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Have they actually gotten implemented though? I keep hearing that Trump keeps kicking the ball down the road on them. Which is a pretty classic negotiating tactic - hit people with sticker shock, and then walk it back.
I am still very very suspicious that some of the motivations behind the Tariff Whiplash Phenomenon is Secret Sauce Stuff that will come out in 1 - 40 years. Not confident, just suspicious. (There seem to be other plausible explanations.)
Either way, I don't really think Tariff Whiplash is really good evidence that Trump has dementia (I suspect he has lost a step but isn't suffering from a mental illness if that makes sense).
People have been expecting Trump comebacks all the time and somehow he always did. At least with elections, he still had his genius. But ultimately everyone succumbs to old age and loses everything. It is very hard to accept the ultimate demise but with Trump it is now. With Biden most people including Scott Alexander managed to live in denial until the end of his term. Could happen the same with Trump.
How would you differentiate “lost a step” and “suffering from dementia”? Dementia is exactly like that, initially mildly losing a step, with some better days and some worse days. Trump has always been very erratic and that's why many people don't notice. But if you are able to separate his rhetoric, you could see that now he has lost a plot.
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.
The Trump administration advances multiple mutually exclusive theories justifying high tariffs:
The problem is that you can't have all three. If tariffs are a negotiating strategy, you're agreeing to drop them in exchange for whatever concessions you're angling for, negating their use as industrial or tax policy. If they're revenue raisers, you're counting on Americans continuing to prefer imports over domestic consumption, so there goes industrial policy. If they're industrial policy, you're betting on Americans switching to domestic production and thus not replacing revenue.
There are other problems, as well. For example, the Trump admin not having any coherent idea of what they're looking for in a trade deal (in no small part because Trumpian trade theory makes no sense), so trade talks are floundering. Anti-Chinese coalition building is not consistent with trying to shake down your trade partners. ISI has a terrible record (I mean, who doesn't look at Argentina and think it's something to aspire to). Not to mention, the entire endeavor seems to be rooted in either a delusional belief that the US can reclaim post-war era style manufacturing supremacy despite radically different global economic conditions or just straight autarky.
Even being maximally charitable and assuming there's a serious plan behind all this, the Trump admin being so high-handed and transactional towards allies is absolutely the wrong way to go about negotiating the creation of an anti-China trading bloc, especially when they're also badly overestimating the strength of the US' position. The US already benefits substantially from the present global economic arrangement, so going to your trading partners and saying "give me more, also cut off your biggest trading partner who produces a bunch of difficult to replace inputs for your domestic industry" is a tough sell. Doing it in an aggressive and insulting matter further undermines the goal by invoking national pride.
If you wanted to build an anti-China trading bloc, you would probably try to carefully negotiate a multi-lateral trade partnership with other critical trade partners in a way that encourages trade to shift away from China rather try trying clumsy threats and hoping for the best with bilateral negotiations.
I feel like I've been hearing this line more and more lately :V
I...don't think this is true. It probably is true that you can't maximize the benefits from all of them. But having tariffs at all creates a protective effect and generates revenue, unless they are so high they cut off all trade (which might happen in one or two categories but ~never happens wholesale).
I'm not privy to the talks, so I don't have a strong opinion on them.
I think the US negotiating position is quite strong. I don't know that I would have been as bellicose about all this as the administration is reportedly being, but I think the current administration basically (and, sadly, probably correctly) sees the US military and economic arrangements as part of a whole cloth arrangement. The leaked Signal chats were very instructive in this regard. And so the US can't just threaten to tank your economy (which they absolutely can do) they can threaten to cripple your national security structure as well.
Please note: I am not saying threatening to do this is a good idea, necessarily. But I am saying I think the US has a lot of leverage. Not that you should weigh my opinion on this stuff (particularly economics) very strongly.
Hmm, yes, it seems like DJT is trying to have his cake here (TPP) and eat it too (protective tariffs). I'm not even sure that's impossible, but it will almost certainly mean compromises will have to be made. Alternatively, Trump tried to have protective tariffs and then pivoted to a less ambitious program when the stock market panicked.
In Trump's shoes, I would have tried a much slower approach, with gradually ramping up tariffs to smooth the transition (this would be less abrupt and painful whether your goal is industrial policy or dealmaking, so it seems like a straight-up win). That seems very obvious to me, which is part of why I can't shake the suspicious feeling Secret Sauce Stuff might be involved. But there are other plausible, perhaps much more plausible explanations for the apparent urgency.
To the extent that you pursue any one of those goals, you sacrifice the other two. And that's being charitable and assuming there are actual benefits and these policies don't just make America poorer and weaker. Raising enough revenue to replace income taxes requires extraordinarily high tariffs without a decrease in imports (good luck). Trading partners are not going to accept radically asymmetric tariff arrangements, so if you're conceding tariffs as part of trade negotiations, you're effectively dropping the tariffs and any attendant hypothetical benefits (i.e. returning to something approximating the status quo after torching a bunch of good will).
I suppose one could reconcile tariffs-as-industrial-policy with tariffs-as-tax-policy if one supposes that the economic boom from ISI policy will be so massive that even with massive hikes in taxes on imports, people will still consume enough imports to generate a substantial amount of revenue. This is a) not credible b) under Trumpian trade theory, a bad thing.
Frankly, the most honest pitch would be that this is just right-wing degrowth policy - arguing that poverty is an acceptable tradeoff for certain intangible benefits (for left-wingers, it's environmental protection and anti-capitalism; for Trumpists it is the reestablishment/reaffirmation of certain social hierarchies). The Trump administration seems to willing to make this case, though I don't know that they realize that's the case they're making.
The problem is that this is an iterated game, which the Trump administration seems to forget. After decades of acquiescing to US preferences on a range of subjects, suddenly the US comes to you and says "You've been taking advantage of us. Give us more." Worse, their demands are irrational or incoherent - their primary grievance seems to be that their consumers buy more stuff from your producers than your consumers do from their producers. The 'deal' they're offering is that you should give American good privileged status in your domestic markets while they tariff your products at home and that you should cut off your biggest trading partner.
Not only is this a shit deal, you're also going to ask yourself "what about next time?" (and, if you're someone depending on US security guarantees, "do I believe they'll actually show up if the shit hits the fan?") The US is a valuable market, but it's not so valuable that you can't live without it. Especially if they plan to shake you down on the regular and you're starting to doubt they can be counted on in a pinch.
Were they?
Has Trump ever done anything to make you think 4D chess theories are plausible and not cope? Trump had an anti-China trade deal on his desk during his first term. He vetoed it.
Oh, no, I don't think this is fully possible under the current state of affairs. You might could substitute some income, but the welfare state is too vast to fully replace. But there's a difference between "replacing income taxes" and "generating revenue." I (contra Trump, I guess) am very skeptical the former is possible without some major changes but the latter seems like a no-brainer. Like I said, I agree you can't maximize the benefits of all three. I just don't think it's right to suggest that e.g. a protective tariff will generate zero revenue.
I've heard people Smarter In Economics Than Me suggest a Trump economic boom over the rest of his term (this was after the tariffs came down), but their theory was that it would come about due to deregulation. They weren't exactly fans of how the tariffs were handled.
Maybe this is what the administration is doing, but do you not buy into the concern about outsourcing our industrial base to China at all? (I don't think that situation is quite as dire as is often suggested, but that doesn't mean we should ignore the problem, does it?)
Sure. As I said,
Although, with that being said, I do suspect the US probably could delete-from-existence some European nations. The question of whether or not the US has leverage and whether or not it should use that leverage (or how it should use that leverage) are different in my mind.
Did you read them? Some of the most interesting discussion revolved around the question of if the US should commit valuable military resources to reopen a trade route that largely does not influence US trade. Pretty interesting to see that the administration at least seems to be thinking about this (or at least some members, specifically Vance, seem to be).
There are a number of good moves his administration made in their first term, I think. Whether or not that counts as "4D chess" is up to you, I guess. But the idea that the government acts based on secret information isn't, I don't think, proposing a novel theory of government action. "Secret Sauce Stuff" motivates government action all the time, from standing up Space Force to killing Qasem Soleimani to locking China out of the US power grid. One analogous example might be US actions against Huawei (which were undertaken under the Biden and Trump administrations). The US has targeted Huawei directly on the basis that they are a security concern, and certainly there are public reasons to think this, but I am sure FVEYS has Secret Sauce reasons as well.
Now, I'm not sure that's what's going on here. I don't think that Trump or his administration is above making mistakes. But look, when Trump says "I'll put massive tariffs on China if they go to war with Taiwan" and then less than a year later does this, amid some (perhaps overstated) warnings from the DoD that China is targeting 2027 as a kick-off date for military action against Taiwan and at least one unsubstantiated rumor that their timeline is even shorter, it does make me suspicious, yes. I think we should all be open to the possibility that the solution might be Just That Obvious even if we don't think that's the most likely alternative.
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