Cause otherwise midterms discussion will be scattered around a bunch of separate Culture War thread posts. And it's nice to have more off-the-cuff rapid reactions in a dedicated megathread.
The first thing I've noticed so far: if the exit polls are correct, Americans are very pessimistic about AI.
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Americans have much too short of attention spans. The idea of re-onshoring ultimately would have paid dividends for America, but changing the business environment such that people would choose to make things in America is probably a decades long process. He couldn’t have possibly done it in 2 years.
Likewise fixing international issues. Asserting and projecting power is not an overnight thing. Again, you need at least a little time to fix the problem.
Maybe, maybe not. But in reality it went like this:
Trump: I know you don't want to do this, but I'm going to try to make you build in America.
Businesses: Even if I wanted to do this, it takes years to plan to build factories and millions of dollars. China has optimized their industrial pipelines for this. U.S. can't compete with that and we'd just lose money as Chinese products would be massively cheaper everywhere outside the U.S. if not in the U.S.
Trump: I'm making you pay more to import everything, effective immediately, until you build a factory that takes years to build.
Businesses: We're just going to pass the cost onto consumers and continue to import. This is still cheaper than onshoring and you'll be gone in 4 years max.
Trump: *surprised Pikachu*
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Americans didn't want international issues fixed. Anything other than a Venezuela resolution would have been a negative, and Iran was a dumb own goal.
And if you want to make big long term changes, well, you should probably either avoid starting contentious foreign wars, or achieve some sort of buy-in from most of the country. Trump had a very limited mandate, he did a lot outside that mandate, and handled that mandate in a dumb way, and this is not a shocking result.
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But also there are visible costs in the short term that the government seems to have had no interest in, and resultant long-term problems that the government doesn't seem to have had any interest in mitigating. For example, hobbyists can no longer legally buy drones from China, or which use Chinese parts.
In theory, this is the first step in creating a big beautiful American drone industry. However, the replacement American manufacturer is shoddy, way more expensive, and focused on military use. It is also part-owned by Trump's son. And it uses American labour, so even in the best case scenario the prices are never going to be as good again. Even in the best case scenario, hobbyists (plus photographers etc.) aren't going to be able to buy DJI-quality drones for years.
Yes, it's not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. But for this group something they liked has got suddenly worse, it's going to be worse for a while, and there is no guarantee it's going to get better. Scale that up 100x and you have a lot of annoyed people.
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