A one-word answer explains. Can you figure it out?
Why the Trump Tariff Merry-Go-Round Won’t Stop
Robert B. Zoellick, U.S. trade representative (2001-05), and deputy secretary of state (2005-06) explains in a WSJ op-ed.
Please consider Why the Trump Tariff Merry-Go-Round Won’t Stop
Anyone trying to make sense of President Trump’s tariffs is missing the point. The conga line of trade negotiators will keep dancing because Mr. Trump will continue to use tariffs to exert dominance, signal threats and make deals. There won’t be a new end state. Tariff numbers will keep fluctuating, prices for goods and investments will be unreliable, and agreements won’t last. But the damage to America’s economy and strategic interests will persist.
The president has cited various goals for his disorderly deal-making. He wants to cut bilateral trade deficits, open foreign markets, protect favored U.S. industries and restore manufacturing. He also wants to raise revenue and in some instances simply punish others for a perceived offense. His administration leaps from one rationalization to another to justify the boss’s most recent whim. But Mr. Trump won’t be pinned down. He believes uncertainty adds to his power and wants the freedom to bully others depending on what has his attention.
Consider the president’s dismissive treatment of the most important trade pact from his first term—the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement. Canada and Mexico, our closest trading and investment partners, can’t rely on Mr. Trump’s deal.
As a former reality TV star, the president enjoys signing papers and waving them before cameras. He likes announcing concessions and deals. He revels in the appearance of winning and moving on to the next episode. The rest of his government scrambles to discover the terms of the deals, sorting through the exceptions and side bargains—before the merry-go-round spins again. Enforcement will depend on Mr. Trump’s attention span and his latest fancy.
After World War II, the U.S. viewed economic and security policies as complementary. When America’s allies and partners succeeded, they added markets for U.S. producers, lowered costs for consumers and companies, expanded growth, and enhanced America’s security. During these years, presidents took advantage of the attractive power of the country’s flourishing economy and society while keeping America on the competitive edge.
By contrast, Mr. Trump relies on coercive power. He views economics as a zero-sum contest for a fixed pie of resources and wealth to be divided up through his deals. Ironically, the interdependence of America’s allies enables Mr. Trump to menace them more than possible foes. In contrast, he has been cautious with China, which made a plan to hit back effectively, especially through controlling exports of vital minerals.
Mr. Trump’s trade policies and uncertainty will impose costs over time. Prices will increase. Washington will misallocate resources to less-competitive sectors. Productivity will slide. Other countries will be less willing to rely on American policies and companies. The costs might be offset for a time by other aspects of the U.S. economy, such as investments in artificial intelligence, data centers and energy. But America will be dissipating economic power, resilience and competitiveness.
Mr. Trump’s tariffs and chaotic trade policy will yield a mishmash—not an international system led by a more powerful and attractive America.
The Word is Power
The single word that describes these events is power.
Trump respects North Korean leader Kim Jong Un despite the fact that North Korea is an economic basket case.
Q: Why?
A: Kim Jong Un has absolute power, and Trump believes he deserves the same power, over everybody and everything.
Trump wants to control the Fed, pick the head the BLS, decide who should be the CEO of Intel, fire economists at Goldman Sachs, and modify the constitution at will.
Trump even wants to control what exhibits are on display at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Air and Space Museum.
Zoellick says “The President likes tariffs because they allow him to exert dominance.”
Dominance is a good word too, and so is control. Full credit for any of those.
Other descriptions include economic illiteracy and extreme narcissism but they miss the mark of what I was looking for.
Economic Illiteracy
Trump’s economic illiteracy starts with his belief there is a winner and loser in every deal.
The fact is, if two sides agree to a deal, in the absence of coercion, then both sides think they benefit from it.
Trump has disrupted this normal deal making process with demands that he always be the winner. The irony of the setup is Trump’s deal demands are very often counterproductive to the US.
I can only imagine the howls if a Democrat president did these things.
Trump acts just like the Soviet Central planners (or more recently Kim Jong Un). Economically speaking, how did those work out?
The worst part is Trump treats allies worse than China. The bigger the ally, the more the pounding.
At the top of the ally pounding list is Canada, followed by Mexico.
Trump Statements on USMCA
- August 21, 2023: The highly anticipated Des Moines Register Poll of Iowa Voters is just out: “DONALD TRUMP HOLDS COMMANDING LEAD In First Test of 2024 Republican Caucus Field.” Remember, I got the Farmers 28 Billion Dollars from China, the USMCA Trade Deal (& many others!), saved Ethanol, Social Security, and MediCare, & got Iowa “First In the Nation” status. Nobody else could have done this. Anyway, I’m at 51%, a 31 Point lead over “farmer hating” DeSanctimonious, with the others gaining on him, but not on me!
- February 15, 2020: RT @WhiteHouse: President @realDonaldTrump’s USMCA will have a tremendous effect on GDP!
- January 30, 2020: BIGGEST TRADE DEAL EVER MADE, the USMCA, was signed yesterday and the Fake News Media barely mentioned it. They never thought it could be done. They have zero credibility!
- January 29, 2020: USMCA is a cutting edge state of the art agreement that protects, defends and serves the great people of our Country. Promises Made, Promises Kept!
- January 29, 2020: USMCA is a massive win for American manufacturers and auto workers!
- January 16, 2020: One of the greatest trade deals ever made! Also good for China and our long term relationship. 250 Billion Dollars will be coming back to our Country, and we are now in a great position for a Phase Two start. There has never been anything like this in U.S. history!
- December 10, 2019: America’s great USMCA Trade Bill is looking good. It will be the best and most important trade deal ever made by the USA. Good for everybody – Farmers, Manufacturers, Energy, Unions – tremendous support. Importantly, we will finally end our Country’s worst Trade Deal, NAFTA!
- December 19, 2018: Mexico is paying (indirectly) for the Wall through the new USMCA, the replacement for NAFTA! Far more money coming to the U.S. Because of the tremendous dangers at the Border, including large scale criminal and drug inflow, the United States Military will build the Wall!
- December 13, 2018: I often stated, “One way or the other, Mexico is going to pay for the Wall.” This has never changed. Our new deal with Mexico (and Canada), the USMCA, is so much better than the old, very costly &, anti-USA NAFTA deal, that just by the money we save, MEXICO IS PAYING FOR THE WALL!
- November 30, 2018: Just signed one of the most important, and largest, Trade Deals in U.S. and World History. The United States, Mexico and Canada worked so well together in crafting this great document. The terrible NAFTA will soon be gone. The USMCA will be fantastic for all!
- October 3, 2018: Mexico, Canada and the United States are a great partnership and will be a very formidable trading force. We will now, because of the USMCA, work very well together. Great Spirit!
- October 2, 2018: “USMCA Wins Praise as a Victory for American Industries and Workers”
- October 2, 2018: Great reviews on the new USMCA. Thank you! Mexico and Canada will be wonderful partners in Trade (and more) long into the future.
Flashback October 1, 2018
Late last night, our deadline, we reached a wonderful new Trade Deal with Canada, to be added into the deal already reached with Mexico. The new name will be The United States Mexico Canada Agreement, or USMCA. It is a great deal for all three countries, solves the many deficiencies and mistakes in NAFTA, greatly opens markets to our Farmers and Manufacturers, reduces Trade Barriers to the U.S. and will bring all three Great Nations together in competition with the rest of the world. The USMCA is a historic transaction!
Does anyone have any questions regarding the greatness, importance, and historic nature of USMCA to farmers and manufacturers?
It was such a great deal that Trump thanked Mexico and Canada. Notably USMCA is “Good for everybody – Farmers, Manufacturers, Energy, Unions – tremendous support. Importantly, we will finally end our Country’s worst Trade Deal, NAFTA!”
It “greatly opened markets to our farmers” and it even paid for the wall! And it will bring three great nations together!
For more discussion, please see Cheese Was a “Key Achievement” of Trump’s USMCA Trade Agreement
Q&A on the Greatness of USMCA
Q: Is 250 percent on cheese fair?
A: It’s not 250 percent. It’s tiered, and embedded into USMCA.Q: Who signed USMCA?
A: TrumpQ: Who is responsible for this arrangement?
A: TrumpQ: Didn’t Trump brag that USMCA was the best trade deal in history?
A: YesQ: Is Trump a good deal maker?
A: Apparently not, by his own admission
Excluding Oil, the US Has a Trade Surplus with Canada Every Year Since 2008
Also note that Excluding Oil, the US Has a Trade Surplus with Canada Every Year Since 2008
Let’s do a fact check on Trump’s Canada claims.
Trump Tells India – Only Buy What I Approve, Else 50 Percent Tariffs
On August 6, I noted Trump Tells India – Only Buy What I Approve, Else 50 Percent Tariffs
Trump ups tariffs on India to 50 percent for buying Russian oil.
This absurd move has driven India close to both Russia and China undoing years of diplomatic improvements.
Related Posts
August 3, 2025: Switzerland Gets a Big Slap in the Face from Trump’s Tariffs
Swiss business leaders don’t understand what happened. I do.
August 3, 2025: Trump Puts 93.5 Percent Tariff on Graphite Needed for EV Batteries
Here’s another shoot yourself in the foot tariff move by Trump.
August 4, 2025: China Again Chokes Off Critical Rare Earths Needed for Defense
Trump threatened China with tariffs for doing business with Russia. Guess what?
Nobody wins trade wars. But if there’s a relative winner it’s China.
Instead of working with allies to rein in China, Trump smacks allies hard. Down the road repercussions will be severe.
What if crazy Trump makes a huge offer to Zel and gets peace in Ukraine? Then other countries will worry about a huge US-Russia trade alliance. Something to consider.
The “Dark Ages of Trump”
A congress that legitimizes and defends a sex trafficking pervert as a president.
Removing women’s reproductive rights.
Allows and supports the genocide in Gaza by Israel.
Friend of Russia in its expansion and threatened Canada, Mexico and Greenland.
Occupies American cities with military force.
Deprives our nation of rare earths and debilitates our military.
Trump is a Putin ally and his actions for his personal benefit do not benefit America or its allies. Trump is actively gifting parts of the Ukraine to Putin and Russia!!!
All Americans witnessed Trumps attempted insurrection and assault on the Capitol in real time. How Trump has not been prosecuted for child sex trafficking and sedition is beyond me. Congress is complicit in protecting a pedophile by blocking the release of all of the Epstein files.
Trumps statements: “I could shoot someone in the face on 5th Avenue and not be prosecuted” and “I have no age limits” when asked about his predatory sexual behavior and “I will be dictator on day one” should curdle all Americans blood.
Yet Fox News (the largest media corporation) keeps him in power and above the law.
Whoever is keeping this malignant narcissist protected and in power, is actively disemboweling America.
MAGA is simply a manifestation of the WWF “Suspended disbelief” mentality where fans support scripted wrestling characters even though they know they are fake…
>>>>>
The last sentence needs to be read and understood by all.
I don’t think Trump is a narcissist but good grief is he an ego maniac. You stroke his ego and you will be his best friend, even if you’re a dictator or tyrant. Criticize anything he does and you become his worst enemy. He seems to be incredibly thin skinned when it comes to anyone criticizing him.
David Rosenburgs take on Trumps Tariffs.
https://youtu.be/tJFaRjDw3kk?si=5wdl797yzIbZ1Zhb
Narcissist, I’m not sure. Suffering from Delusions of grandeur. 100%
Replying to my own post, after asking AI for the full defination.
It is Trump 200%.
AI Overview:
Delusions of grandeur are false beliefs about one’s own importance, power, or abilities that persist despite evidence to the contrary. These delusions can manifest in various ways, including:
Believing that one is superior to others, has extraordinary talents or abilities, or is destined for great achievements.
Feeling immune to harm or setbacks, or having supernatural powers.
Believing that one has a unique connection to famous people, historical figures, or deities.
Being convinced that one will become incredibly wealthy or famous, even if there is no basis for such beliefs.
Trump is a malignant narcissist and a danger to our economy and freedom.
As a friend of Putin and Russia ~ everyone should see that Trump is actively supporting yet another dictator, undermining NATO and threatening our allies in the world,
Trump is endangering freedom, democracy and capitalism.
Mish is very happy today.
“Ego” is also a good one-word description.
“At the top of the ally pounding list is Canada…”
Yeah, we’ve noticed. Which is why I personally won’t set foot in the U.S.A. until Trump no longer resides in the White House, even though I used to greatly admire your Country (haha get it?) and even lived in California for a few years. I used to go out of my way to purchase U.S.-made products vs. (e.g.) Chinese-made, but my motivation to keep doing this is approaching zero at this point. Once my Ford Taurus (final assembly: Chicago, U.S.A.) finally bites the dust, I will probably not keep my habit of purchasing only cars made by U.S. automakers, which I broke only once, when I was living in California. But I think I can be forgiven for that, because almost nobody in California, even California natives, buys U.S.-made cars! (At least, it seemed that way when I lived there.)
In the long term no one, neither foreign or domestic, will want to invest much in a country where the investment can either be seized or made worthless on the slightest whim of one person. The US will slide into an economy that looks like Russia’s where only the investments with the quickest payback or investments by those that curry favor with the ruler will ever be undertaken. Costs will rise and living standards will fall. The rule of law was the best advantage that the United States had and it didn’t cost us anything.
You know this reminds me of his supporters in 2016 who went to his campaign rallies with t-shirts saying “better Russian than democrat”. Well guess what?
Correct. Well said PreCambrian.
What do we learn from this? Focus on improving your life as best you can. Because Trump truly doesn’t really care about the people in America. He just cares about controlling others, which is “winning” in his mind.
What makes anyone think we have to wait for repercussions?
The driving force is insider trading and front-running trades for sycophants and toadies.
The Monroe Doctrine. Preserving the Union. Making the world safe for Democracy. A New World Order. Project for a new American Century.
It’s all about power. The U.S. government has sought to become an empire from the beginning.
Spot on Mish! Very accurate post!!
It’s all about China, Mish. Oceania oligarchs’ income stream is threatened by Chinese businesses building brands to market directly to retail and Oceania’s warriors are threatened by China’s tech and industrial progress. And perhaps the our uniparty, that centralizes power and skims profits for itself, feels that the communist party of China, that centralizes power and presumably skims profits for itself, is embarrassing our uniparty by actually delivering a better quality of life for its people.
If only Chinese businesses and people would return their focus to low-value work and let Oceania install a Yeltsin, none of this would be happening.
As for the current regime demanding tribute from its colonies, if it confuses anyone then read the speeches in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. For a taste of what you might learn, read the excerpt know as the Melian Dialogue.
The D.C. regime has power over its colonies and is extracting more from them than China. The regime has less power over China and hence has to move more carefully, out of fear of retaliation that it doesn’t anticipate and/or cannot afford.
The behavior looks desperate and erratic probably because they feel the clock is working against them
Nonsense. If it was all about China, there would only be tariffs on China.
It’s all about Trump’s need to “control” everything he can. Which is why it will never end. And no matter what China or any other country does to appease Trump, he will just demand more.
> Nonsense. If it was all about China, there would only be tariffs on China.
It wouldn’t work. (It might still not work. IDK.). The D.C. regime has to draw on its empire holistically. Tariffs everywhere ensure the most Natostani’s paying taxes into the collective war machine. The tariffs “crowd out” private serf spending so that the DXY components all retain more purchasing power (versus baseline), benefiting NATO war spending.
Look at how quickly the Brusselcrats and respective colony puppets folded. The people at the top are mafia partners.
Could Eurocrats tax their serfs more to pay that nato “5%”? The serfs already pay rates like 40%. But here, the Eurocrats get to shift blame to big bad Donald for tariffs. I don’t like what they stand for. But I see their logic.
China is just one of a thousand excuses that Trump uses to justify what he does. Every time he opens his mouth he finds another excuse to attack. You are missing the forest by focusing on a single tree.
That’s probably not the best analogy (“China = single tree”) to argue your point. But I won’t belabor it because that’s like foot-faulting you. It was just your way of saying you frame the issue differently and reject my framing. Got it..
Now, let’s see…
Do you remember the “pivot to Asia”? Was that about Kwajalein? The Philippines? Indonesia? Thailand?
Do you remember Trump first-term tariffs that promoted shifting of some manufacturing into Vietnam and Malaysia and out of some nearby country? What was that nearby country?
Do you remember the format of some security bloc involving the USA and Australia? What country did they frame as their “threat”?
What country do warlords like Hegseth and others say they want to confront after transferring the burden of Nuland’s Ukraine project onto Europe? Lichtenstein? Lesotho? Liberia?
Would you like to think again about your framing?
Nope. Every-time Trump opens his mouth, he is targeting someone. The entire world is his target for control. China is just one of a thousand targets. And one that he has less influence on compared to America’s friends and allies.
Great post Mish. Power or Dominance are both good descriptors. The single word that I used here about a month ago was “Control”.
At that time I compared Trump to an abusive husband who wants to control his wife, or a schoolyard bully who wants to control the other kids, including his “friends”.
No matter how often the abused gives in, hoping to satisfy the abuser, it will never be enough because the abuser doesn’t really care about what he just achieved with his abuse. Just like we all need to take another breath over and over again, the abuser “needs” to demonstrate his control over and over again. There is literally NO END to this behaviour. There is no way to satiate the abusers needs. So the abuse will continue.
And yes; the abuser always works his abuse on those closest to him, because they are the ones most vulnerable and easiest to control within his sphere of influence.
Which is why Trump is treating our closest allies as punching bags.
There is only one way to deal with an abuser like Trump who “needs” to control everything and everyone.
I agree. For this term, Trump seems to be out for revenge.
First, it was the immigrants and the foreign countries with their unfair trade practices.
Now, he’s turning inward & focusing on the big cities. He’s even taken some potshots at his base.
Unfortunately, that kid went for the headshot.
Trump is genetically unable to play cooperative games. But capitalism and democracy are in their essence cooperative games. Communism and authoritarianism, by contrast, are in their essence highly non-cooperative games. It‘s a tragedy for this country that it has elected a hyper-narcissistic leader who believes in an incoherent mishmash of leftist economic recipes and rightest politics ideas.
Genetically? I suppose you think Germans and Scots are not smart enough to understand democracy or capitalism? Curious view.
C’mon man it’s really obvious he was trying to spell generally.
Think so? He should have corrected himself then.
When ya got nothing else, being obtuse is the last resort.
Good point! „innately“ was the term I was looking for.
He may in fact have meant genetically. It’s a question of, are narcissists born or raised? Clearly he is a sociopath. But was he born that way or did he become that? If you look into his growth as a child, one thing that stands out, is that he was a practical joker. Playing jokes on people without regard to empathy is a symptom of antisocial behavior. Also, he said he liked military school. It was the first time anyone smacked him around and disciplined him. Most people don’t like that part of military school. Then there was the way he was treated by his parents. “You have to be a killer, You’re either a winner or a loser.” So both genetics and nurture could be at play. But clearly his parents gave the standard; you’re a nobody if you don’t win. And they drove that home with his older brother who just wanted to be an airline pilot. They made fun of him and lampooned him no end.
> But capitalism and democracy are in their essence cooperative games. Communism and authoritarianism, by contrast, are in their essence highly non-cooperative games.
China’s communism seems no less democratic than NATO’s oligarchy. I live in the latter and observe TPTB market memes to sheeple during the campaigns and then rule very differently. Every single time. How much does every serf here want to continue as Charlie Brown trying to kick oligarch Lucy’s election football?
Panic and stupidity.
It is no surprise that a fervent life-long supporter of Free Trade, Robert Zoellick, not understanding that this policy has badly failed and few want it anymore except him and a rapidly declining cohort of his fellow travelers, would write an editorial in the WSJ attacking others of economic incompetence without the least amount of self-reflection or humility. It doesn’t matter. No one is listening anymore.
You know Mish what gets me is how badly this serves his other goals. Like you would assume a dictatoral takeover of DC and threats to start an open conflict with other states would necessitate things like having an approval rating over 30% with fighting age people or, you know, an economy of some sort to point to as a success.
As much as I loathe to compare them, Hitler spent an awful lot of time and money making everyone happy with stuff like Volkswagen, giant infrastructure projects, and a colossal improvement of the economic situation. He got away with murder because he was universally liked by a grand majority.
And then there’s Trump, a guy who’s lust for drama vastly outweighs his love of anything rational. He likes being hated by people, he’s said it himself multiple times. “Go ahead, don’t support me!” Screams the king to his most dedicated base over Epstein before talking about the infamous child trafficker like he was a close friend.
I legitimately think it has to be delusion at this point because anyone who can read can probably put together than the balance of power here does not add up. I’m very worried because he seems keen on starting a fight nobody in America will win.
Why Haven’t Tariffs Boosted Inflation? This Theory Is Gaining Traction
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/why-haven-t-tariffs-boosted-inflation-this-theory-is-gaining-traction/ar-AA1KzRwi
The stats are designed to avoid measuring the loss of purchasing power.
I’ve switched to cheaper cuts of beef. Other people probably switched to chicken. Sadly, still other people will switch to no protein or cat food.
AFAICT, the foregoing won’t manifest in the stats.
The question Mish is how did we get here and why now? As long as I’ve been alive, America has been fiscally broke but since 2008 it felt like it was breaking and since 2020 it feels broken. Being broke is bad but being broke and broken is a recipe for total disaster and I guess we have that now.
It feels so broken that many people are making the decision to leave semi-permanently or permanently, including me. My target date is 2026 but even many of the people that post comments here aren’t living in the US anymore. I’m not sure how we got here, everyone I know blames the toxic boomers and maybe it’s as simple as that but without understanding the cause I don’t know how you fix all of this mess.
If I ever do comeback it will be around 2036 when a large chunk of boomers should be six feet under or nursing homes but I will certainly keep an eye on things from afar and just not come back.
Buy a DeLorean with a Time Machine.
You can choose:
Anytime in the past
Anytime in the future
Where you ‘pop-up’
You know everything you know now
No going back.
So part H.G. Wells, part Rod Serling.
Now if I wanted to not have Boomers in the first place, then I’d seek out Woody Wilson.
I asked AI to explain why boomers get the blame:
The criticisms of Baby Boomers can be summarized around several key themes related to economic, social, and environmental issues:
1 and 2 are very valid, but I think everyone forgot that boomers had the summer of love and basically catapulted civil rights in every sector forward for the first time in America’s history. The whole “save the planet” thing was their invention, so credit is due that Zoomers don’t like to give them because they were never taught about it.
You can’t just lump them all together. The civil rights people probably weren’t even in the majority. My parents and extended family were fully against all that, and liked to tell me that if i didn’t behave, they were gonna give me to the hippies (their parents had threatened to give them to the gypsies).
It wasn’t even socially acceptable for men to have long hair until well into the 90s.
Wages apparently peaked in 1973. Early baby boomers were just out of college. U.S. as producer to the world, was running out of steam, as Europe and Japan recovered. Eventually, China became producer to the world, eliminating numerous U.S. factory jobs. The peak in inflation rate in early 80’s, ushered in what became an era of debt financialization. A cycle inverted.
Blaming baby boomers is a narrative.
Item 3. – Trump’s climate science demolition team are all baby boomers: Roy Spencer, John Christy, Judith Curry, and Steve Koonin.
Who is getting the Blame?. AI has it right.
Now ask AI who caused these problems. The correct answer is: The Democrats and their allies in the News Media.
Blaming boomers is the simple answer and while I’ve done that here on this blog I don’t think it’s the whole answer. It’s the culture. Specifically, it’s the hyper individualist greed personified grind culture that Reagan, yuppies, and the benefits of globalization all fed into. “You don’t need a community! Just buy product!” “You should have things your friends are jealous of! Buy it now on credit!” “Whatever you do, don’t share!”
Everything we teach kids in kindergarten, the absolute basic social building blocks for a functioning society, is conspicuously absent from America. Regardless of when they dropped away, the here and now is a vicious, irreverent, and wholly psychopathic society in which anyone who isn’t you is subhuman. Businesses started with it to prey on consumers, but now it’s been co-opted by literal neo-nazis to increasingly pit normal people against each other. In a normal world, people see a homeless person and want to help them. They don’t see a bug to be exterminated. Same goes to the Mexicans we’ve been keeping in antebellum slavery conditions for decades now.
This is a bed that’s been made entirely by love of money, the root of all evil. Every American moral, every social guidepost, it’s being attacked and commodified into dust. I hate to bring out my faith but it’s undeniable that we’re a modern day Sodom. Created by group of (literal in the case of Peter Thiel) false prophets who would like you to think trans people are the sinners while they ship another boat of kids off to a private island.
So to answer your question of “why here and why now” in short: Because people stopped being kind and started being greedy, selfish, and hateful as a rule. As history shows again and again, these are bad traits for a society.
Add NIMBY too. I was rampant under the Boomers.
White flight and its consequences is definitely something I think is valid to blame boomers for. Zoomers are screwed for housing because Grandpa refused to live in the same neighborhood as a black person. It’s really sad when you think of it.
What a coincidence! One of my neighbors is black.
By 2036, the US may have split up into new countries. Those new countries may not let you in.
Enjoy your exile.
California will have a strict “you must have at least 9 teeth to enter” rule.
So WHERE are you departing to? – grass no greener elsewhere as far as I can see.
And you will still be in the IRS’s sights unless you renounce your citizenship and with the world in a state of flux probably not a great move.
Mish, it’s incredible to me that you—who loves to deliver snarky insults about others’ perceived “incompetence”—are now finally seeing what millions have been screaming for years:
Trump is a narcissistic wannabe dictator who cannot be trusted with his own “deals.”
Better late than never, I guess.
I have been saying that for years
Good Lord where have you been
Hard to believe the “Ghost poster” is the first to mention that our potus is better than the alternative!
Fact is very often stranger than fiction…
In lieu of lost tax revenues, tariffs will fill the gap?
Defies arithmetic. A subject once taught in grade school. Also, defies English. Another subject once taught in grade school. Using arithmetic and English, how do consumers fill the gap in their lost after-tax pile of cash? Answer? Become savage – lived through the Great Depression – savers.
Good word pick. Having our whole future ride on the narrow fragile fulcrum of this pinhead and his psyche will have inevitable, predictable results. It MUST be sand in the gears of the economy.
Nobody in the government is doing anything about it, so sandbagging is the way to fight it. If I weren’t gainfully employed, I’d get a job with ICE and be the most worthless employee they ever saw.
Trump and my Dad are in the same age group. Dad is not demented yet but he and Trump share a very similar inability to reason. And both Men arrogantly look down upon others. Both Men appear to be demented to an extent.
I can barely stand to be in my Dad’s Home. He is always confused about something.
I’m lucky. My mom survived, and her elder self is the voice of sane, sweet functional reason it always was. Had she predeceased dad, I can’t imagine the frictions.
To me, this article shows the big change in Trump’s personality, between his two terms.
And now Trump 2.0 has a vehement army of apparatchiks with AI at his side, to magnify his arbitrariness. And a public willing to do mental backflips to rationalize his constantly reversing whims.
Us average usually spend a bit of time trying to construct consistent arguments and try not to contradict ourselves. When we plan an action we do consider whether there are sub-optimal outcomes and the probability of such outcomes.
Past presidents generally worked this way, though often with the advantage of being able to create a a wall of disinformation to hide the sub-optimal outcomes and just do what their backers wanted.
Trumpie is much more efficient, a one pass thought process, with no filters and no look back function. Saves a lot of time.
But depends on who daddy was, I suspect a lot of those folk he wants to move out of parks are there because of the same thought processes.
The depth of his thinking is dime thin.
This tariff nonsense IS NOT about tariffs per se.
The powers-that-be want to destroy the status quo which was quite favorable to Americans: we send the Chinese worthless (and illegal according to the US Constitution) digits on a computer screen and they ship us real goods and services in return.
Who would complain about receiving free shit? Only inveterate morons, right?
That’s exactly the one-sided extremely favorable relationship we had with the rest of the world.
Now Trump’s handlers (zios and the ubiquitous freemasons and the like) are ordering Trump to annihilate this gravy train by imposing tariffs on imported goods and services ultimately paid by US AMERICANS, individuals or small and medium-size enterprises.
TARIFFS = TREASON
“ Who would complain about receiving free shit? Only inveterate morons, right?”
Raises hand. I’m complaining about it because it can be directly tied to the federal spending and debt bonanza that is our federal government. With a 2 trillion dollar deficit it aint those of us who earned our money honestly that are getting all that free shit, its the grifters, welfare cases, and government connected entities that get free stuff. Everyone else and especially today’s children will foot the bill.
Yay our defense contractors get to stay on the gravy train, and foreigners don’t get worthless dollars, instead they turn around and buy real assets with those dollars. Its not a coincidence that a larger and larger percentage of the S&P 500 is foreign owned every year.
The powers that be LOVE the status quo. If they didn’t they wouldn’t be powers would they? Trump is an idiot, his tariffs are moronic. It does not logically follow that the status quo was good.
What makes you think you earned your money honestly? If you earned it in the United States, that would be completely impossible.
So everyone in the United States earned their money dishonestly? Does the stupid burn when you pee?
Yes, all Americans have earned their money dishonestly. Some are so dishonest they can’t admit it. As Trump says, everybody does it.
You yourself are getting “free shit”: imagine how much your iPhone, car, computer, tools, clothes, hardware, even some of your food would cost *you* if they were produced here.
Everything is cheaper now. The powers that be (Trump’s handlers) are CLEARLY disturbing the status quo by implementing tariffs.
And here you are, denying these facts. Troll some?
My Iphone cost a grand
cost less != free
geez you are as stupid as the other mouth breather.