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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Notes -
Trump has always been a good candidate, but sucked at being the president. Trump I was Trump being restrained by the GOP and pissing the electorate off in four years. Trump II managed to convince everyone the restraints were the problem and speedran the process in two years.
Inb4 people explain to me the attack on Iran was instigated by the neocons, not the magahats. Yes, and Trump still fucked it up worse than Dubya ever could.
There is just very little ability to operate anymore as POTUS and contrarian and flakiness is high.
Trump is the only POTUS I’ve loved and it’s now apparent that America can’t be governed. He’s largely delivered on campaign promises and got crushed.
Yeah, turns out sometimes people like hearing your promises but don't like the reality you deliver. His whole immigration approach was maximum spectacle to rev up his base while not pissing off business. Turned out nobody liked the combination of lots of tear-jerker moments, maximal chaos, and minimal improvement. And the Iran War was just not a campaign promise. He very clearly did not follow through on his proposed foreign policy there. There's no possible way to spin that fiasco as america-first, the electorate isn't interested.
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*
Im not saying that he’s doing so in the perfect way, but unless it actually costs more to import, there’s no incentive to build in America, and to hire Americans. It’s just basic business, unless it costs less to build and hire in America than to import, the business community will build in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, China, Mexico, or El Salvador. Your underwear comes from El Salvador because it’s much cheaper to build in El Salvador, hire Salvadorans, and ship to America than it is to build in America and hire Americans. Increasing the cost of imports is part of encouraging American manufacturing, probably would work if they had done other things to lower costs to build and hire in the USA — tax breaks or rebates, preferential treatment in getting government contracts, and so on. But it doesn’t change unless the cost of imports goes up enough to offset the cost of American manufacturing, it doesn’t happen.
I already understand the reasoning, but the reasoning doesn't work.
Offshore production is massively cheaper. If Trump's tariffs make a product 10% more expensive to import but it would cost 50% more to make here, then making it here is still competitive suicide. Especially if they sell the product outside the U.S. and their product has to compete internationally with China.
My hobby is board games. Board games are already a product that barely makes a profit. A board game producer laid it out. Board games involve a lot of different custom pieces. Most factories aren't set up to handle that, but China is. The ones that are, wouldn't want to take the job unless they produced several thousand minimum, far greater than the board game is expected to sell. As this is a luxury good, if you raise the price people won't purchase it. Effectively, to even try to comply with Trump's plan would kill their business.
My message here is you don't get points for effort. A half-assed attempt is worse than doing nothing, and costs a lot of people their livelihood and doesn't even get you closer to the outcome intended.
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