No, half of America’s voters blew it. The market is just expressing the consequences.
The only sad thing during this whole ordeal is how ineffectual democratic politicians are... especially when they personally dealt with minority parties stopping them quite easily for the last 15 years. You'd think they'd learn some lessons but their failure to seize the moment is the only consistency they have.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/regu...
don't know if they're cherry-picking
And from previous statements, Trump's idea of "anti-US tariff" seems to include the EU's VAT, which is sales tax that everyone including local supplies pays.
So while some of that might be cherry picking, the reasoning overall is obvious nonsense, which is worse.
I'm so tired of hearing that even when it's the Republican's fault, it's the Democrats to blame for not... What? Committing an assassination? They have zero power in the federal government. No house, no senate, no judicial, no executive. Nothing.
You are right tho, it is the fault of Republicans in Congress to let it come to this point.
All the more reason to expand the house in the future.
There.
Was.
No.
Vote.
Please, show me the bill they signed for these tariffs. Please, show me the bill for DOGE. The dissolving of the DoE. The mass firing of federal employees.
Democrats cannot do anything because Trump has dissolved the power of the legislative branch and Republicans are capitulating. He is acting unconstitutionally as a king who declared unilateral edicts. The only they can do is sue in the courts afterwards, but they would still need standing, which politicians lack.
They're also playing games where new time-limited tax cuts are counted as "costs" for their planned lifetime, but now, later, they're claiming renewing the same cuts costs nothing because they're already there. [0]
This is like a man with a mid-life crisis renting a fancy sports car saying "just one month is quite affordable", except next month he extends the lease, saying "this is fine, it's already in the budget so it doesn't cost us extra."
That matters because they're using this fake math to try to trigger special rules which let them pass budgets with fewer votes.
> The odd part is that Congress, at any time, can revoke these tariffs
Side note: Originally the law (IEEAP, 1977) [1] allowed Congress to revoke them with 50% of each house. But few years later the Supreme Court ruled that mechanism unconstitutional. This means it now requires a veto-proof supermajority of >66.6% in each house.
So yeah, with enough votes this could be done in a very short time-frame... but "enough" is such a big number that it requires most of the GOP to decide it doesn't want to destroy America after all.
[0] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/04/republicans-tax-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Emergency_Econom...
The same business-industrial class captures them as the Republicans. Neither party is genuinely going to organize around class or material needs.
The real threat to America or Americans isn't a single man. It's the superstructure that enabled him.
In other words: "Wer hat uns verraten? The Democratic Party."
Medicare for all? A cease-fire in Gaza and an end to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians?
Neither is Bernie’s idiotic version of Medicare for all, in spite of it being a fun bumper sticker.
Y’all have gotta give up the TikTok bullshit and read some books.
Yeah, politics, where you kill your conscience for the chance of winning.
Again, this is social media political thinking. No nuance or even a vague hand wave at intellectual honesty.
I have a book for you that predates the "TikTok bullshit." It's called "The Fateful Triangle" by Noam Chomsky. He portrays internal Isreali thought and political currents in the early '80s, which are more or less unchanged 40+ years later. In particular, the dichotomy between the "doves" of the left who want an apartheid state with a pacified Palestinian population to live in townships whose purpose is to provide cheap labor, and the "hawks" who outright called for the Lebensraum policies that we're seeing today in the illegally occupied territories of the, as Menachem Begin called them, "beasts walking on two legs," remains unchanged.
As for Medicare for All, I don't know of anyone who has had a positive experience using the American for-profit, multi-payer healthcare system. What is the alternative bumper sticker for keeping the status quo? "I <3 Getting my claims denied" or maybe "I DON'T want to shoot the CEO"?
You’re aware, of course, that it isn’t a binary choice, right? That Medicare for All isn’t the sole and only other possibility, or that thinking it’s an idiotic idea does not, in fact, suggest that one thinks the status quo is perfect?
What, specifically, do you know about healthcare, Medicare reimbursements, or how doctors work in this country? What, specifically, do you know about how the current system functions? I’m curious what apparently extensive knowledge underpins these really strongly held opinions.
> Noam Chomsky
Who may have done a brilliant job of discussing Israeli political thought, and whose writing might’ve led you to understand what would happen if the US withdrew support and Israel was pushed into an existential conflict. Let someone know when you get to that part.
Biden? If that man was actually the one leading the country over the last 2+ years, I’ll eat your hat. All that is coming out now from multiple sources in the administration seem to indicate he hasn’t been capable of making many decisions for quite a while now.
I see posters on HN trot this out, but I'm yet to see any evidence of this. Can you point to a couple of reliable news sources reporting on this so I can read more for myself?
DNC fundraiser Lindi Li has been all over the podcasts and news (back in November a lot) talking about the challenges she saw.
I’m not sure what you consider “reliable news sources” but I have seen this topic and these authors, and Lindi Li on network, cable, and new media news sources across the spectrum.
Republicans are awful, but Democrats don't seem to want to do any better than "at least we're not them." It shouldn't be any surprise that Trump has (had?) real appeal over feckless national Democrats.
They respond to the perception of their material conditions, and the rise in inflation of the last few years has resulted in regime change all over the world.
Liberals are only just now beginning to realize this, but it remains to be seen if they'll learn at a scale that matters.
Anyway, the economy was rocking under Biden, we had the largest investments in manufacturing in decades (the advanced kind, not mud production), record low unemployment, stonks going up, etc.
Inflation is pretty much the only issue that mattered, which was a global phenomenon that America navigated better than anyone else, and there's almost nothing to say about it. Well, you can lie and say that you'll reduce prices on day one, despite having no mechanism to do so, which I suppose is the real takeaway: Dems should blatantly lie more.
These are very real ideas and concepts that average people internally and instinctively revile: they are no longer people but "human resources."
?
This is demagoguery.
Naturally and as we all know, Zuckerberg is actually the reptile. And more to the point, it really was and still is next to nobody but some right wingers who were complaining about NGOs in that fashion -- it's an optics hurdle that has to be overcome, especially as it's usually only focused in on a couple offenders but ignoring many more.
Generally, it'll take more effort and tact to explain yourself as a result, and if we're talking about where it came from, it really does appear like it's just appeared suddenly out of the rightwing-o-sphere to many.
Actual economical or other results have nothing to do with anything. It was not about that. Democrats thinking them being objectively better for economy might do something is what looses the elections.
Instead, voters were told they were better off than ever, and there was some astroturfed panic about "Project 2025."
Oh, please, if this isn't you just saying the quite part out loud.
They are enacting Project 2025. Significant portions are already done, for God's sake! Don't pretend like it's some Boogeyman made up thing!
I mean literally day one a slurry of orders practically taken straight from it were made, and it's clearly been the playbook they're operating off of.
It's not astroturfed, some of us spotted what's going on and tried to draw attention!
Except, you know, the people who came up with it. And then got put into power.
You know this, of course.
The margin is so close that one can name any of a dozen reasons why they blew it and be totally correct.
The Democrats blew it by no cravenly violating norms like refusing to seat a supreme court justice because it was too close to an election.
EXACTLY the thinking that won Trump the election. Reduce legitimate concerns to the deplorable desires of the unwashed masses.
We need another "Why Trump won?" postmortem, as it seems people haven't learned yet.
That doesn’t make it wrong though
Similarly, only a handful of democrats (and ex-democrats) are actually doing anything to make big public statements, to direct people as to what a useful usage of their energies could be.
Oh, and they could do things like not put David Hogg as a vice chair in a way that not only looks corrupt, but far more importantly has absolutely no strategic sense at all -- who asked for that guy?! He's looked like a complete idiot at virtually every debate he's been to, believes in virtually nothing except total gun control conveyed in a sanctimonious, tactless, trivially hateable manner that instantly alienates many americans who might be willing to listen to nearly anyone else in context of all that's going on... I could keep going, the point is this is a guy with absolutely no redeeming qualities except his well-off family with a father in the FBI, which just confirms narratives while not even providing an otherwise competent person.
Most importantly though, they don't know how to fix their behavior or optics as a conservative-lite party that only moves to the right now, that only "compromises" by giving ground for nothing in return.
If you're a socialist
If you're LGBTQ
If you're an environmentalist
If you're single-issue on healthcare
If you're bothered by the situation in Palestine
If you're a voting reformer
If you're any one of these things
Then you have NOTHING at this point, just a party where people who tried to speak for you and usually did so tactlessly and poorly, then started blaming you for the election saying "if only we were a little more conservative! Then we would have won the election!"
Sorry for the rather rambling post, but I think it should do a good job of expressing the core anger and dissatisfaction that's being felt, and why they're both not doing enough + look unpalatable to a huge chunk of their own voters now.
Now, interestingly, the GOP has shifted to being largely pro-tariff—except for a few staunch free-market conservatives like Rand Paul.
Strange world …
As in, I could buy tariffs as a strategic decision to help build own industry in some are ... but these are just not that. These were originally used in conjunction with annexation threats, then with lies and are deployed with no regards to own citizens.
Trump has a lot of leeway to declare emergency rulings and to have those enforced in the short term. Such powers come with a short leash that require appeals to be addressed in a short time frame.
That mechanism was upended twenty four days ago when US Republicians effectively "stopped time" ..
Each day for the remainder of the first session of the 119th Congress shall not constitute a calendar day for purposes of section 202 of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622) with respect to a joint resolution terminating a national emergency declared by the President on February 1, 2025.
"Each day [..] shall not constitute a calendar day"
This does not appear (on my admittedly brief search) to be something routine in US resolutions.
There's some further commentary here:
The Constitution gives to Congress, not the president, the power to impose tariffs. But the International Emergency Economic Powers Act allows the president to impose tariffs if he declares a national emergency under the National Emergencies Act, which Trump did on February 1. That same law allows Congress to end such a declaration of emergency, but if such a termination is introduced—as Democrats have recently done—it has to be taken up in a matter of days.
But this would force Republicans to go on record as either supporting or opposing the unpopular economic ideology Trump and Musk are imposing. So Republicans just passed a measure saying that for the rest of this congressional session, “each day…shall not constitute a calendar day” for the purposes of terminating Trump’s emergency declaration.
Can someone explain like I'm a college freshman?
* Trump declared emergency Tariff powers.
* An appeal was made to stop this.
* The appeal has to be heard and voted on within X number of "Calendar days"
* "Calendar days" usually means "every day of the week, including weekends and holidays, as a 24-hour period from one midnight to the next."
* However this term has been "redefined in a context" such that it no longer means that ... (just with respect to the appeal against Trump's tariff powers)
with the result that the filed appeal will never be heard or voted on within the current session.
Programmers likely are familier with changing the meaning or type of things within a context .. it's a procedural version of that.
My faith in American "democracy" has faded significantly.
edit: fix the vote count.
I don't feel arrogant about this, I feel depressed and angry.