You have to hand it to the UK - they got rid of Liz Truss as prime minister for wrecking the economy in less than 2 months. Trump has done the exact same thing and yet he’s still here, like a bad case of fucking herpes. Our political system sucks that we can't oust this lunatic like in a parliamentary system.
I've been hearing this is a "deliberately" manufactured crisis. If this is a deliberately manufactured crisis, it's one of the dumbest in history. The first rule of manufacturing a crisis to seize power is to avoid having your own fingerprints on it — you want plausible deniability, and ideally a fake trail pointing at your political opposition. But this crisis has a fucking neon “TRUMP” sign on it. The economy is crashing in real time and everyone can see why.
Trump has been talking about how awesome tariffs are since the ‘80s. The evidence suggests he genuinely believes this. Nobody's playing 11-dimensional chess here. Or, is the strategy - Identity politics for campaigning, a corporate raider style takeover for dismantling the government, and lastly. Martial law to enforce?
Trump basically said he won't protect the stock market because he feels what he's doing will help businesses. The stock market is a measurement of what investors believe the future will look like. It’s a leading indicator. When Trump took power they didn’t think he would really be dumb enough to impose tariffs on major, integrated, economies. But now they realize he really is that stupid and, secondly, he might stick to his guns for awhile to deepen the pain. It’s almost like it wasn’t a good idea to put a guy in charge of the economy who couldn’t get financing domestically, because he bankrupted everything he touched.
Trump is governing by Executive Order not because he’s strong, but because he’s weak. A strong president could push much of his agenda through a divided Congress, like Joe Biden did. Trump knows he can’t do that, so he issues proclamations and orders that get routinely knocked back by the courts. That leaves him playing footsie with the idea that he can simply defy them in the end, but if he truly believed that he would have done it outright by now, while his hand was still strong. Now that he is underwater on approval, even over the economy which is supposed to be his wheelhouse.
There’s not a respected economist, pundit or CEO in the world who believes this is the way forward. Markets are tanking, small and large businesses are scrambling, world leaders are retaliating, and where is Trump? On the golf course with his Saudi backers.
This guy can't stroke out on the shitter rage tweeting fast enough