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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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If Trump cared so much about business interests, why would he go around raising and lowering tariffs willy-nilly? He only cooled on that when the stock market had a meltdown.

If Amazon had a choice, would they opt for 'tariffs' or 'don't hire illegals'? Surely it would be the latter. The latter would barely even affect share markets short or long term.

Because Trump earnestly believes that tariffs are ultimately good for (American) businesses. That’s the whole reason he’s doing them. He might be wrong about that, but that’s his motivation.

You misunderstand it's not about business interests, it's about not getting bogged down in court cases and media battles for the better part of a decade until some future admin shuts the whole effort down. Either win or lose now instead of losing for sure down the line.

Amazon can easily weather tariffs by passing the price on to the customer, a labor shortage is much more dangerous to them. Both directly in terms of delivery and indirectly through market share. If Amazon starts paying American wages while providing American working conditions in their warehouses companies like Costco and Walmart might start edging in on their turf.

Eh, there’s a good chance Amazon literally couldn’t staff itself at current levels without illegals, whereas they can pass tariffs onto the customer pretty easily. Amazon already offers a better compensation package than is normal in blue collar labor markets and their dominance relies on fast turnaround times that require big workforces. I haven’t seen internal numbers, but they’re probably way more scared of a potential labor shortage than of cost increases.