformed into an arms factory and the other can not.

That's most likely not why this is being done but it's still conspicuous.

This is one of the worst arguments for tariffs! If we want arms factories, we can just spend 1% of our GDP on arms factories, have some competent individual (I would've picked Elon a year ago but we've seen how that's gone) manage 'procurement' instead of the existing bureaucracies, and we'll have a ton of arms factories. We do not need to make shoes to make missiles.

You can't just tax and spend your way to an independent supply chain for military goods. Small countries have the luxury of doing efficient off the shelf procurement because they don't need to be able to fight China and win. The US can't.

Who's making the electronics in your missile ? Who's making the inputs for those and for every other part of the process? If it's your enemy you're fucked.

I'm not saying tariffs, let alone those tariffs, fix this, but your solution isn't one.

And I know that because it's what France has been doing. We can still make planes and submarines locally, but we don't have enough tanks and small arms to correctly maintain the small forces that oversee our crumbling colonial empire, let alone anything approaching the requirements of mass combat.

Mass can't be just bought. You need to build the factories.

I don't understand the argument here. The thing you are paying for is the construction of those factories. And the factories for the inputs. This is expensive. But so are tariffs.

And you don't need to source literally all of the inputs (for instance the electronics) domestically. China is not the only country we can import inputs from. We have allies.

More comments

An Amazon warehouse is more likely to be transformed into an arms factory than a shoe factory is. Unless your arms are slings and such.

Soldiers need boots.

In 1941 when the US entered WW2 the Endicott Johnson Shoe Company in New York notably took only a few months to pivot to produce military boots, ammunition belts, holsters, gas masks, parachutes and many other leather or textile implements of war.

Today the number of textile based pieces of kit for the common soldier has vastly increased. Body armor, rugsacks, complex sleep systems and multi layered clothing are all common issue.

Being able to make these in large quantities is as important as the metalworks for your guns and shells.

Are either particularly likely to become arms factories?

My guess is that an Amazon warehouse is marginally more likely to, since the building itself would be larger, be better logistically, and have up-to-date infrastructure. But neither would have much ability to transfer either their machinery or skilled labor to arms production.

I guess the shoe factory could easily transition to making combat boots.

I have it on good authority that the professionals also value "logistics" (warehouses, trucks, trains). Which isn't to say that the factory isn't useful, but the ability to ship it's outputs to where they are needed is important too. I'd be watching for investments in navy transport abilities there too.

This is absolutely true. But logistics only matters if you have some outputs to ship in the first place.

People now have to game out the answer to one question:

What does it take for ~85 Republican representatives in the House to vote, with a veto-proof majority, to reassert congressional control over tariffs? I say the House because I think if it gets to that point in the House, the Senate will probably be fine.

  • How far do Trump’s ratings have to fall that they are no longer afraid of retribution?

  • How far does polling for the party have to fall that they are worried for their jobs, even in erstwhile deep red districts?

It's gonna be tough, because they don't just have to be worried for their jobs, they have to be more worried for their jobs via general election than via primaries. It takes a lo to make primary voters disregard Trump saying 'THIS TRAITOR KILLED OUR BEAUTIFUL TARIFFS! VOTE HER OUT!'.

I took a crack at answering here. Willingness to veto obviously depends quite a bit on the specific policy being vetoed, not just Trump's approval rating, but I'm guessing Trump's approval rating would have to fall to somewhere between 36% on the very upper end and 28% on the low end for the house republicans to start turning against him in those sorts of numbers.

It might take more than that because there is actually a fair bit of support among Democrats for what Trump is doing.

Where? Do you have examples?

What would motivate Democrats to support what Trump is going on tariffs?

Opposition to free trade and a belief that it has cost Americans good jobs.

Either pure "never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake," or "absorbed too much leftist radiation about economics." Or a bit of both. There was this tweet, for example.

I’m actually bullish on this happening. People are already shitting themselves and we haven’t even begun to feel the inflation, layoffs, pullback in consumer spending etc.

Even Trump cannot survive 10-20% inflation, layoffs, market meltdown, etc. when all it takes to rebound it is either get rid of him or take his tariff power away

I think you're underestimating the extent to which people can fail to accept that Trump's trade policies are the cause of any bad economic effects and the extent to which they can fail to accept that the bad economic effects are even happening.

I’m literally watching the goalposts move in real time. It’s infuriating.

One of the great things about setting the bar at "economic apocalypse" is that you can back off to merely raising prices a bit while failing to achieve any your stated goals and still claim victory.

Certainly possible. My prediction rests on the assumption that we are about to see economic catastrophe worse than 2008. That’s my take at least.

If that doesn’t end up happening and we instead just have something like Covid or an average recession then absolutely he will ride out the term.

But I simply don’t see how if we have financial oblivion Trump survives. There are too many powerful elites that will also be impacted and even the average GOP voter will revolt and turn on Trump if the bread and circuses are gone

Who is going to do it? The Republicans either agree with him or don't have the cojones. The Robed 9 won't save us (they could, with the major questions doctrine, but Roberts is going to enjoy whispering "no")

There’s all kinds of fun options depending on how bad it gets.

There’s already 7 GOP senators trying to take his tariff power away and nothing tangible outside the market has even happened yet. Elon is calling other members of the inner circle retards for their trade policy (proxy shot at Trump).

Most realistic scenario is that congress just votes to take tariffs away and overrides the veto. If there is blood in the streets even a GOP congressman will be loyal to his constituents who are mailing him death threats and threatening his political career forever. And it’s much easier to swallow just taking back tariff power over an actual impeachment or something.

If it gets really bad, like Great Depression bad, I would bet my life savings he gets JFKed or has a mysterious heart attack/plane crash/take your pick.

You simply cannot survive as a politician in America if you fuck with the economy to this extent. We already see the campaign ramping up, Jamie Dimon and other financial bigwigs are pressuring Trump (first option in the toolbox) but if he continues to go full retard they will take the other tools out too.

How many politicians were assassinated during the COVID lockdowns or during the Great Depression?

A couple in the Depression. More if you count local politicians, conventions, etc.

Not so much during COVID, perhaps because, you know, it wasn’t that bad?

This asshole tried to kill a judge in 2020, but it was some sort of unhinged #MeToo grift instead of a COVID thing. And then there was this random act of schizophrenia in 2023.

But really, violence is rare.

If you believe the FBI, there was that plot to kidnap governor Whitmer.

Well, the plot existed, even if it was developed at the Hoover building.

The COVID lockdowns made the rich richer than ever before as infinite money was ploughed into pumping equities and real estate, why would they have been unhappy with that?

The lockdowns caused a massive plunge in the stock market. There was a recovery, but I don't see how that could have been caused by money printing. Printing money doesn't affect the real prices of assets.

Elon is calling other members of the inner circle retards for their trade policy (proxy shot at Trump).

Well, if Elon wins and gets Peter Navarro fired, that would be great, but it ain't going to happen. The problem is that Trump likes tariffs. Without Navarro, maybe he'd have less-stupid tariffs (still damaging but not Great Depression damaging), but he's going to be inclined to go with his tariff-friendly advisors over Musk on this.

Most realistic scenario is that congress just votes to take tariffs away and overrides the veto.

The non-MAGA members of the GOP don't have the cojones. They never did, that's one of the reasons MAGA won in the first place.

If it gets really bad, like Great Depression bad, I would bet my life savings he gets JFKed or has a mysterious heart attack/plane crash/take your pick.

The Deep State will like the Great Depression; the last one is what created them, after all.

The Deep State will like the Great Depression; the last one is what created them, after all.

Idk about this, but I do wonder the extent to which Democrats will be tempted to let Trump shit the bed for two or even four years given that the ensuing backlash could create the environment for New Deal-era levels of political dominance. If the question arises they can't credibly choose not to step in, but in ways the best case scenario politically is for mostly-Democratic majorities in Congress to try to stop him and then a majority of the Republicans prevents the overriding of his veto, which prevents them from trying to shed the Trump legacy down the line. Indeed, when there was shutdown talk Nate Silver said Democrats should stop trying to be the adult party and just let Republicans take ownership of their own messes.

ensuing backlash could create the environment for New Deal-era levels of political dominance.

I doubt you're going to get that. It's much more likely you'll get an equivalent to what's going on in the UK right now.

The UK already had multiple medium sized political parties though, I don't know the odds of that situation coming to be in the US (though it would be good).

Up till now MAGA has been neutral to positive for the average American. Trump didn’t really do anything that’s impacted Joe Six-pack and if anything has delivered some wins on woke and DEI. And his tax cuts broadly benefited Joe Six-pack in the short-term as well.

So the only real reasons to oppose Trump have been “he’s vulgar” or political games like Jan 6 that democrats also played. Or you’re a woke lib who hates him on principle.

But now all of a sudden people are staring at GFC part 2 with the potential for much much worse. Joe Six-pack will get annihilated with inflation and might get laid off too. And whose fault is it? It’s 100% on Trump and everybody knows it.

All of a sudden even conservatives are like “wait a minute wtf” and that will lead to political pressure on Trump from essentially all of America except the most diehard of his base (and how many of them are diehard enough when they are about to lose their homes and a t-shirt is $50?)

Two questions. With the second question being-

'When the Trump tariff rollback doesn't happen over the next two years, what next?'

Great new American golden age, Don Jr selected as presumptive next nominee (all other contenders drop out), Amazon buys Truth Social for $20bn cash in exchange for slightly reducing tariffs on China and Vietnam (15%)

GOP gets destroyed in the midterms, Supreme Court gets scared of getting packed in a future Dem trifecta and starts limiting Trump in a big way, lamest of lame duck final 2 year presidencies, woke coalition return to power not out of any competency but because Trump screwed up so badly (85%)

Even if the GOP ultimately gets destroyed in the midterms, I think there will be a GOP pullback well before then, probably beginning at the end of this year, assuming, of course, that the tariffs stay in place. As the effects are more fully felt, I think Trump's intransigence on the issue may cause some of his supporters in congress to see the writing on the wall. You can guarantee that some otherwise safe seats will have primary challengers basing their entire campaigns on tariff policy, particularly in districts where losing the seat to a Democrat is a real possibility. The Republicans who are currently standing with Trump will have a hard enough time getting reelected already, and will have to pull back in order to have any chance of salvaging their careers. This is doubly true if Trump's approval ratings tank among Republicans, at which point supporting the cult no longer scores you any points.

one other interesting twist on all of this is that Trump is extremely old. This is not a charismatic 40-year old who has the potential to cement his rule for a decade+. Trump is inherently a short-term politician, and if he starts being a short-term loser then it’s a lot easier for people to jump ship. There is little chance he stages some kind of comeback in the future after this which would cause people to doubt if defecting now will come back to bite them later.

Full on communism European style socialism once the democrats take over. And they don't eliminate the tariffs either.

A veto-proof majority? Not gonna happen in any realistic scenario. I doubt Trump's approval rating will drop below the high 30s for any sustained period of time, he just has that much of a lock on the Republican base. Trump has also invested quite heavily in purifying the party from all critics. He's been much more focused on that than any durable policy goals. With all that in mind, Republican legislators (beyond a few dissidents) will not broadly from Dear Leader.

I doubt Trump's approval rating will drop below the high 30s for any sustained period of time, he just has that much of a lock on the Republican base.

Would you take even odds against Trump's approval rating falling below 37% for at least 30 consecutive days before the midterm elections according to yougov's data?

Looking at Trump's first term approval ratings, the 37% mark is close to where I'd put the 50-50 at. But 1) I make a habit of not betting on prediction markets unless I have a decent alpha, and 2) Trump is one or two standard deviations more buffoonish this term than he was in his first term, which needs to be factored in. I could probably barely be persuaded to make an even-money bet at 35%, and I'd feel genuinely good if I could make the bet at 33%.

I probably put the 50/50 around 35% rather than 37%, but it does seem like we're actually pretty close in our assessment of how things are likely to go in terms of approval rating.

That said, the actual number to watch is "how many reps can go against Trump without being voted out". If Trump's approval rating drops to 35% or 37%, that indicates that his enthusiastic approval rating is probably a fair bit lower, which means that at least some republican reps will be in districts where less than half of the republican voters are enthusiastic Trump supporters. I pulled down 10 representatives at random from the House website and then did a vibe check of how Trump-aligned they were and whether they could/would oppose him if he got unpopular.

  1. Rep. John Carter (R-TX-31): 90/100 Trump alignment, voted to challenge 2020 election results, deep-red district. VERY NO
  2. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-IA-1): 65/100 Trump alignment, won by razor-thin margins in a swingy district. YES
  3. Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL-21): 90/100 Trump alignment, Trump campaign co-chair, voted with Trump positions 90.6% of time. NO
  4. Rep. Troy Downing (R-MT-2): 80/100 Trump alignment, Trump endorsee, deep-red district. NO
  5. Rep. Brian Jack (R-GA-3): 95/100 Trump alignment, former White House Political Director for Trump NO
  6. Rep. Tracey Mann (R-KS-1): 85/100 Trump alignment, election challenge supporter, fundraised for Trump's "election defense fund," VERY NO
  7. Rep. Sheri Biggs (R-SC-3): 75/100 Trump alignment, won despite opponent having Trump's endorsement. VERY YES
  8. Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL-7): 80/100 Trump alignment, Trump Defense Board appointee but also military connections, swingy district. POSSIBLY
  9. Rep. Zachary Nunn (R-IA-3): 70/100 Trump alignment, competitive district. YES
  10. Rep. Robert Wittman (R-VA-1): 85/100 Trump alignment, wanted to overturn 2020 election. VERY NO

So if Trump became deeply unpopular (and a 35% approval rating is pretty deeply unpopular, even end-of-term Biden only dropped to 38%), I think at least 3 and maybe 4 of these 10 reps would oppose Trump if he was pushing to do something deeply stupid and unpopular. With 218 democrats and 223 republicans in the house, you'd need about a third of republicans to flip... and it looks like about a third of republicans could flip if there was a compelling enough reason (and "compelling enough" is quite a bit short of "literally Hitler").

I'd personally do my napkin math from the Cook PVI instead.

I'd break Republican Reps into the following buckets

  • Won in blue districts, and very susceptible to breaking from Trump: 3 Reps
  • Won in districts that are R+0 to R+2, moderate-high susceptibility to breaking from Trump: 13 Reps
  • Won in districts that are R+3 to R+5, moderate-low susceptibility to breaking from Trump: 23 Reps
  • Every other Republican Rep: 181 Reps

So I see what you're saying as fairly unlikely. Trump would have to do something truly cataclysmic to get a third of Republican Reps to fear losing re-election more than Trump coming after them with a primary challenge. The 2022 midterms showed Trump would gladly prioritize eliminating "traitors" over actually having Republicans win. Purifying the party is something Trump has always shown very consistent determination in doing, far above any actual policy goals.

Cook PVI seems useful from a contestedness-of-district perspective. I do think Trump-alignment-of-winning-rep matters too, especially in cases like Sheri Biggs, who won in SC-3 over her Trump-endorsed opponent Mark Burns. SC-3 isn't contested at all (72% R), and so your analysis would put her as "low susceptibility to breaking from Trump".

Keep in mind that Trump would have to do something pretty bad to get his approval ratings all the way down in the 35% range. For reference, his approval rating is currently sitting at 45% (and within-Republican-party approval rating sitting at 90%). So I agree that as things stand now, representatives mostly can't oppose him.

But the question is what happens when 25-30% of his own party disapproves of what he's doing. Once we're conditioning on him doing something bad enough that his loyal base stops being so loyal, I think the set of safe actions for house representatives changes too.

doubt Trump's approval rating will drop below the high 30s for any sustained period of time

Probably true, but even a 55-45 margin in Presidential elections implies a landslide. Bush/Dukakis was 53/46.

How far do Trump’s ratings have to fall that they are no longer afraid of retribution?

There is no realistic number at which this is true. Trump only needs to maintain a majority of the primary voters, not a majority of the country, or even a majority of Republicans.

The nature of Trumpism is that a GOP revolt is going to look more like various advisers being ousted and Trump having new handlers put in. I don't think open confrontation will happen. The GOP establishment has consistently shown that they lack either the ability or the courage to do so.

Trump's problem is that a big chunk of his passionate supporters are retirees with 401ks. These people have something to lose. Up to this point, Trump's suck-it-Libs style hasn't come with a tangible cost. It was all pwnage and upside. My Trump-loving family has fallen conspicuously silent in the runup to RV season. I guess we'll see.

Trump's problem is that a big chunk of his passionate supporters are retirees with 401ks.

A 30% drop in a retiree's 401k is "it's going back to 2019 levels" due to the massive amount of inflation (also 30%) the previous government caused protecting this particular group at everyone else's expense.

And I think a lot of shy Tories Trump voters know that. And no, that doesn't make paying back taxes any less fun; I believe that Trump made it as fun as such a thing possibly could have been. But the missing money needs to come from somewhere, and if it doesn't come at the sole expense of the youth of the country for once that's the biggest step forwards for this country in almost 60 years- bonus points if they remember that.

Perhaps, but I genuinely believe that most Trump supporters will not blame his tariff policies for resulting economic damage. The stock market is fake anyway, the woke (((financiers))) are manipulating prices to make Trump look bad. Reports of inflation are either fake or price gouging by greedy businesses. Unemployment numbers are fake or just lazy people who don't want to work.

I think maybe you underestimate how normie a lot of these people are and how often they check their portfolios.

We're both guessing.

80% of voters don't vote in midterm primaries as compared to 63% in the 2024 general. Assuming that all of the primary voters did vote in the general, essentially 1/3 of the general election voters voted in the midterm primary. So within that slice of voters in Republican primaries, as long as Trumpists maintain 50% control, you can't win a primary. Even if the anti-Trump candidate would do better in the general, or even among R voters who don't show up, it doesn't matter because they'll lose the primary before any of those people get a vote.

There’s certainly a never-say-die subset of true believers but I doubt that’s even the majority of the coalition that elected him in November. I think most people were voting against democrat incompetence on inflation and illegal immigration in that order.

If trumpflation ends up being even worse than Biden’s and comes with stagflation and layoffs to boot, I can easily see a new GOP coalition that unites around “Trump but minus tariffs”. And there’s a very clear and straightforward process to make that happen, just need the veto-proof majority in congress to take away tariff powers and let Trump do whatever else he wants

You're confusing units of analysis. We're not talking about the coalition that elected him in the presidential general election; they only need to be an effective majority of the Republican primary voters in the midterms. Which is a much smaller and more motivated subset. It doesn't even need to be a true majority, just a sufficient plurality that you'd need to run the table otherwise to win the primary.

I don’t think you can talk about ‘handlers’ in Trump II. Trump I had handlers of a sort, in that Trump was new to politics and there were seasoned veterans who just flagrantly hid documents from him and ran things while he postured. Trump II doesn’t have handlers. Surely (?) there are still some ultra deep state CIA types in Langley with things that never get shared with Trump, but that’s not the same thing.

The old-guard GOP establishment helpfully defenestrated itself when Liz Cheney led her failed useful-opposition ploy with the post-Jan 6 hearings. That may have been courageous by a certain standard of courage, but it was also foolish by the standard of remaining politically relevant within the GOP, and led to both a direct diminishment and further party-base skepticism of the neo-liberal wing that she was a part of.

If Trump's attempted coup wasn't the time for her to stand up, what situation would be more fitting?

After an actual coup attempt would probably have been more fitting.

Every bet that the GOP will finally break with Trump has been wrong.

Intellectually, I know there has to be a point but I can't put my own money on it.

I imagine it's the same for actual Republicans.

It’s coming. You can’t just nuke the market in America and expect to survive politically. It will take time but nothing Trump has done up till now has really been bad economically, so it’s easy for GOP to hang on because he kept the money flowing and people remember Trump 1 as a great time for the economy. But if all of a sudden we have GFC Part 2 and it’s 100% attributable to his actions he will be toast.

Not sure how trustworthy this is as a proxy but the comments section on Wall Street Journal articles was a MAGA shithole up till a few weeks ago. Now it’s full of people with regret and complaining about their investments and how Trump is a buffoon, etc. Once the mass layoffs and 10-20%+ inflation hit it will be over

My concern is that he'll crash the economy then provide some form of long-term inflationary "relief" right before the midterms which enough voters will attribute to him actually knowing what he's doing that Republicans aren't totally screwed in the midterms.

DOGE checks? Dollars to donuts Trump can just mail them out before the judges intervene.

There really isn't a lot China needs to import from the US. China mainly buys airbus jets and China has already been cutting back on American goods. China imports 140 billion USD worth of goods from the US. These tariffs are on about 0.1% of the global economy and people act like the sky is falling.

What I find most interesting is how many on the left have come out as supporters of free trade. Historically opposition to free trade has been a corner stone of left wing politics.

There really isn't a lot China needs to import from the US.

Other than food.

Getting food from America might be the cheapest way to do so, but there's no shortage of countries they could import it from.

The relationship between the Left and some specific foreign economic policy has always been complicated. So too on the Right.

You likely grew up as I did with the position of any side on this matter being that of their general disposition towards the whole of the neoliberal program, but it needn't be so. Except for free traders the tendrills of ideology are not so deep as to constrain pragmatism in this particular matter. Even among libertarians you shall find a non trivial amount of people who consider high tariffs to be entirely justifiable.

Historically opposition to free trade has been a corner stone of left wing politics.

This is nonsense. Protection was the High Tory's cause throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, where Lloyd George and even Keir Hardie were free-traders - Hardie's words:

Free Trade is the free exchange of commodities between different countries. Trades Unionism is the combination of workmen to protect their own interests against the employing class - there is nothing whatever contrary to the principles of Free Trade in Trade Unionism

Even in America the identification of the cause of protection with the left and the Democratic party is a phenomenon only of a few decades of the post-war period. Extending left and right into the 19th century may be slightly anachronistic, but in the second half of that century the groups most closely associated with protection were bankers and factory-owners.

Significantly, we didn’t have full suffrage at that time. Left vs Right was (very broadly) businessmen vs gentry.

Once we had full suffrage, the Liberal party was defenestrated and we got protectionist command economy vs free trade.

I've seen a few people over the last couple days claim that "Trump has good instincts". And that's true; and it's also one of the most positive things you can say about him. The goals are good, you can kinda see the vision, but the execution is so haphazard and reckless that the only conclusion you can draw is that he's operating on pure instinct, rather than anything approaching a calculated and rational plan.

All of Trump's "earth-shattering" foreign policy moves are things that, on a fundamental level, I think are good things. I think we should pull out of Ukraine and have friendlier relations with Russia. I think we should move some amount of industrial production back to America and become more self-sufficient in general. I think we particularly need to reduce our dependence on China, because we shouldn't be so dependent on our foremost geopolitical adversary; a full embargo is a reasonable goal to work towards.

Drastically reshaping existing alliances and trade relations is fine; but at the end of the day, we still do need friends and allies. We can't go full juche. Starting a trade war with every country on earth simultaneously was probably not the most advisable way of going about things. He could have worked to get more countries on board with his new world order before dropping the tariff nuke on China.

Maybe his calculus was that the only way to reshape existing trade relations was to just rip the band-aid off, because otherwise governments and businesses would have just eternally dragged their feet. Maybe he reasoned that he only has 4 years, and if he doesn't act NOW he'll miss his window of opportunity. Or maybe he just doesn't think at all and he just acts on whatever impulse he's feeling at the moment.

How is China more of an adversary than Russia?

Far bigger economy and military (aside from nuke count, which is rapidly rising) = far more credible threat to depose the US as hegemon.

That’s the weird thing to me. I get he wants to appear willing to go to the end to get what he wants. The tit for tat with China accomplishes this. Why not with the other countries that came forward asking for a deal announcing a pause while negotiating. China gave you the perfect opportunity to make your threats real whilst giving a carrot to the others who play ball.

Maybe his calculus was that the only way to reshape existing trade relations America was to just rip the band-aid off, because otherwise governments and businesses would have just eternally dragged their feet.

As a general rule I'd say his attitude is the above. If you slowroll any policy it will just give the opposition time to bog things down, or so the thinking goes.

I think it was JD Vance that said they've set themselves a target to accomplish as much as they can before the mid terms.

One of the many problems with this is that if investors think that tariffs will be reversed in two years, then you won't accomplish any reshoring. You'll just slow down the economy for two years.

What I find surprising is that he didn't attempt to destroy a specific economic area at a time. Europe is so uniquely vulnerable and without allies that it would have provided an easy target, but doing total trade war on the whole of the world is audacious.

My only explanation for this is the one you propose: that he only has a limited opportunity to do this and that locking it in is more valuable to his agenda than the fallout of a rushed policy.

Jesus christ. Futures respond instantly down 100. RIP my money.

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