He can not seem to grasp that your enemy is allowed to fight back and if you make enemies of friends eventually that is all you will have.
He can not seem to grasp
…anything, really. And his closest henchmen know this well, too! Just read the entire chat on Signal.
They’re just using him because he pulls (or used to pull) public consensus, while working around his bullshits.
He’s just gone. Nothing’s going on upstairs. I sometimes think of an ancient clip of Ali G trying to sell him some kind of ice cream glove and there was enough brainpower to realize it was bullshit and try to get out of that situation. Now tho, there is nothing there. He doesn’t grasp the most basic things.
Classic bully / troll behavior. Always the aggressor yet also always the victim.
I’m not condoning it, but he sees this his original actions as retaliation. Or purports to see this as retaliation. Sigh.
Edit for clarity
It’s like he can’t comprehend that other people would react to his actions.
He raised tariffs, other nations reduced trade with the US and looked elsewhere. If he continues to raise tariffs it will inevitably cause the US to be isolated in trade.
It’s not even a shocking/daring tactic, it’s a self destructive tantrum because his misunderstanding has led to mismanagement and now he’s doubling down
It’s a move to spur domestic manufacturing and move the US to Autarky — straight out of Hitler’s playbook; albeit an incompetent attempt because he’s a mentally challenged degenerate.
Autarky isn’t bad — covid highlighted the weaknesses that capitalism and globalism created for every economy — but Trumps goals are not risk mitigation or “national security”, and he certainly intends for it to enable imperialist wars and conquests. The fact is the allies won WW2 largely because of US manufacturing capacity (Europes was destroyed). China could take Taiwan tomorrow and the world would have to let them as we are entirely reliant on Chinese manufacturing; they could cripple us if they halted exports.
I agree with almost everything here, but I don’t think an embargo on China would be as damaging as you think it would.
It would hurt, don’t get me wrong, but China is largely in the position it is now because the developed world was looking for cheap labour and China fit the bill. There is no lack of underdeveloped nations who would gladly shift their economy if it meant they could support a fraction of the manufacturing supply that China currently commands. Africa and South America (not a single nation, I know but this is true of many African and South American nations so I’m combining for simplicity’s sake) is positioned both politically and geographically, to be a sudo-China in terms of manufacturing if the wider world decides to embargo China-proper.
The US and EU pulling out of China would devastated them far more than it would affect the former. I’d like to think that the EU at least, would be willing to withstand some economic damage to aid another nation in need.
It took 30 years for Chinese manufacturing to reach what it is today.
Yes, other countries would love to take on that role.
But it would take another 30 years, IF China cooperated and pushed the transition like the west did. Which they won’t.
I’m not well read on india’s modern manufacturing capabilities, but I do know that they have been trying for a while to up their manufacturing exports and entice jobs that would normally go to china. 1 billion ppl is a competitive sized workforce.
If America and EU needed an immediate substitute, india could fit the bill.
Not really, for the same reasons Russia’s economy is now in the shitter: sure they could sell oil to another country, but changing the whole infrastructure is not something that can be done in days. Same with moving the whole production of goods to a completely new country.
Also consider that nowadays western countries have lost the knowhow to produce efficiently goods (while their service industry still remains unmatched)
To be fair, if you look at it from the perspective of a narcissist who has never been told “no” his entire life, it makes perfect sense.
Exactly, he doesn’t know how to negotiate because a negotiation involves give and take. Trump has only ever known take, take, take
For many years I have argued that Putin’s actions in Ukraine and Europe “make sense” based on the assumption that no country in the world actually has agency in its actions other than a handful of superpowers - Russia, the US, and China. Any other country not on that list must be a vassal state of one of the ones that is, so if the Eastern European countries are no longer Russian vassals then that must logically mean they are now American vassals.
It would appear that Trump is under a similar delusion. He’s apparently trying to beat countries into submission that he views as already being American vassals. Hence why he thinks stuff like the “51st state” garbage is no big deal, since in his view Canada’s already 90% of the way to being a state anyway.
I’m sorry, but I completely disagree. I don’t see any evidence for this vassal worldview (apart from extreme cases like Belarus and Russia). Without that first assumption the whole premise falls apart.
Even assuming the main characters (MC) and vassals idea is true to reality, the rest of the argument is flimsy at best. Even if a MC loses a vassal through mismanagement or foreign interference, that doesn’t automatically mean that the vassal has a new MC overlord. They could be in a limbo state where some of the MCs are vying for control.
As for Trump, I think it’s much less of a stretch to assume that Trump loves the sound of his own voice and what better way to hear his own voice than to create sound bites, hence the 51st state nonsense. If anything Trump’s actions say to me that he has NO capacity for the mental mapping required to envision this kind of complex interweaving of interests and angles that is geopolitics. I find it even less likely that this is the one he would subscribe to.
Maybe vassals is too strong-worded to describe the phenomenon. But living in western Europe I have firsthand experience in the relationship between the US and my country in the past decades. The US offered protection to the “free world”, but of course this comes at a price. The US had to be regarded as a role model in many ways, and everything that came out of the US, was copied and implemented verbatim. Which made the US the de facto puppet master and they really liked that role. This relationship was carefully orchestrated and nurtured by the US from the end of WW2 onwards, and the effect was that European countries embraced this strategy and viewed the US in a positive light, no obvious power play or bullying necessary. But the fact is, there always was a strong dependency on the US, and this was by US design.
Trump doesn’t realize that there was good reason for choosing such a “soft” strategy, he can’t because bullying is his only available tactic. He will soon find out that his perceived european vassal states don’t respond as well to hostility and blackmail as he might have expected.
“If you guys damage the US economy, I will do even more damage to the US economy.”
—stable genius
Me and a group suggested he’s not using a fake tan. His orange tint is caused by being pissed on
do economic harm to the US
… Like the economic harm you’re doing to Europe and Canada?
You’re literally that bully that’s starts screaming “don’t hit ME!” when the victims punch back
