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You peak at intelligence in the late teens or early twenties - before you are even eligible to be President. So from that perspective all Presidents have "lost a step" - none of them are as bright as they once were. I think Trump was better at debates in 2016 than in 2024.
I'm not a doctor, so I tend to defer to them for the definition of dementia. Personally I would use a sort of everyday definition - if someone is mentally lucid enough to take care of themselves in the day-to-day. With POTUS, the standard should arguably be higher - "if they can fulfill the duties of the office."
Which plot specifically? I don't see "Trump doing wacky stuff with tariffs" as, by itself, indicative of dementia. But I don't typically watch Trump speeches, so if he was noticeably out of it, the way Biden sometimes appeared to be, I wouldn't necessarily notice. If Trump is actually suffering from dementia then he should step down quickly, before it meaningfully impacts his duties.
Less intelligent decisions are one thing but doing senseless things are completely another.
Trump's dealings with tariffs make no sense. Some people continue to refer to hidden motives but by now we are aware that this is not the case. He is not capable to fulfil the duties and is greatly harming the US. It's only going to be worse with every day. A lot of loyal people will be in denial. Just like many still believe in Havana syndrome as real or something like that. And his election was mostly luck. Democrats hid Biden's dementia and people felt cheated and decided to punish them for this. It just happened that Trump was the candidate. Could have been any other guy. Now people will be even more angry when they realize they have been cheated again.
I dunno. I would have a stronger opinion of this if I considered myself more economically literate. But the basic strategy that seems to be shaping up, as reported, of essentially forcing countries to choose between the US and China does make sense. We'll see if he's able to pull it off.
I don't really think that's true. Keep in mind that the press has sat on really big stories in the past at the request of the executive branch. If (as has been rumored) China was planning to attack Taiwan - and this precipitated some frantic economic maneuvers - I could definitely see "us" being unaware of the story. I don't hold that theory strongly but it's been in the back of my mind.
Why would you use this as an example? (This keeps happening, to me, I swear!)
Almost certainly, Havana Syndrome is real and is being covered up by the US government to smooth over relations with foreign powers and/or conceal the fact that we have and use the same technology. We know how it works (it's a directed energy weapon). It's possible that the symptoms are not even being induced as an anti-personnel attack, but rather an electromagnetic spectrum attack that targets data. President Bush and his family were plausibly affected by this at a summit in Germany (and he wrote about it in his memoir). The Russians have even been reported to have alluded to these types of weapons publicly. There are other incidents, too (such as then-Vice President Richard Nixon being bombarded by extremely high doses of radiation - probably not due to any attempt to harm him, but rather due to a wiretapping attempt) showing that certain foreign powers are willing to irradiate high-ranking US personnel in potentially dangerous ways as part of their espionage programs.
This stuff is all public knowledge and findable on a Google. That doesn't mean that every reported case of Havana syndrome is legit, but there's absolutely zero reason to believe that it's somehow impossible and very good reasons to think it is real.
And rightfully so, if your idea is true.
Yes, it forces other countries to choose China instead of the US. How does it make sense?
If you go to countries and say "we are going to slap you with a massive tariff if you choose China, or a teensy-tiny one if you choose us" it...makes total sense? The US is the largest consumer market in the world – if you are forced to choose between China and the US, all other things being equal, you pick the US every time.
Now, obviously, there's room for Trump to bungle the execution (by making all other things not be equal). But the plan is not crazy.
Teensy-tiny would be 1% or maybe 2-3%. That is practically zero. Europe had tariffs towards the US about 2.5% overall. The EU had an agreement with the US to put tariffs on Chinese electric cars, I think the EU decided on 35%.
It means that the EU has already chosen to be the partner of the US instead of China. Why is he now putting tariffs on the EU? He is punishing countries for choosing the US.
Maybe Trump means something else by “choose us”? From all other talks it could mean that he is not happy about trade deficit and he means that the EU should buy more from the US and not the other way around. I already explained that trade deficits are imaginary problem. In a free market conditions any country cannot force people to buy from the US. You have to offer things for good price for that to happen. You cannot bully customers to buy from you. But he is trying to do exactly that. Even if we could regulate the market to buy more from the US, such intervention is not good, it would make all of us poorer.
I do not think that the tariffs Trump has announced are Final For All Time.
I don't think this is the consensus of economists. At a minimum there appear to be differing schools of thought on it.
This thing is pretty definite. During covid we had a lot of discussions about masks, if they are effective and so on. Cochrane review clearly showed we have no evidence that masks are effective which in other words means that in medicine we don't use them. We use only things that have evidence of effectiveness. You can sometimes use experimentally, but you cannot claim that they are effective. Mask mandates are out of question, just a recommendation for voluntary use.
Yet, a lot of governments and even medical professionals were adamant that masks definitely help. All these different opinions mean nothing. People just don't want to admit the best evidence that we have and follow their own beliefs.
I understand that I am not going to convince anyone. It is just that I haven't seen trustable evidence of the contrary. Economics are different from medicine therefore maybe I am wrong. I still would need to see good reason that would explain why trade deficits are the problem per se.
If you think about it very in very reductive terms, I think it's pretty easy to understand where the potential problem is. Obviously if in your personal life you "import a greater value than you export" (buy things you cannot pay for) you might be In Trouble. It seems, intuitively, to be something like debt - maybe it is sometimes necessary, or sometimes even beneficial, but not something you want to make a habit of.
However Real Life Macroeconomics is not very reductive! So while I can intuitively see the problem with a trade deficit in theory I am not sure how well that actually captures the practice, particularly because "value" is a slippery thing. Maybe that's why I personally care a bit more about "limited autarky" than the trade balance, since I am not yet prepared to try to better understand macroeconomics in anything like a systematic way.
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