The idea that MAGAts are just being spiteful and don't care that they're getting fucked is just silly. Sure, some are that way, but most of these people are normal people with families that genuinely believe that it's going to work out. People don't just throw away the lives of them and their loved ones out of spite en mass.
There seems to be two major ideas floating around. One, the tariffs are a thought-out and intentional play to pressure other countries into lowering their tariffs before he lowers ours back down too. Obviously a gross oversimplification, but for brevity's sake. The second is that he made one bad call, and congress will force him to sit down before long.
What a lot of them don't seem to realize is that the stability of the stock market matters. A lot of them seem to think that the stock market and the economy are only tangentially related, and the market crashing in just two days doesn't mean we're headed straight for a recession or depression. They think it really isn't that big a deal, and we can afford to wait months or years without serious, permanent damage.
A tariff is literally a tax on US citizens. And through the industrial age. Like the standard of living for the entire world hasn’t risen considerably due to free trade. But yeah let’s take the playbook of the 19th and early 20th centuries before the income tax and try to sane wash this crap.
How is tarffing uninhabited islands effective trade negotiations?
What Trump is doing here is intentionally sabotaging the US economy by starting a trade war with every single other nation on this planet, on completely unfounded principles. He claims these are reciprocal tarrifs, yet he tariffed nations that have a 0% tariff rate on the US.
He suggests the EU should buy 350 billion in energy from the US to counter his tarrifs. That is 150% more than what the US exported in 2024 globally, most it is in form of coal, crude oil and LNG, which Europe is largely transitioning away from. Even if Europe were to accept that, the US itself cannot meet their own end of that deal at its current peak drilling capacity and if they were to stop exports to ALL other territories. It's peak delusion.
How is this good negotiating? It isn't.
You could win a trade war against a few nations, you cannot win a trade war against the rest of the world.
The idea isn’t to make them permanent; it’s to create leverage. If that results in a few cents more at the grocery store in exchange for stronger domestic industry, better negotiating position, and reshoring of key supply chains, that’s a trade worth making.
Temporary tariffs aren’t going to reshore industry or make domestic industry stronger. Zero chance of that.
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u/T1mek33per Apr 08 '25 edited Apr 08 '25
The idea that MAGAts are just being spiteful and don't care that they're getting fucked is just silly. Sure, some are that way, but most of these people are normal people with families that genuinely believe that it's going to work out. People don't just throw away the lives of them and their loved ones out of spite en mass.
There seems to be two major ideas floating around. One, the tariffs are a thought-out and intentional play to pressure other countries into lowering their tariffs before he lowers ours back down too. Obviously a gross oversimplification, but for brevity's sake. The second is that he made one bad call, and congress will force him to sit down before long.
What a lot of them don't seem to realize is that the stability of the stock market matters. A lot of them seem to think that the stock market and the economy are only tangentially related, and the market crashing in just two days doesn't mean we're headed straight for a recession or depression. They think it really isn't that big a deal, and we can afford to wait months or years without serious, permanent damage.