That's true, but it didn't predate the election of a man who has made his understanding of tariffs and economics crystal clear in the months and years leading up to January 2025.
The tariffs this time are far in excess of anything he did previously or promised to do while running for office again and took nearly everyone by surprise though.
> Trump has made tariffs a central campaign pledge in order to protect US industry. He has proposed new 10-20% tariffs on most imported foreign goods, and much higher ones on those from China.
It also disrupts JIT supply chains. Companies make decisions with certain variables not being volatile.
You now have a situation where one week the cost of a commodity is X and the following week it could be 2X. The butterfly effect across industries also cannot be predicted.
Many industries also seem to be still recovering from the pandemic period with supply of spare parts still being de-prioritised over making parts available for new units. :/
I don't think there's that much surprise at the tariffs on China; it's the tariffs on the rest of the world, especially friendly countries like Canada that are the big surprises.
Also, who believes politicians campaign pledges?
>and he knows the legal peril he faces if the White House isn’t GOP-held for the rest of his life.
This combined with the utter self-emasculation of the Republican Party to Trump's incoherent, or at best self-serving, garbage is the most worrisome thing of all.
She did, everyone just sort of... pretended she didn't. So they could have plausible deniability for voting for Trump.
See also: Harris is an elite! (Trump is more elite), Trump knows business (he's a pretty bad business man), Harris did nothing in office! (She was VP), Trump is the underdog! (He's literally already been president)
The second paragraph of your first link: “ However, she has not provided many details on her plans”
Edit: did you read these links?
“ The American people lacked any concrete policy positions from the presumptive, and then official, Democratic presidential candidate for seven weeks following President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race.
Despite the absence of clarity on key issues, Vice President Kamala Harris quickly rose in the polls compared to Biden”
Speaking as someone who despises Ted Cruz to the bottom of my soul, I decided in 2016 that if Trump had decided to run as a Democrat, I would have voted for Cruz. At least he has some sincerely held beliefs that do not involve his own wallet and cruelty towards the entire world outside his inner circle.
My point being: at some point the American electorate has to take responsibility for picking the worst available person. The Democrats did not compel them to vote for Trump.
≥The Democrats did not compel them to vote for Trump.
Perhaps i didn't make my point clear. Indeed ur statement is true. I was referring to those who hated Trump but also hated Harris and so DIDNT VOTE. My point being that if the Democrats had fielded a compelling candidate many of those who didn't vote may have voted for them. Enough to win. The Democrats learned nothing when they fielded Hilary Clinton and lost. Joe Biden barely won. And only because they were sick of Trump and also how he handled Covid. Also don't forget the Democrats tried to run with Joe for a second term when he was clearly unfit. Huge turn off.
So yes, my argument is the Democrat Party is partly at fault for Trump 2.0. They did not field a worthy candidate.
"Vote Blue no matter who" is a failed strategy. And rightly so.
That's slightly revisionist. He won the popular vote by almost 5 percentage points. That's a lot. He also got more electoral college votes than GWB (both times) and Trump in 2016. His victories in the battleground states were also by a higher margin than Trump's in 2016, though still close. "Barely won" is a shade of true.
I honestly don't blame the guy for believing it was his responsibility to the country to run for re-election and keep Trump out of office. His heart was in the right place, even if the rest of him wasn't up to the task anymore.
> Also, who believes politicians campaign pledges?
People who actually understand politics and who realize that the extent to which politicians keep their campaign pledges is usually related to how their parties end up performing in the legislature, rather than just being dishonest.
It didn't take informed people by surprise. We still see people denying that Trump had anything to do with Project 2025, whereas honest informed people knew that he very much did.
Nobody informed saw massive tariffs on India, Brazil, etc. If you were right the stock market wouldn’t have tanked because the smart money would have priced it in.
Maybe the smart money shorted on the tank. After all, if you know there's going to be a downturn in a known time period that's a smart move. I believe it's worth analyzing who sold what and when, if not for insider trading, then at least for historical knowledge.
Trump’s style of governing is patrimonialism. Mafia. It’s how he ran his businesses, and Trump 1.0. It’s entirely predictable that he’d go much further this time around as he claimed DOJ should act as his personal law firm.
Modi pissed Trump off by refusing to support a nomination for him to get the Nobel. And Trump hit India with tariffs. Unsurprising to anyone paying attention.
No one is so stupid they can’t follow this, and predict the aggregate consequence well in advance.
It’s only by willfully suspending rationality, that people convinced themselves the obvious wouldn’t happen. And one of those is an insistence that the only valid form of prediction is at an absurd level of prediction granularity, rather than the inevitable storyline as a consequence of Trump’s intrinsic corruption and ability to corrupt everyone around him (or else they discarded and flung far away).
Trump is famously a racist, a rapist, a felon, and a vile insurrectionist. Nothing good could possibly have followed his election. Indeed, we’re really lucky so far. It’s going to get much worse.
That's true, but it didn't predate the election of a man who has made his understanding of tariffs and economics crystal clear in the months and years leading up to January 2025.