Fret not, says the president, he is apparently playing chess while the world is playing checkers
He’s trying to treat the entire country like one of the casinos he bankrupted to screw over his creditors.
I’m sure he thinks he’s playing chess. But what he’s really doing is sitting in the corner eating the pieces.
A vivid and possibly accurate description.
I still think he is planted there to do as much damage as possible before he expires. Which would mean he is doing it all on purpose… Which then again would have to make him smarter than I give him credit for
Or he’s betting that if people get desperate enough they will allow an absolute dictatorship.
Or he’s betting that if people get desperate enough they will allow an absolute dictatorship.
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He is setting tariffs on his own, a power designated solely to Congress by the Constitution.
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He is having masked police kidnap people off the streets without warrants and shipping them to an overseas gulag without trial or even charges.
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He is illegally refusing to distribute money allocated by Congress to certain states in order to punish them for not doing his bidding.
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And when the courts have ordered him to stop doing the above, he has willfully ignored those court orders with no repercussions.
Exactly what more needs to happen for this to be a dictatorship?
Firing judges who resist him
Dissolution of Congress
Deployment of military on US soil to control citizens.
Alteration or abandonment of the Constitution.
You’re right we are definitely on the spectrum of dictatorship, but it can get much much worse.
If we compare the United States to the Empire in Star Wars, we’re somewhere past the end of Revenge of the Sith. Palpatine has declared himself the Emperor under the guise of needing to protect the Republic from an existential threat. He has already announced his intentions, taken personal control of key institutions, and started to strip power away from any institution or individual that he thinks can seriously oppose him.
He hasn’t yet given up the facade of democratic legitimacy. He doesn’t do that for 19 years in Star Wars. Hitler never abolished the Reichstag in 12 years of dictatorial rule. Russia still has a parliament and a nominally independent legal system 25 years after Putin first rose to power. The Roman Senate continued to exist for hundreds of years after Rome became a dictatorship, and even outlived the existence of the empire as a unified entity, and the Byzantine Senate (the legislative body of the Eastern Roman Empire) lasted until the 14th century.
And I think it will get worse
Suspending elections.
We have never missed an election in nearly 250 years of existence, even during the Civil War. If he does that, then America no longer exists, and we have no obligation to pay taxes, respect the laws, pay our debts, etc., and most especially acknowledge the government.
It is every man for himself.
You might as well be waiting for someone to go on TV and look directly at the camera and say, “I am a dictator” (which Trump even kinda did). We’re always going to have elections because they’re a valuable tool of controlling the population. Nearly every country in the world has them, including ones that are generally considered dictatorships.
Without elections, the only vehicle of change or expressions of popular will would be actions, and those actions are generally more disruptive and effective than voting is. We didn’t always have elections in the first place, and we didn’t vote our way out of monarchy.
With elections, people put their anger on hold for years, waiting for the appropriate time to express it, and the way it’s expressed is by choosing a different corporate lackey to support. Gerrymandering, corporate finance, a compromised press, etc ensure that will be the case. Even better, they get people forming their whole political identity around their preferred corporate lackey and half the population hating the other half for it, making organizing on a large scale extremely difficult.
It’s a very silly place to draw a red line. Even if it happened, you’d still “have to” pay taxes for the same reason you do now, because of force. What, are you paying taxes and following laws and shit right now because you think the US government represents some kind of moral authority?
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Yeah I agree. There has to be a bigger plan than this. In 40 years our children will see documentaties about the republicans pulling the biggest power grab ever and using idiots like Trump to actieve it. It’s not Trump playing chess here, he’s just a pawn. There are people behind the scènes pulling the strings.
If what currently is happening is really just throwing tantrums without having a plan then I feel sorry for how dumb most of america had become.
The plan comes from Moscow.
I think this is more from Silicon Valley, destroy the country to make way for the Butterfly Revolution and corporate city states with CEO kings at the top. If we don’t stop it we’ll be in a techno feudalist dystopia
“Adam something” did a great video on it. The Trump presidency is marked by fascism, incompetence and technocrats. It’s multipronged
Obligatory fuck Putin.
In 40 years our children will see documentaties about the republicans pulling the biggest power grab ever and using idiots like Trump to actieve it.
It’s optimistic that they’ll even have documentaries to watch (and that they’d be historically accurate and truthful).
Even Space Nazi’s “unwoke” AI Grok says Krasnov is a Russian agent with over 80% certainty.
It’s an LLM, why are we putting any weight into anything it says?
It will literally say that if everyone else is. The opposite of a fact bot.
Could be both planted and so inept that he believes he got there on his own accord and is doing a great job.
If the world is playing checkers, then you’re an idiot for playing the wrong game.
NFL has it coming. They denied him once and he may or may not never forget.
What I find most fascinating/hilarous about this is “leftists” up in arms about this. This is like the most far left thing you can do other than actually seizing the means of production.
I am not exactly a leftist but I find the tariffs wonderful. Consumerism is a pox on the nation, this should fix this.
Why are we opposed to exploitation and pollution here at home but are ok when China does it because it allows us to buy a year’s worth of clothes every week for the price of single ethically produced garment??
Over leveraged billionaires are in trouble, BIGLY. If this continues they will be margin called and forced to start selling their shit. Of course the flip side is that liquid billionaires will come out of this richer than before. Probably the real plan behind this.
Also can we talk about how much of the economy was just fantasy? Billions, even maybe trillions of dollars of our economy is simply speculative value backed by mass delusion.
Turns out Trump may be a tankie after all.
The one problem is that it will not yield results within 4 years, so it will cause a whole lot of pain only for whoever is in power next to reverse it as soon as they take office. Hell this might not last till the end of the week for all we know.
“The economy is bad, actually” is a wild take.
I think it’s the one thing everyone can agree on.
But you have to be aware that it depends greatly on your point of view of how economies should work. Do the dynamics of economics exist simply to push up the GDP or do they exist to create abundance and prosperity that everyone can take part off? The current economic system as it works simply exists to push up the GDP increasingly through financial alchemy, speculative assets and debt. Neoliberals will hold that this is good, but I’m not convinced because my eyes and ears tell me different. This is not a sustainable economic system, even if it looks good on the surface. Or more specifically it is not a sustainable economic system for the middle class. It is schrodingers economy in a way, good and bad existing in superposition.
This is why China keeps gaining ground, they plan for the long term and have high tolerance for short term pain. Their corporations don’t sweat a bad year, look at Huawei for example. An American company I think would rather sell of its assets and give every exec a gajillion dollars before going though the trouble of rebuilding themselves from being banned from one of their largest markets. Our corps only plan on a quarter by quarter basis, our government on 4 year terms, and entire organizations change plans on a bad day at the stock market. It’s frankly ridiculous how short sighted we’ve become, and our economy really is emblematic of that short sightedness.
BASED
I think, for ‘lefties,’ the trouble is that Trump is replacing progressive income tax with regressive consumption tax. Not that US tax structure was particularly progressive, but it at least pretended. Now, the low end of the income scale, living paycheck-to-paycheck, spending everything on goods & services it going to have to spend an extra 15%, straight to federal coffers, ,while corps get a 25% tax cut and billionaires get elimination of the estate tax.
It’s schadenfreude to see billionaires lose 10 or 20% of their wealth, but they still own all the factories. They’re still going to make money, and they will make up for production reductions by reducing workforce and eliminating 100% of many worker incomes. That is why all the economists are crying recession: consumption taxes reduce consumption, reduced consumption reduces employment, unemployment reduces consumption.
Right, that was a point I made in there somewhere. That the reality is that this will make billionaires more money which tracks with Trump. But even if that were somehow addressed the last part would still happen, it is a feature not a bug. The economic depression is necessary to burst all bubbles, and we have a lot of them, which in turn will make domestic production cheap enough that it is actually feasible. It does require the absolute implosion of markets and the destruction of all speculative wealth that exists in the system. The middle class will be the one to take the hardest hit in fact, not only because they will lose the value of their spending money, and their good paying jobs, but their retirement funds will be in tatters. Buuut if you see it through, at the end of the depression we should have a better functioning economy than what we have now. The problem is Trump simply does not have the spine nor the time to see it through and people really hate sacrificing the short term for an uncertain long term that doesn’t necessarily benefit them directly.
Anyways I think I rambled but I think the tariffs are actually a good very long term play if you are willing to cause a lot of shock and pain in the short term. We just don’t have the stomach for it, so maybe the artificially inflated economy is better. At least until the balloon pops anyways and we have no other choice but to suffer through the same depression but it is easier to stomach because there’s literally no other choice.
I mean, if you’re starting from the view that we have too many poor people for the number of billionaires, then killing off a bunch of plebs in a massive economic depression is definitely one way to balance the field. Just seems a little psychopathic to me, is all.
It’s definitely a MAGA theme, though: let bird flu run wild and all the survivors will be immune; crash the economy and all the survivors will be better off; throw out all the immigrants and every that remains will be comfortably English-speaking; jail all the protesters and everyone that remains will agree.
Funny enough, “Eliminate all competition” is what will turn a capitalist society into a dystopia. The free market isn’t so free when all the competition is gone.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think i get the sentiment of what you’re saying. Tariffs can be good to bolster local production, and thus, local workers under the assumsion that businesses doing well is good for workers (I’m not convinced it is, at least I don’t think it’ s what’s best for workers. But let’s work within the limitations of the capitalist system here.
The problem is how USA is doing it right now. If you give a 10 year warning before implementing tariffs, while also allocating money to support growing the needed industry, you make sure the industry has time to adapt and make the necessary changes to accomodate the needed growth in production and educating the workforce.
None of that is happening. In fact, while putting in the tariffs, the workers’s jobs are threatened with an economic collaps. The outcome in this scenario is survival of the rich, who will survive a 99% loss in wealth and income just fine. While the most vulnerable, the working class and those even more vulnerable like the sick or handicapped, are asked to simply live with it, and hope to god they may some day be able to afford what they used to. Meanwhile the richest will keep buying all that the working class are forced to sell off, just to survive.
Tariffs aren’t necessarily bad, but in this implementation they’re absolutely catastrophic to the working class, and a sale to the oligarchs.
Right, that’s sort of what I meant but I always try to be a little more provocative because otherwise there’s no discussion. Tariffs are a good idea if you use them right, and plan on how they will be used strategically. I would still do it in a similar way that Trump did it, meaning it would apply to all countries but especially for those that keep wages low through exploitation and pollution, in such a way that the average cost of production in those countries for all major exports is the same as domestic production.
Consumerism is a pox on the nation, this should fix this.
Leftism is when you fix consumerism by rendering common people too poor to buy shit. What a take.
Why are we opposed to exploitation and pollution here at home but are ok when China does it because it allows us to buy a year’s worth of clothes every week for the price of single ethically produced garment??
Well, first off, these tariffs aren’t focused on China. They’re hitting everyone, including countries with better labor laws and more environmental regulation than the US, such as the EU. Second, the tariffs aren’t conditional on countries making improvements, like if you want to argue we should have tariffs based on emissions per capita, that’s not an unreasonable position (although we’d have to tariff ourselves somehow), but that’s not what’s actually happening at all.
Turns out Trump may be a tankie after all.
No, he isn’t.
Not too poor to buy things, only poor enough that you’ll consider it twice before buying another plastic piece of shit you don’t need off of Amazon. It’s absolutely messed up that the ONLY reason we can consume as we do is because we moved all the pollution and exploitation to where we can’t see it, so that we can consume with a clean conscience. I don’t know how you can defend this shit, because I can’t. If your country’s economy depends on the exploitation of the people of another’s that just colonialism disguised as free market trade.
China was an example because it’s the most well known one. Second I never said that the implementation was good itself, I just think the concept of universal tariffs is very much solid especially in terms of ethics (which Trump somewhat frames it that way, of course his intentions are both bad and not well thought out so it’s only superficial ) with the caveat that it results in short term destruction of wealth which depending on the point of view is not so bad. I at least don’t think the levels of speculation in our markets is good and anything that pops that bubble is a good thing.
I don’t know how you can defend this shit, because I can’t.
I’m not. Just because I don’t like Trump’s policies or approach doesn’t mean I’m supporting the status quo. They’re both bad.
I just think the concept of universal tariffs is very much solid especially in terms of ethics
Why should we place tariffs on countries with better labor laws where things are more ethically produced?
Lol he wants you to trust him, he can bring the money back! All 12 trillion!.. That the entire country made in 4 years together, slowly…
As a demo, let me show you how I can control our household’s income (the markets) I have full control and you shouldn’t worry about it. We start small to demonstrate how I do have full control. I can totally remove money! From this car flying down the highway, I just open the window and toss the money out! I can do it from this bike! Look see? It’s friday pay day! I got the money back! OK let’s go big. Here’s all the and we’re on this large airplane! Let me show you how its done! You simply open this window… Watch it all fly away!
Okay let me show you how I can bring it all back… Just sit back and wait for the check. When you’re famous they let you do it! Wait for it! Hey it Friday! No check? Oh…we get paid every other Friday! And we’re waiting!.. Friday again! But this is a holiday! We’ll have to wait two more Fridays, you’ll see. Its coming back!.. Hi, I need a ticket to Antarctica, i’m told there’s only penguins there! One way please, and hurry!
Then if thats the case, this seems like a national security threat. Destabilizing the country through financial terrorism seems pretty felonious.
Convenient that he’s immune from the law so long as he’s in office (and apparently also when he’s not).
The legal system is only for poor people.
Dude’s already a felon and even got impeached in his first term. I was pretty disappointed when the impeachment lead to literally nothing
Not sure President Shady Vans is an improvement.
Yeah I think he’d start to lead us toward the dystopian corporate techno feudalism that silicon valley crypto Bros dream of
Vance doesn’t have his own personal cult. That alone makes him preferable to Trump.
Vance the nonce is techno-Oligarch Theil’s little fuck toy.
Who’s gonna tell him he can’t just burn it down for the insurance money?
“The president isn’t a number-crunching guy, per se, but President Trump strongly demanded big numbers that would make other countries treat us fairly. And I think you can see today that those numbers are huge,”
HAHAHAHA
I doubt he can even count past ten, because that’s when he runs out of fingers.
The Narcissist’s Prayer
That didn’t happen.
And if it did, it wasn’t that bad.
And if it was, that’s not a big deal.
And if it is, that’s not my fault.
And if it was, I didn’t mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.“nufufu, all according to keikaku!” - Doald Tump
Republicans are such idiots that they would mistake huffing paint as a sign of genius.
So the 1% can buy nearly all of it for a song. Provided of course all of us the dumb money sells.
The KISS principle applies here, keep it simple. There is no plan, there is only Trump saying “I win”. He’s just declaring victory in the face of disaster as usual
It’s this.
There is no plan.
Whats the point of being the most powerful man in the world if you can’t make everyone in the world know it.
“Liberation Day” (🤮) was the “Mission Accomplished” moment for the shit whistle’s second term.
I had this thought the other day and this seems as good a place to leave it as any. Trump seems to be running the economy like it is a simplified version of the 1980s. Like the macho, bold, no compromise leadership style we would have expected from a white collar “hero” of that time period. As if that’s when he learned what a leader looks and acts like and never changed his mind. Absolutely no consideration for evolving culture or the infinitely more complex, interconnected world we live in. Let alone the complexity of the stock market, global trade, and US consumer economy.
Just oversimplified notions like, “We have to tear it down to rebuild it! You don’t have the balls to do something like that! I’m leader!”
Though, more likely he’s just dementia riddled and controlled by a foreign government and too dumb to realize any of it.
“Don’t worry about blank. Let me worry about blank!”
My only regret… is that I have… boneitis.
GOP presidents do this every time. Crash the market and the oligarchs buy it up for pennis on the dollar.
Yeah those bastards should let all of us buy stock with penis.
deleted by creator
I have some questions.
😂 I’m leaving it as it is, somehow still correct
Hello I was told I could buy an oligarch for my penis?
Trump right now is a literal amalgam of Pelosi, Bernie Sanders and Obama. Dude is a Democrat from 1988-2008 lmao 🤣
This is the dumbest political take I’ve ever seen, and my dad called Trump a communist because he had Cold War brainrot
What are you even talking about, why would you ever think a pack of neoliberals don’t love the stonks, and why would you ever include Sanders in them? I can only assume you don’t even know he’s not a Democrat.
Lmao, Pelosi Bernie and even Obama spoke in favor of tariffs during the time a lot.
You thought you were cooked?
Bro you were only marinating
Yeah because a tax on tires alone is comparable to universal tariffs on basically everyone but Russia
Bro, what kind of crack are you smoking, you sound like you were a Bernie bro who voted for Trump so you can fuck offnow
Republican doing Republican policy Republicanly is
a. A Republican
b. A Democrat
c. A Russian
Shockingly few people can answer this question correctly.
You win the award for being the dumbest fucking Lemmy user. Congratulations!
