Summary
U.S. CEOs and business executives are alarmed as Donald Trump remains firm on imposing high tariffs on U.S. allies, despite warnings from economists about potential economic harm.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump’s late-night social media announcements have blindsided both his advisers and business leaders, leaving them scrambling to react.
While Trump consults some advisers, like Marco Rubio and Treasury pick Scott Bessent, his unilateral approach limits their influence.
The uncertainty has left business leaders struggling to find ways to alter his stance on trade policies.
I hope he ruins all of them. Every last one.
You had four whole years of Trump to realize he never jokes around, he doesn’t bluff, and he’s never going to pivot, change directions, or admit he made a mistake. He means what he says and there is no nuance or subtext.
In some regards, I hope so too. The old Fuck Around and Find Out bit. The fucking MAGAts will look like deer in headlights when the economic freight train derails and crashes.
He means what he says and there is no nuance or subtext.
Well, there is a sort of nuance here.
In that he’s also terrible at doing literally anything, and fails constantly at achieving promises.
He also has so many plots and schemes cooking at any given moment with so many other people and organizations that you absolutely cannot trust or predict any outcome. This is the real thing that nobody learned about Trump is that he is completely unpredictable because he can’t be honest about the color of the sky if asked.
My only solace is that Trump kills everything he touches and betrays everyone who is loyal to him.
Leopards, faces, etc.
This is literally the most predictable outcome.
Trump’s late-night social media announcements have blindsided both his advisers and business leaders, leaving them scrambling to react.
He said he was going to do this long ago, dipshits. “Seriously, but not literally?”
unilateral
authoritarian*
FTFY
I’m always scratching my head while also panicking
Just increase taxes on the wealthy…
All tariffs will do is put the additional costs onto the working class.
I’d be happy paying higher taxes if they went towards things that benefit the community, like universal health care, improving quality of public education, etc.
Working as intended.
You’ve got my vote. (I’m not actually allowed to vote in the US election)
I’m sure imposing tariffs benefits him and his cronies. That’s why he promises to put it in place.
They are probably playing the stock market using the office to manipulate prices. This is a huge problem and is why we don’t need businessmen in the government there to enrich themselves.
NOW who’s fucking with the money?
It’s a bullying tactic straight out of elementary school. Trump knows they will suck up to him and shower him with donations and more importantly fan his ego. He doesn’t give a crap about what happens because of the tariffs (obviously) since he can just blame other people.
Good, destroy eachother.
I’m just going to point out that the ultimate victims of this idiocy are the working class.
The wealthy will still be wealthy regardless
I’m just going to point out that the working class had the chance to vote against this and didn’t.
The average age of an empire is 250 years, the US is 249 years old. The only solution to this might require a “significant restructuring”…
No they didn’t.
The working class had the option to vote for keeping things the way they are, or dramatic change and hope for the best.
They voted for dramatic change, because the way things are isn’t working.
Most people are politically tuned out, and just want to pay their bills and have some fun on the weekend. They see bills are getting harder to pay and what they can do on the weekend is getting more expensive. Like it or not, the Republicans did a good job spreading the message that a vote for them will make things cheaper somehow.
We know it isn’t true, but we’re both chronically online, somewhat informed, and statistically are likely to have an above average intelligence. We do not form a good cross section of the voting public. We voted against the tyrant.
But we’re also both smart enough to know that we weren’t voting for somebody that would actually fix any of those problems. We were voting against a dollar store tyrant and hoping for the best.
And, even if everything I said is wrong, nearly half of the working class did vote against it.
Hoping that everybody suffers because of the ignorant, short sighted decision of half of them is fucked up my guy.
Voting for dramatic change has a positive ring to it, which makes some implications falsehoods.
Voting for dramatic change that we have been plainly shown and openly promised will take everything that’s bad about the system and make it dramatically worse, now that’s something that’s idiotic, and that’s what happened.
No they didn’t.
Yes, they did, Trump was clear about his plan for tariffs. Being completely fucking ignorant about your country’s political situation does not mean the information was not available or that the option to vote against it didn’t exist.
nearly half of the working class did vote against it.
Less than a third voted against him. A third voted in favour of this shit, and the last third didn’t bother to show up.
Hoping that everybody suffers because of the ignorant, short sighted decision of half of them is fucked up my guy.
I’m not hoping people suffer, but when 66% of the population either supported this or was indifferent to it I am not going to be emotionally invested when it comes to the consequences of their actions.
I am one person, 77 million people said they wanted this, and another 90 million said “this is fine”. Who am I to argue with them? Let them have what they wanted.
They get to buy the dip.
Good to see nothing has changed in 40 years.
Might be a bit of a contrarian take, but at this point I think Trump needs to have a gigantic fuck up to drive people to the streets in anger, South Korea style. One of those ‘we need our medicine before we can get better’ moments.
For some reason tens of millions of people buy his “'I’m the greatest - only I can save you - they’re evil and stupid” rhetoric.
So it’s going to take a truly epic fuck up that he can’t bullshit his way out of - and that the media can’t ignore - for people to finally see that him and his cronies are all gigantic pieces of shit.
His entire first administration was a series of such fuckups. I am not hopeful that consequences (for him) are ever coming.
This is the whole issue. Republicans, a cult, can only exist in pretend political party form because they have convinced their base that literally–literally–anything that has a big ol REPUBLICAN label slapped on it is the highest moral good.
They see children getting murdered in cold blood in schools and take the side of the guns. I should probably repeat that four or five times with varying emphasis.
Trump could bomb an orphanage, brag about it, and within a week Fox Lies & Propaganda would be running stories about how the orphanage made a mistake on its taxes that was falsely flagged as fraud, and how orphans might become criminals.
It won’t undo the current disaster, but the real path back is probably more like talking to one person who’s trumpy but still somehow you kind of like anyway, with a tone of…come on now. Are we serious with this? You see this for what it is, right? You gotta put a stop to this, it can’t go on. Or just plain old Lakoff advice about getting your racist grandpa to tell you a story at thanksgiving of a time he helped somebody. This is one step in restoring his brain to its unpoisoned-by-conservatism state.
You gotta attack the foundation of fascism and conservatism, which science seems to think you do with empathy.
January 6th has entered the chat…and quietly left unnoticed.
South Korea wasn’t in a cult for that leader AND what he asked for was essentially what… Something that equated to the build up to January 6th, without even a January 6th style failed coup attempt to show for it.
No, they did what we should have. We failed.
South Korea values education. The Republican party has been destroying the public education system for decades.
So south Korea does not have as many braindead people as we have here
He did have a gigantic fuck up. He fucked up the response to covid-19. Badly. And how much did his fuck up make the situation worse in the rest of the world?
74 million people still voted for him in 2020. During and immediately AFTER that fuck up.
Yeah, but the alternative was voting for a woman, so…
There wasn’t a woman running in 2020.
A half black, half Indian woman, though!
It’s going to take something monumental for the US to ever change- and even then I doubt it will. People seem 100% stupider than 15 years ago and some study just showed adult intelligence has dropped in multiple areas. I wonder if people infected with COVID literally got stupider on top of all the lead poisoning from pre-90’s.
I don’t think that’s possible, unfortunately. I’m pretty sure he knows he can get away with anything, and his stupid fans will still gladly follow him. He will put the blame on someone else, every time, and they will believe him, every time.
If this could have happened it would have happened during covid
After the great depression, tariffs were implemented and failed to do anything other than fuck over the American people.
The event that finally ended the Great Depression was the United States’ entry into World War II, which significantly boosted the economy through increased demand for war materials and created millions of jobs in defense industries. While President Roosevelt’s “New Deal” programs aimed to alleviate the Depression, they did not fully end it. The massive production needs of World War II essentially pulled the US out of the Depression. The government spending on war materials created a significant economic stimulus.
So what you’re saying is that World War 3 is necessary to save the USA.
Not saying that. I’m just saying not tariffs and then not saying other things.
Let’s see, he could not impose tarrifs and make everyone happy that he’s not going to burn down the economy OR he could impose tariffs, shut down taxes on the ultra-wealthy and embezzel/stock trade his ass back to billionaire with cash on hand.
he DGAF what anyone wants unless they’re going to make him significantly richer.
All part of Putin’s plan. He probably gave him the advice on tariffs.
hell for all we know, that was part of his concession for putin helping him get elected.
Prepare for Russian Oil Imports.
“If you burn America to the ground, I will let you rule this ashes.”
I wonder if in a Freudian slip the translator said “Self Sanctions” when discussing tariffs
