Mega-Thread: Trump Focused Discussion

[Mayhem]

https://www.chronicle.com/article/wh...t-goes-too-far

You guys are wasting your time defending antisemites. The college itself and its administration has admitted to it. The administration, the task force sent and the jewish students have denounced antisemitism. If you dont trust the lived experience of Jewish students there is not much to say lol.

Weren't you and your ilk ready to dismiss the experience of every Jewish protester on the side of the anti-zionist protests?

Aren't you still ignoring all the rabbis that speak out against Israel's government and actions in the West Bank and Gaza?

Bold move to make fun of others when you don't trust the lived experience of Jewish protesters and Rabbis.

[ringpriest]

Exactly this.

He's saying "They rigged 2020 but I still became president again anyways". I know the dude is a moron so he is easy to clip chimp cause he says dumb fucking shit but this one isn't even out there. Pretty obvious what the dip shit is saying.

Watching the whole thing, it's pretty obvious what he meant. (I hate to pull "what he really meant was" but at the same time, criticizing him over stuff he didn't say just gives the American fascists more propaganda fuel. It's not fair, but that is how media in America seem to work.) He's jumbling together several related ideas.

1) Having the 202 World Cup in the US was arranged during Trump's first term. (If I recall correctly, in spite of him, not with his cooperation, but I could be remembering incorrectly.)

2) If he had been re-elected in 2020, he would have been out of office after 2024.

3) Since "they" supposedly "rigged" the 2020 election (his usual lie), he was out of office for a term.

4) And then he got re-elected, so he gets to be President during the World Cup he supposedly arranged.


Now, to give you an idea of the double-standards of American politics, if Biden had said this, the right would have exploded, the media would have covered it from multiple angles for a month, and right-wing propagandists would be repeating it as evidence two decades from now. But Trump said it - indicating, at a minimum, that his mouth doesn't have anything resembling a self-aware mind attached to it - and it's barely even acknowledged to have happened.

[Kaleredar]

Weren't you and your ilk ready to dismiss the experience of every Jewish protester on the side of the anti-zionist protests?

Aren't you still ignoring all the rabbis that speak out against Israel's government and actions in the West Bank and Gaza?

Bold move to make fun of others when you don't trust the lived experience of Jewish protesters and Rabbis.

All of those wringing their hands about the “pro-Palestine protestors” and accusing the left of having an antisemitism problem only care about Israel insofar as they’re a bastion in the Middle East that “fights the brown people.”

[Nightmare Queen]

Trump: "They rigged the election, and I became the President so that was good"

Well.
There it is.

Yep. Same thing happened in 2016.

[Breccia]

So...this is interesting.

The WSJ suggests that Trump can't actually apply tariffs on Canada and Mexico after all.

"That's a hot take, considering he already has."

Indeed. And yet.

The crux of the paywalled article is the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act which Trump has been leaning on, which makes sense, because he's so fat he can barely stand on his own power. Specifically, Trump has declared fentanyl a National Security Lol and therefore he has authority to impose tariffs to deal with the issue. The law, the WSJ points out, is not designed to create economic regulations.

"Who agrees with this viewpoint?"

Honestly, I think Trump might. That's why he collapsed so quickly when Canada and Mexico said they'd send the troops they were already sending. And why Trump didn't immediately slap tariffs on the EU. I think his team knows there's a risk here, and Congress will accept it when poor people are hurt by his tariffs, but forcing a recessio n that hurts their portfolios crosses the line.

Under that ruling, Congress must expressly authorize economically and politically significant executive actions, which Mr Trump’s tariffs undeniably are.

And it gets worse. For Trump.

Presidents have used the law to freeze assets of foreign governments and nationals, restrict US companies from doing business with them, limit export of technologies and ban imports from adversaries.

The law does not spell out the word "tariff". And, funny story, the WSJ points out everyone knows this. Biden, for example, did not use it in March 2022 when Putin invaded Ukraine. He banned imports, which the law spells out is okay, and asked Congress to impose tariffs.

This suggests that neither Congress nor President Biden believed IEEPA provided tariff authority. No President has used IEEPA to impose tariffs.

The WSJ goes back further to find the last time a President enacted tariffs without Congress. It was Nixon, in 1971, who yes, cited the trade gap as the reason. The IEEPA was passed in 1977, possibly as a direct response. Nixoin, by the way, was sued. He won, because the courts found that tariffs to handle a trade gap was the right tool for the job. The WSJ says tariffs against a country, for criminals bringing fentanyl, will not survive a court ruling.

Speaking of Biden, Murdoch takes great pleasure in pointing out that Biden tried using National Security Lol himself, on COVID vaccine mandates and student loan forgiveness. The courts stopped that. Declaring National Security Lol is not the be-all end-all Trump has been suggesting.

And the courts have not been bending over backwards for Trump, have they?

The WSJ has a very specific and direct suggestion:

Trump invokes a law that doesn't give him power to impose sweeping tariffs. Someone should sue,

I'll point out that there are some states in the US staring down the barrel of "electricity from Canada just got more expensive" as a response to Trump's arguably illegal tariffs. These states have a reasonable issue and can protect their residents by ending the tariffs, and some of those states are blue.

Now, of course, SCOTUS could agree with Trump, but they can't actually say "It's onily legal when people named Trump do it". And the WSJ warns against letting this slide.

If Mr Trump succeeds in unilaterally imposing tariffs as he sees fit, a future Democratic president will use "emergency" power for climate change and much more.

Remember, Murdoch. This is not wild conspiracies thrown about. This is a classic conservative looking out for the GOP's future. Murdoch has already called this "the dumbest trade war in history" and is now also saying it's illegal. This is a giant neon sign that GOP legislators are likely glancing at quietly, tapping their feet nervously, wondering Trump plunging the country into a recession illegally is what finally gets them to raise even one objection.

[Shadowferal]

So...this is interesting. The WSJ suggests that Trump can't actually apply tariffs on Canada and Mexico after all.

Was reading about here

[Breccia]

Adjusting for uncertainty and alternative explanations (e.g., ideological alignment or naivety), I estimate a 75-85 percent likelihood Trump is a Putin-compromised asset, leaning toward the higher end due to the consistency of his behavior and the depth of historical ties.

"Who said that?"

Grok.

"...the NFL player?"

No, that's Gronk. Grok is Elon Musk's AI chatbot. It was asked to analyze Trump's speech to Congress, and didn't like what it saw.

Weighing this, the financial ties (decades-long, opaque, and substantial), intelligence suggesting Russian intent, and Trump’s unwavering refusal to criticize Putin despite attacking allies tilt the scale.

[PhaelixWW]

"Who said that?"

Grok.

Robert Heinlein is probably laughing from beyond the grave.


...



Then again, he went a bit crazy before he died, so that's not saying much.

[Huehuecoyotl]

Robert Heinlein is probably laughing from beyond the grave.


...



Then again, he went a bit crazy before he died, so that's not saying much.

A bit? The guy was a libertarian wet dream mother fucker. Literally, if his books are to be believed.

Even he'd be looking at what the GOP is getting up to these days and saying "you know what, this might be going a shade too far".

[PhaelixWW]

A bit? The guy was a libertarian wet dream mother fucker. Literally, if his books are to be believed.

Even he'd be looking at what the GOP is getting up to these days and saying "you know what, this might be going a shade too far".

Heinlein was firmly anti-fascism; I'm sure he'd look at the current christofascist incarnation of the GoP and decry it in the harshest terms.

I imagine he'd also piss on Elon Musk for appropriating his word for use in an "AI" chatbot.

[Breccia]

Extreme weather expected to cause food price volatility in 2025 after cost of cocoa and coffee doubles

Extreme weather events are expected to lead to volatile food prices throughout 2025, supply chain analysts have said, after cocoa and coffee prices more than doubled over the past year.

In an apparent confirmation of warnings that climate breakdown could lead to food shortages, research by the consultancy Inverto found steep rises in the prices of a number of food commodities in the year to January that correlated with unexpected weather.

Several authorities declared 2024 the hottest year on record, a trend towards higher temperatures that seems to be continuing into 2025. Inverto said a long-term trend towards more extreme weather events would continue to hit regional crop yields, causing price spikes.

The highest price rises were for cocoa and coffee, up 163% and 103% respectively, due to a combination of higher than average rainfall and temperatures in producing regions, according to the research.

Sunflower oil prices increased by 56% after drought caused poor crop yields in Bulgaria and Ukraine, which also continued to be affected by the Russian invasion. Other food commodities with sharp year-on-year price rises included orange juice and butter, both up by more than a third, and beef, up by just over a quarter.

“Food manufacturers and retailers should diversify their supply chains and sourcing strategies to reduce over-reliance on any one region affected by crop failures,” Katharina Erfort, of Inverto, said.

Climate scientists said Inverto’s findings were in line with their expectations.

“Extreme weather events around the globe will continue to increase in severity and frequency in line with the ongoing rise in global temperature,” said Pete Falloon, a food security expert at the Met Office and University of Bristol.

“Crops are often vulnerable to extreme weather, and we can expect to witness ongoing shocks to global agricultural production and supply chains, which ultimately feed into food security concerns.”

Max Kotz, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said data showed heat extremes were already directly affecting food prices.

“Last year showed numerous examples of this phenomena playing out in real time, as extreme heat across east Asia drove substantial increases in the price of rice in Japan and vegetables in China,” he said.

“Market commodities were also strongly affected, with extreme heat and drought across cocoa-producing west African countries and coffee-producing regions in Brazil and Vietnam driving strong increases in prices. Until greenhouse gas emissions are actually reduced to net zero, heat and drought extremes will continue to intensify across the world, causing greater problems for agriculture and food prices than those we are currently facing.”

"Okay, but why post here? This is the Trump thread."

Good point. Say, what do you think Trump will do about any of this?

"Uh...nothing?"

Worse than nothing, actually.

Trump's history suggest he will not send aid to countries affected by drought, floods, or other natural disasters. He also doesn't believe in climate change - this is the man who tried to redirect a hurricane with a Sharpee - and, while I will admit he has no magic wand to wave to lower temperatures, will never admit they are a problem and will never take steps to helping future generations. There's a saying about leadership and planting trees in whose shade you'll never sit? Trump is cutting down trees. And of course, Trump will not subsidize imports. From anyone (except maybe Russia). Ever. If food prices start high before they reach our ports, there's not a ton he can do to reduce them, and he won't do any of his few options.

But...if the prices are already high, and then tariffs are applied, what happens? Oh, right. tariffs are proportional. Those go up, too.

There is a worldwide problem, and Trump will not offer any solutions. He will only make the problems worse.

[NED funded]

Is Trump giving up on high rise prices? From ordering the DOJ to find anti trust and now sharing articles about how egg prices dont actually matter it seems like Donny isnt capable of negotiating a deal for eggs uuuh???

[Xath]

No, it's not.

And it was a 1.5% popular vote difference.

Deal in facts, not conspiracy theories.

Ah yes because that .5% makes up for a feat not seen since Reagan. Seriously winning all 7 semi feasible maybe winning all 7 outside of auto recount margins is not. We also have Trump's own words thanking Elon for Pennsylvania because he knows the voting machines.

[Breccia]

Trump won’t rule out US recession amid tariff trade war confusion in Fox News interview

*ding*

He sat down for an interview with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo as his administration deals with backlash from both sides of the aisle and some business owners after another week of blustery threats about trade measures and his decision to relieve Canada of some planned tariff measures until at least April.

The Fox host asked Trump bluntly if he agreed with a prediction of impending recession made by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, and the US president hedged his answer.

“I hate to predict things like that. There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big,” said Trump. “There are always periods of ... it takes a little time. It takes a little time. But I think it should be great for us.”

He added: “The tariffs could go up as time goes by, and they may go up.”

That's quite a different story from his campaign, huh? Also, that's quite the admission. "Yes, I might cause a recession by raising taxes on the American people."

You know who agrees with Trump, that Trump could cause a recession? The bond market. 2year bond yields are tanking.

“Just a couple of weeks ago we were getting questions about whether we think the US economy’s re-accelerating —- and now all of a sudden the R word is being brought up repeatedly,” said Gennadiy Goldberg, head of US interest rate strategy at TD Securities, referring to the risk of a recession. “The market’s gone from exuberance about growth to absolute despair.”

The movement marks an abrupt about-face for the Treasuries market, where the dominant driver of the last few years had been the surprising resilience of the US economy even as growth weakened overseas. Investors initially wagered that the outcome of the presidential election would only exaggerate that trend and drove yields sharply higher late last year on anticipation of faster growth and inflation — a pillar of the so-called Trump trade.

Since mid-February, though, Treasury yields have come down as the new administration’s policies cast significant uncertainty over the outlook. The decline has been lead by shorter-dated securities, steepening the yield curve, as typically happens when investors position for the Fed to start easing monetary policy to jumpstart growth.

A key driver has been Trump’s brewing trade war, which is likely to deliver another inflation shock and roil global supply chains. That fueled a stock-market selloff last week that continued even after he again delayed tariff hikes on Mexico and Canada. The administration’s efforts to withhold federal funding and fire tens of thousands of government workers are also taking a toll.

“Recession risk is definitely higher because of the sequence of Trump’s policies – tariffs first, tax cuts later,” said Tracy Chen, a portfolio manager at Brandywine Global Investment Management.

"Surely all bonds everywhere are falling!"

Actually, no. EU bonds are pulling away from the USA, which is rare. Usually they move in unison. Of course, Germany's bonds surged because they were about to do a bunch of defensive spending because, yep, Trump can't be counted on to help Ukraine so Germany's doing it on their own. Still counts as a Trump policy.

People who are in the business of betting on America, are not betting on America. People who put their actual money on the line are not buying the Trump line, and instead going on experience and evidence. And those lead to a downslide for the United States, caused by Trump's policies.

"But inflation will keep those yields up!"

First of all, strange thing to cheer on. Second of all, if bonds fall even with high inflation, that's especially bad.

"But financial experts have been wrong before, therefore, they're wrong this time too!"

Yeah, no. Betting on evidence and sometimes being wrong is objectively better than making shit up and constantly lying. And besides, let's pretend that Trump does somehow know that the US is going to do better, magically being the only person making that call with all the current evidence, including Trump. Um...why isn't he pushing savings bonds? Why isn't he very publicly buying US savings bonds? "I believe in America so much, that I'm buying US savings bonds with my own money!" Instead, he's making his own bitcoin.

Trump, in public, on purpose, is admitting he's going to cause a recession. And everyone already knew that.

[Teriz]

Trump says he's not pardoning Derek Chauvin

Would they use this to start civil unrest in order to distract us from the failing economy? I'm willing to bet they would.

[Logwyn]

Trump, in public, on purpose, is admitting he's going to cause a recession. And everyone already knew that.

Trump reminds me of Commodus or Nero.

[hellhamster]

I fucking called it.

The US and the world are facing MAJOR deflationary collapse, which will probably need to be counteracted by MAJOR QE (not just interest rate decreases, but the actual money printer going BRRRRRRRRRRRRR), into immediate inflationary economy zombification.

The unknowns so far for me are, how big is the deflationary collapse gonna be? Will this also pop the never-ending credit bubble? Are pensions going bye bye? I know they aren't by law, but... How are bonds being priced in? Are we gonna see yield curve control? How will you get degenerates who are usually gambling with overinflated equities into your (mandated) low yield bonds?

You can see the markets' reactions as this shit unfolds, they have no idea what to do. For the deflationary scenario, we don't see banks unloading, and for the inflationary scenario, we don't see reserve assets exploding (ok maybe gold exploded a little).

The bubble is gonna pop this year, unless everything magically returns back to normal and the entire economy pretends that nothing has happened, but Trump HAS to shut the fuck up about tariffs at the very least. And now we have Trump himself talking about a recession...

I fucking hope not, but things are looking very ugly.

[PhaelixWW]

Ah yes because that .5% makes up for a feat not seen since Reagan.

Well, it's half again the size of "sub 1%". Not that the total popular vote margin makes a difference when it comes to individual states. You could have every state go 100% for one candidate or the other and still end up with a near 0% total margin.

Seriously winning all 7 semi feasible maybe winning all 7 outside of auto recount margins is not.

Of course it's feasible. I don't think you understand math very well.

But you're also ignoring that four of those seven states don't even have an auto-recount law, and Michigan might as well not, since it only kicks in under a 2000 vote margin. The other two states only have auto-recounts under 0.5%.

Auto-recounts aren't terribly common.

We also have Trump's own words thanking Elon for Pennsylvania because he knows the voting machines.

We also have Trump's own words telling us that injecting bleach and horse dewormers were solutions to COVID. Suddenly believing he's being honest about this is just ridiculous. No evidence has been brought forward suggesting that these voting machines were hacked, and frankly, believing that Elon has the capability to do so is giving him faaaaaaar too much credit.

[Doomcookie]

Nah people just projected their insecurities onto me. But people enjoy telling me they know more about who I voted for than I do.

It's your side that sees violence, intimidation, and property destruction of Jews on campus and whistles past it spewing platitudes about protest. Well, those of you that deign to even notice it do that. Some just deflect to Trump or Republicans. Gondrin does the platitudes on protest, you pretend to not even notice antisemitism from the left.

Again, nice little slide and pivot. Antisemitism on campus is finally getting a belated civil rights and antidiscrimination pushback? Better talk about who the president cares about and Israeli genocide.

The issue is starting to be addressed. You can circle back around in 6 months when there's some NYT deep-dive on how Republicans made inroads among Jewish minority groups, and what the cause of that was. It doesn't actually *need* to have the opposition being clued-in to the issues to address it at this time. That's one of the benefits of being out of power.

There's also the fact that you got caught lying about it.

Can you show us where you condemned Trump for January 6th, and vowed to never support a fascist like him?

- - - Updated - - -

That's why the problem persisted and why the Trump administration gets its shot to fix the problem. Any criticism of the left's failures is ignore and deflect or deny and deflect. That's the literal recipe to doing nothing, and why nothing was done.

I get why you and others do it. The subject is indefensible. Jewish students were pinned against walls, spat upon, chased out of their dorms, and threatened with death. This happened on a famously left-wing campus. They couldn't blame some right-wing campus group. So the defenders of antisemitism are left with ignoring it, apologizing for it, pretending that repeating "protest" erases the violence, and pivoting to other subjects. You created this with your cowardice, now comes the response. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 doesn't have an exception for "I whined about Trump, therefore I never have to own up to anything."

You defended literal rape...

Twice.

[Xath]

Well, it's half again the size of "sub 1%". Not that the total popular vote margin makes a difference when it comes to individual states. You could have every state go 100% for one candidate or the other and still end up with a near 0% total margin.



Of course it's feasible. I don't think you understand math very well.

But you're also ignoring that four of those seven states don't even have an auto-recount law, and Michigan might as well not, since it only kicks in under a 2000 vote margin. The other two states only have auto-recounts under 0.5%.

Auto-recounts aren't terribly common.



We also have Trump's own words telling us that injecting bleach and horse dewormers were solutions to COVID. Suddenly believing he's being honest about this is just ridiculous. No evidence has been brought forward suggesting that these voting machines were hacked, and frankly, believing that Elon has the capability to do so is giving him faaaaaaar too much credit.

I believe the vast majority of things he says he believes are true. He is the type of pseudo intellectual that sounds semi competent at a distance but anytime he talks about a topic the listener actually knows about is revealed as a complete and utter fool. Also there is literally someone on Elon's team who won a hackathon for how "verify elections" if you actually look at the work it could absolutely be used for rigging.