I thought trump didn’t like taxes?

And does it grant you immunity from accidentally being deported? Or intentionally for that matter ?

I feel like using percentages would be more meaningful. The Dow Jones peaked at 381 just before crashing in 1929. So using absolute numbers can’t be compared because the entire DJ wasn’t worth the drops we are seeing today.

I in 1929 it lost~10-12% on its worst days

So far Trump is losing ~5% approx each day

It’s not exactly a stellar endorsement. I’m only saying that you are comparing things at today’s dollar value, when the value of currency changes over time.

This Wikipedia page shows that the worst days by percentage are not where we are yet.

However… Rank, President (AFFILIATION), date, DJ, Point loss, %loss

1 Reagan ®, 1987-10-19, 1738.74, −508.00, −22.61%

2 Trump ®, 2020-03-16, 20188.52, −2997.10, −12.93%

3 Hoover ®, 1929-10-28, 260.64, −38.33, −12.82%

4 Hoover ®, 1929-10-29, 230.07, −30.57, −11.73%

5 Trump ®, 2020-03-12, 21200.62, −2352.60, −9.99%

6 Hoover ®, 1929-11-06, 232.13, −25.55, −9.92%

7 McKinley ®, 1899-12-18, 58.27, −5.57, −8.72%

8 Hoover ®, 1932-08-12, 63.11, −5.79, −8.40%

9 T. Roosevelt ®, 1907-03-14, 76.23, −6.89, −8.29%

10 Reagan ®, 1987-10-26, 1793.93, −156.83 , −8.04 %

All republicans. I note that the biggest daily gains were also republicans but most of them are related to the big drops e.g a day, week or month later, so they basically tank the index then the index recovers some time later.

I was having this thought myself but am not familiar enough with international trade to know. It seems to me that bringing down trade barriers outside the US allows coutries to more easily find alternative trade partners to fill the void left by abandoning us ones. It also brightens the effect on America because they won’t be able to hold as many businesses hostage.

Firstly, does he really think it’s going so great over there that wealthy people think it’s worth $5M to get in? More likely they will just wait for the fire sale and buy up the land cheap.

Second if you have 5 mil, do you need to go there for work?

All you need to do to not need the chlorine wash is to not treat the animals so badly that they shit all over each other due to lack of space. Improve their welfare improve the product, but no. Dollars come first.

I did not mean the toddler thing as a insult, but as an analysis. I genuinely think he can only think in straight lines. Any complexity escapes him. While I agree on the dictator stuff, I do think when he implemented a tariff it’s because he thinks that it will either result in businesses setting up in America, or foreign companies paying. I think he thinks it is a genius move and that he has not thought through all of the possibilities. So although saying he thinks like a toddler like an insult, I didn’t mean it like that. And I will also point out there is a difference between saying he is acting like a toddler to saying he thinks like a toddler.

Boycott Mercedes anyone??

The man thinks like a toddler. “If I put tariffs on goods from other countries, other countries will have to pay to do business here and America will become rich, we are the biggest market so they have to live with what we demand”

He doesn’t think the rest of the world can stand without them or he doesn’t think that reciprocal tariffs will hurt America as bad as they hurt us.

First every company has a cost to produce goods. Typically they cannot go below this. That means putting the tariffs on finished products means the only way non US companies can continue to sell in the USA AND pay the tariff, is to raise the price to the US buyer. If the buyer is the consumer then shit , things get more expensive. If the buyer is a manufacturer based in the USA buying components from abroad, then they have to spend more to built the product, I.e their cost goes up and, shit, things get more expensive. That means the consumer gets hurt or the USA business swallow some of the pain but ultimately both get hurt, because the cost of the goods may become prohibitively expensive reducing the demand. Manufacturing overhead increases as a result so either the company has to fire the newly idle staff or the price goes up. Price goes up and fewer sell again and it gets stuck in a death loop for the business unless it is an essential product that people have no choice but to pay for.

Now the other side of it is that he thinks that imposing the tariffs mean everyone in the USA will buy American and it will be good for American business. Except the USA doesn’t make everything it needs nor can it, at least in the short term. It is not simply a matter of switching suppliers to USA suppliers on the 5th of April. It is a matter of there being no alternative. Any prospective USA based supplier would have to set up a factory, tool up and gain experience in the manufacture of every tyoe of product all of which takes months if not years. Or foreign companies have to establish manufacturer at the cost of millions in a highly volatile country where the rules change on a daily basis. Also any company from overseas is at risk of having any employees who are not white Americans being detained or deported by ICE. Not what could be called a safe bet, or good investment Either way, by the time US suppliers come online the businesses that rely on those parts will very likely have gone under through the increased costs levied on them.

In the mean time, the world outside America is bigger. It will hurt us too, but I expect trade barriers to come down in the rest of the world and non-US manufacturers will be able to find alternative suppliers to the US ones they may currently use.

I was thinking devices like iPhones may become too expensive for people outside the US until I remembered they aren’t manufactured in America, but with all the boycotts which will be exacerbated by reciprocal tariffs, I expect business is going to become very hard for American companies outside the USA.

If I were an American company right now I would be seriously evaluating moving outside the USA. Losing the US market is less harmful than losing the ROTW markets.

At the end of the day, there is an arrogance in these tariffs that says the world needs American goods and services more than America needs the world’s goods and that we will cave before America. We all crave our McDonald’s and Coke and Netflix and Teslas so bad that we’ll give in and play by trumps rules. He thinks that there will be short term pain for long term gain for the USA, but I think it will be like that for the rest of the world and America is in for long term pain.

Ultimately America won’t be the biggest market very soon, because buying power is going to go off a cliff and I think for Americans, it’s going so stay down there. There will probably come a course correction in a few months time when the pain has become so bad for Americans that they demand heads roll. When that happens I don’t think the ROTW is going to just say all is forgiven and go back to how things were. More likely this will cause lasting damage to the US and it’s businesses and the rest of the world will adapt to avoid working with an unstable partner.

You know how sometimes your get so frustrated at someone you struggle to eloquently articulate your dislike of them because there are so many facets to that dislike. This is how Elon makes me feel these days. I struggle to put it in the simplest terms.

It really bothers me that he thinks he deserves pity while denying it to others. It bothers me that his attitude towards money comes from never having had to worry about it. It bothers me that he thinks that he can take actions that threaten people’s livelihoods and even their lives and expects to be loved for it. It bothers me that the only way he can rationalise why people hate him is that they have brainwashed or paid by the left rather than having legitimate grievances with him. It bothers me that he thinks if you aren’t a billionaire it’s because your are lazy/don’t deserve to be and that their hard work is not equal to his. Lastly it bothers me that I don’t know if he genuinely holds these positions or if he just uses them as justification to do horrible things.

I’m not trying to be a nay-sayer, but what does this actually achieve?

He’s not disrupting a vote. He’s only talking. While I’m all for the Democrats doing something this doesn’t actually achieve much. Chick Schumer had a chance to actually disrupt this administration but he didn’t.

So I am genuinely asking, if the Democrats are not preventing the Trump administration from pushing bills through e.g if this were a fillibuster, how does this help?

In MAGAland everyone except George Soros agrees with trump and musk and the only possible reason that people don’t, is bribery

You’ve clearly got an axe to grind so I’m gonna leave it here and let OP debate with you if they choose to

Culture can mean different things but the way I read the original post was that the culture being talked about was specifically the arts, and the main discussion about it was clearly censorship.

So the fact that Europe has a violent and bloody history is not relevant to the point that was being made. It is also a fact I don’t think anyone in Europe would want to deny either because if we ever forget the horrors of war we are doomed to sleep walk into another.

There is only a double standard in OPs post if they were trying to pretend Europe has never been violent, but they didn’t address that, they talked about aspects of censorship.

I think the point was more about the double standardz on violence in censorship than it was about whether each region actually is or had been violent. As a famous US show, South Park pointed out almost 30 years ago in 1998…

“horrific deplorable violence is ok as long as nobody says any naughty words”

I’m neither American nor Canadian , but I just wanted to offer up that the worry I think comes with age. When I was 9 the Berlin wall came down. Before that, there was a constant spectre of nuclear war hanging over the world thanks to the cold war. Our parents lived through those times presumably worrying while I as a child was blissfully unaware of what the cold war really meant. When I was 11 the gulf war started. Again I knew about it, but I didn’t really understand what terrorism was or what was happening in Iraq. Then in 2003 gulf War 2. I was a little more tuned in to politics by now, so I was a little more concerned about it but it was still something happening far away. By the time Russians invaded Ukraine in 2022 I had a daughter. This time although it was a far away war, I was glued to updates, scared for the future of my daughter (and myself). I wonder if back when the cold war was going on if our parents were similarly worrying and freaking out when we weren’t looking.

I dont want to downplay the threat, but people have had the exact same thoughts and feelings we are having before and on those occasions it worked out, ok. Not for everyone of course but for the western world. That gives me faith that even though there are bad people doing bad things, humanity on the whole is good. Maybe there are peaks and troughs along the way, and maybe we are going through a trough right now, but I am hopeful that a self correction is coming that will start us climbing back up to a peak.

I mean, she has a hugely important job. Leaking details of an attack plan is as bad as it gets but if she can’t remember details like this a mere two weeks later, she isn’t for for the job either.

How can she make operational decisions if her memory only goes back less than two weeks???

In the normal world everyone on that chat would be fired but we are in Trump world now so everyone just shrugs.

Nixon would never have stepped down if watergate happened in today’s world.

If he is really concerned with security he should fire Waltz as proof

I meant any incoming administration in 4 years would have to win big in all 3 houses to demonstrate to the world that this 4 years was unwelcome and unexpected. Incidentally that’s also what would be needed to effect the change BUT. A sizable proportion of the US electorate has shown an appetite for what is happening and historically the republicans always seem to do better than they should despite all the horrible shit they do. So I don’t have faith that the next election would go as we hope.

In 2024, despite, or maybe because of his first term, Trump won the popular vote, and project 2025 was also not a secret.

So the question would be, what reform or reforms would convince the rest of the world the USA wouldn’t pull the same moves again?

Donor caps? Media regulation?

The problem is not just getting trump out in 2028, it’s keeping his followers out in 2032, 2036, 2040 etc.

With respect, it will take the US a lot longer than 4 years to rebuild the trust that has been destroyed. Even a return to the norms of the last 75 years, while it would be welcomed by the traditional allies, would mean nothing if it can be reversed so easily again in 8 years and sharing secrets and cooperation with an “ally” like that is dangerous.

Foreign policy changed radically in a matter of weeks. The US is no longer predictable or reliable.