If you look at those tariffs from the PoV of economic and external policies, they sound a lot like “I’ll shit myself so others will need to smell it”. They’re a bit harmful to other countries, sure, as each lost one reliable trading partner; USA, though, lost all of them.
And yes, all of them. Even governments and businesses from countries not deeply affected by the tariffs are seeing USA as a high risk partner, looking for alternatives, and at least my country (Brazil) is deepening ties with China.
But I digress. I think that what’s going on is about USA’s internal policy; if you put it side-to-side with other things like
- forcing businesses to call the Gulf of Mexico by some esoteric name;
- harassing universities;
- removing government staff based on political allegiance; etc.
then you realise that it’s all about loyalty towards Trump himself and his agenda. This taco-haired clown is trying to keep himself and his buds in power forever there, and for that he needs support.
“I’ll shit myself so others will need to smell it”
That’s incredibly on-brand for Trump in so many ways.
That’s also White America in a nutshell. Racists will shit themselves just so the black person would smell it. Makes sense though, trump campaigned on racism and hatred… and won.
White America
Can we not overgeneralize an entire race-based demographic when we’re trying to make fun of racists?
Seems kind of, I dunno, racist?
For fuck’s sake people.
Edit: To be clear, this is on brand for Trump and his band of sycophants, magats, whatever you want to label them. Just don’t try to label an entire skin tone as belonging to his support group.
The problem I have is that there’s no endpoint that will convince people that this isolationist/protectionist way of thinking is harmful to their own interests. England still isn’t going to admit this about Brexit. Let’s see how America fares.
People (… who don’t want to admit that he’s a home-grown disease) love to talk about how Trump is a Russian asset.
… But like. Have we considered that he is a Chinese asset instead?
China seems to really benefit from his shenanigans. Everyone is snuggling up to them while the US are fucking about.
I think he’s most often called a Russian asset because he has multiple apparent connections to the Russian government. Just looking up ‘trump Russian ties’ brings up multiple different articles detailing ties which connect Trump to Putin. It’s not necessarily proven, but the general view in media at least is: if trump is a foreign agent, he’s a Russian one.
Trump would not allow his VP call the Chinese “peasants” if the president is a Chinese asset.
It’d be really weird if he was a Chinese asset as he is pretty damn sinophobic
There’s been memes on Chinese social media since at least 2020 calling him Comrade Chuān Jiànguó (川建国) and saying he’s working to destroy the US to China’s benefit. Chuan is just a sinicized form of Trump and Jianguo is a given name from the first decades of the PRC (Trump’s generation) that means “to build/found the [Chinese] nation”
im oki with working with china peeps. they seem a bit more reasonbl than US politics… ~
(im obv spitballin, jus a dum lil grmn ovr here)
I mean for years now (at least since Obama) the US has been trying to destroy the WTO piece by piece as the fundamentals of the WTO do not align with the US trade policies and do favor China. So they wanted an organisation that favours the US. Obama started it by blocking the appointment of WTO appellate members, leading the WTO to being nothing more than a construct not able to enforce its rules. Trump kept that blockade and started a trade war with China, but since he needs attention he did this very publicly. When Brandon came around, he kept what Trump did as a meassure against China and kept the blockade alive, he was just quiet about it. Now Trump came again and saw it’s still standing and did set up for the final blow, but did it in such a castastrophic clumsy way… the plan of replacing the WTO with another US centric organisation is now as unrealistic as it could be.
