Sure this seems like a great way for if you can sustain a multi-decade effort
If you have 3.5 years to re-negotiate a deal, maybe you need to move faster.
Easier to onshore manufacturing with multi-year timelines, but you don't need multi-year timelines to impose tariffs on carefully selected industries, not penguins and your existing industries' key suppliers.
>If you change your policy multiple times
you're missing the forest for the trees. the policy has not changed: bring manufacturing back to the US.
> ... some were concerned about the law's provisions favoring American industry. ... the chairman of the 2023 G20 meeting in India, called it "the most protectionist act ever drafted in the world", asking American officials, "You believed in market forces and now you do this?" Other countries have begun to create their own similar laws. China requested WTO dispute consultations with the United States.
> 27 European Union finance ministers have expressed "serious concerns" about the financial incentives of the Inflation Reduction Act, and are considering challenging it. They have listed at least nine points in the legislation, which they say could be in breach of World Trade Organization rules. They were opposed to the subsidies for consumers to buy North American-assembled electric cars, as EU officials believe the subsidies discriminate against European carmakers. One EU official told CNBC that, "there is a political consensus (among the 27 ministers) that this plan threatens the European industry" and its supply of raw materials. In February 2023, the European Commission announced it would propose the "Net Zero Industrial Act", similar to the IRA, in turn putting pressure on the United Kingdom and South Korea.
Trump shouting about how his amazing tariffs are going to bring manufacturing back and then promptly cancelling most of them and bragging about how everyone wants to do deals with him and he's going to do beautiful deals isn't any kind of strategy for bringing manufacturing back, and frankly the fact that so many Americans are dumb or partisan enough to insist it is represents a bigger problem for US industrial policy than term limits
This is what it boils down to for you. Other people have a different opinion than you so they're dumb or partisan
In fact the only argument I can think of in favour of setting tariffs for the Heard and McDonald islands is that the average American that thinks that this level of attention to detail helps US manufacturing probably is less intelligent and capable than the penguins that live there....
Which is why if anyone wanted to actually bring manufacturing "back" to the US they would work with congress and pass laws that curtailed the tariff powers in a way that ensured that in the areas where you wanted long term investment the president would not have the power to change policy unilaterally. At which point the typical congressional gridlock would serve to ensure stability going forward and allow businesses to invest.
I don't think that the current administration has enough foresight to actually plan for such a scheme but I think they are smart enough to see an opportunity, to wit the posts on social media shortly before withdrawing some tariffs.
Who gets subsidized is indeed political, but I don't see a way to sidestep that since there's centralization as soon as you take action to prevent the currency from deflating.
The federal reserve, on the other hand, controls interest rates and other mechanisms which actually result in money "bring created" for practical purposes.
Or the mechanisms themselves might not actually have to be changed if we could cast off this myopic political red herring about "the deficit". What we perceive as the balance sheet of "the government" needs to include The Fed, Fannie/Freddie, etc. Treasuries owned by other countries are the equivalent of a big savings account. Treasuries owned by the Fed are the same as all the other other debt owned by the Fed - monetary creation / monetary inflation.
One way could be to send the message to the market that a certain area is strategically important and any startups will have access to extremely cheap loans and not have to worry about natural resources or personel.
Then follow up on those promises, take a step back, watch the Cambrian explosion that follows and when the businesses seems to have grown legs simply scale back funding and watch them fight it out. One could even say that is exactly what has happened in the world several times over. It is not unique to China.
Heck, it's why the US has been (not for long) a leader in medicine. We've historically dumped huge amounts of money into medical research through the NIH.
Biomedical companies don't like research, they like making money. Research is expensive and by its nature filled with deadends. A biomedical companies would much rather take and run with cheap (to them) NIH research.
Whereas in a tariff situation, you are penalizing the consumer for creating an externality (foreign dependence).
So, knock on effects can dwarf direct effects. Tax foreign computer components at some insane rate and perhaps you get a domestic market but you could also see companies start moving their US data centers to Canada and Mexico. Which then has it’s own economic disadvantages.
Insane rates will of course have insane effects. Which is a separate issue.
I think that's a really good point. It's extracting money from consumers through taxes and handing them to industry in the hopes they innovate.
Tariffs though. In that case you're extracting the money from the consumer (through the international organizations being taxed) and giving the profits to the government. What are they going to do with it?
Then they organized a bunch of morons to create an school teaching not to do that, celebrated them so they would teach every foreign school, and managed to stop most of the world from competing with them. But a couple of decades later everybody in a position of power there was a moron from that school.
I'm not here to defend the current approach, but what you're describing sounds like a centrally planned communist / state-directed economy or something. Is that really the way forward?
Replace garlic with whatever industry it is that the gov wants to strategically invest in: semiconductors, automobiles, aerospace, weapons, renewable energy.
What they are describing is basically what every sane government does, and what the US used to do until, er, a few months ago.
If you consider most western countries to be centrally planned communist states (including the US up until very recently), then I don't have anything else to argue.
You may think this is fair, while others disagree. As there's no "world government" arbiter for these kinds of actions, there are only the actions your country takes, and the actions other sovereign countries take in response - for example, all countries in the world could ban import of anything produced by your burgeoning state-aid factories, leaving you with only a domestic market to sell to; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)#Anti-...
I said nothing about fairness. What I said is that every government and some point or another makes use of protectionist economic measures.
> for example, all countries in the world could ban import of anything produced by your burgeoning state-aid factories
This just doesn't happen, at least not for the reasons you mentioned.
China is a good example, as it gives many forms of subsidies to its industries. Other countries respond with a mix of measures to protect the industries they care about.
Virtually all the world's nations are voluntary members. Sure, many criticize it for being a tool of the USA and other western nations to browbeat other nations into shape (e.g. China). There is merit to this claim, but obviously it is not so clear-cut. However, it can't be denied that the WTO has been a tremendously useful tool for the USA and its allies to shape world trade. Somehow the 45th president of the USA thought the USA would get the short end of the stick here and started to obstruct WTO proceedings in 2018. The WTO has lost a lot of its influence since then, removing a powerful tool from the USA's arsenal.
Make of it what you want.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests
I think this is the root of the disconnect. A lot of people say "wait, Americans wanted X because it's a useful tool for projecting American power" - whether X is the petrodollar, the WTO, free trade, whatever. But largely it was one segment of Americans that wanted and benefited from it.
Similarly, the windfall of finding oil off the coast of Scotland in the 1970s made fat stacks of cash for Britain. Maggie Thatcher did not spend that on deindustrialising Scotland. She did not spend it, like the Norwegians, on a sovereign wealth fund that would benefit everyone in the country. Instead, she spent it on revitalising the old docklands of London, and now they're the epicentre of high finance, where the UK makes most of its money in financial services -- mainly for the people who work in that industry, and the South East of England where they live.
These choices ruined the lives of large swathes of the country. But they hugely benefitted the country overall. Were they good choices or not?
So when we talk about “a useful tool” in the American toolbox, we should keep in mind that tool mostly, or at least has the perception, of benefiting only the rich.
[1]: https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Kantorovich.html
Just because some industry gets subsidized and/or ran by the government, doesn't mean we are now all communists. Every government has SOME industry that is ultimately state ran. Fire departments, police, and education are prime examples of nearly universally state ran systems.
There are some industries that just, frankly, work better when state directed, not all of them, but a few. Private fire departments don't work, neither do private police departments.
This is not nor has it ever been an all or nothing thing.
And the events of the last 30-40 years have shown why this is a beyond foolish approach. The 47th and MAGA didn't rise out of nothing, they rose out of the economic devastation brought upon by completely unchecked turbo-capitalism.
No. The events of the last 30-40 years have shown that extremism is beyond foolish.
Extremism on the other direction got much quicker and way more destructive results.
Nuclear power. Solar panels. CPU manufacturing. Weapons manufacturing. Biomed research.
Capitol intensive projects require coordination. Especially projects that can take decades before they pay off.
yup
> probably subsidise them
yup
> communicate very clearly what you were going to do
Probably not. At least, not until right before the ratchet up. You'd want to first subsidize then once industries are starting to build up, you'd want to start the ratchet up. You probably also wouldn't want to say "We are doing this because we want to be better competitors" or whatever. It'd be better if you said something like "We believe country x is doing terrible thing y and for the safety of our country and others we are going to apply a tariff on good z until x stops doing y".
But yeah, universal tariffs are the dumbest idea in the world. We've essentially sanctioned every single nation which is going to massively damage us and manufacturing. Going to be real hard to unwind this.
But you would make damn sure you communicated when the tariffs would hit punitive levels so the rest of the value chain knew and had already had chances to find themselves domestic suppliers
Honestly, just subsidizing is a lot simpler to do and it doesn't run the risk of making the world mad at you or triggering retaliatory tariffs.
[1]there's a certain irony in one of Biden's last actions being to impose tariffs in a way which massively helped Tesla, and one of Trump's first being to propose tariffs that could seriously hurt its supply chain if they don't get exemptions...
The way Trump has done things, any company that manufactures in the U.S. had better be able to get by with just the domestic U.S. market, because exports to Canada and Mexico aren't likely to be significant for quite some time, even if Trump backs off quickly. Lasting damage has already been done.
________________________
[1]It remains to be seen if Mexico will eventually retaliate.
[2]Perhaps not favourably in terms of price/quality competitiveness, but certainly in a geopolitical "support your neighbour instead of China" sense.
And this perception has worked in Trump's favour. "Those weak irrelevant people up there are taking advantage of us, time to teach them a lesson" works well when the people you're telling it to don't realize "those people" are their single biggest customer and a source of wealth for them.
American business people aren't generally accustomed to treating their customers this way. I hope they come to their senses.
There's a while before another election and longer while before the person imposing tariffs would expectedly leave.
There is absolutely, unambiguously no Constitutional method by which this will ever be true.
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/31/nx-s1-5191889/is-trump-runnin...
22nd Amendment:
> No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.
12th Amendment:
> no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.
You can produce the same bullshit arguments for literally any law in existence because language is inherently ambiguous. If someone starts wiggling into, "well technically it's a bit ambiguous whether we're allowed to mow down peaceful protestors with machine guns," it is incumbent upon all of us to say "no, actually that's not ambiguous."
Courts will look to the public attitude to assess these arguments, and the public attitude should be that blatant accounting tricks like the VP switcheroo are incompatible with both the language and intent of the law.
> But winning an election is not the only way a person can become president. And there are hypothetical situations involving presidential succession, Baude adds, that are "not addressed as fully" by the Constitution's text. They reveal ways in which the common understanding of the 22nd Amendment's presidential term limits could be challenged in court. One theory: Trump could become vice president and then president in 2029
> Still, in court, a lawyer could try to argue that being a "natural born" citizen, at least 35 years old and a resident within the U.S. for at least 14 years are the only presidential eligibility requirements specified in the Constitution, says Stephen Gillers, a professor emeritus at New York University School of Law, who proposed in 2004 that Clinton run for vice president.
I'm unconvinced that the Supreme Court will look towards public sentiment.
There is no way to write words that preclude all such interpretations, that does not make all possible interpretations valid or reasonable.
> I'm unconvinced that the Supreme Court will look towards public sentiment.
Yet stunningly, SCOTUS decisions overwhelmingly align with cultural attitudes of their time because that is in fact the role of SCOTUS — to adapt interpretations of text to the current cultural moment. That's why it's notable in the few occasions where they conflict.
I know originalists and textualists like to act otherwise, but they're liars, and you know this because they do in fact rule against the text of law when the text conflicts with their cultural imperatives.
Secondly you may wish to argue the Supreme Court has acted in such a way historically but recent history clearly demonstrates otherwise:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/07/06/majority-of-...
Everyone knows Presidential terms are meant to be limited to two. Everyone knows going for a third term would be an accounting trick. They know it, you know it, I know it.
Your selection of one example out of the 47 cases SCOTUS decided that year (+ countless cases they didn't grant cert to) is evidence of my point, not yours. How many of the other 46 cases can you name? How many of the other 81 cases between then and now?
I'll guess you could name fewer than 4 of them, ergo, as I said: "That's why it's notable in the few occasions where they conflict."
Nor did I say "the court follows public opinion."
I said "courts will look to the public attitude to assess these arguments", which is true, and "SCOTUS decisions overwhelmingly align with cultural attitudes of their time" which is also true.
And yes, the Presidential immunity argument is exactly one such argument: the pro-dictator cultural movement in the US is significant and vocal, while the anti-dictator movement is full of equivocators like yourself who say, "well you know, the Constitution is a bit ambiguous on this point..."
So yes, actually, that decision is an excellent case in point, and a clear reason that SCOTUS should know the American public has no pseudo-intellectualized appetite for a third term.
Your original comment was this:
> There is absolutely, unambiguously no Constitutional method by which this will ever be true.
So which is it, there's absolutely no ambiguity or there is some?
> And yes, the Presidential immunity argument is exactly one such argument: the pro-dictator cultural movement in the US is significant and vocal, while the anti-dictator movement is full of equivocators like yourself who say, "well you know, the Constitution is a bit ambiguous on this point..."
So you're saying that the Supreme Court ruled Presidential immunity because of vocal public opinion for dictatorship but suddenly the same court won't rule in favor of interpreting the law to support a third term?
Seems contradictory chief. Regardless I personally hope it doesn't come to a court decision but we'll see in 4 years.
If congress turns heavy blue in 2026, they can rain hell on the mild conservative goals that Trump seems to have taken a nuclear approach to. Congressman do care about their seat, and they do get scared of losing power. Right now Americans are particularly sensitive to price increases as well, with the pandemic inflation still fresh on everyone's mind.
I personally am not seeing what influence Congress could push that will hinder the current executive branch even if it wished to.
More protests needed. This is tyranny-lite in action, huge overreach by the executive that I'm pretty sure the hallowed founders -- that people always talk about with reverance down there -- would be horrified by. 18th century revolutionaries would be disappointed to see the way people are rolling over.
For example, several car makers makes cars in Canada, Mexico and the US but sells them across the borders (and globally). Honda makes Civics and CRVs in Canada but sells them in the US, but the Accord is made in the US and sold in Canada. So now if there are tariffs on car imports and especially if there is also a reciprocal tariff, Honda gets hit both ways. What would they do? Make some civics in the US and some in Canada? Seems very inefficient.
[1] https://semianalysis.com/2025/04/10/tariff-armageddon-gpu-lo...
Trade imbalances are simply currency imbalances that haven't been allowed to find their own levels - what you can't do is have an artificially high currency (by requiring all global oil sales be made in it, creating an artificial scarcity) and not have a trade deficit - you can't have your cake and eat it too
can you explain it with more details?
If your currency has a lower value, it’s cheap for others to buy your exports, but expensive for you to import goods.
I’m sure this sounds bad to someone, but if I was America, I wouldn’t try to put the gift horse into the wood chipper.
It's why moving to renewables would be catastrophic for the US. And for all of the big Fossils, including Russia and the Saudis. And the smaller second-order beneficiaries like the UK who make money from "services" - moving the big money around and avoiding taxes on it.
We're in a messy transition to a post-fossil global economy. It's going to take decades, and it's not obvious how much will be left standing when it's over.
But one way or another, it's locked in and unavoidable.
I don't know how effective that will be but it at least seems more coherent than these goofy tariffs (whatever people think of tariffs overall we absolutely cannot keep shifting them week to week).
We absolutely cannot create the expectation that we plan to get what we say we want: zero trade deficits.
If we even succeed in making the rest of the world believe we're going to do this it will be catastrophic. So much of the advantages the US enjoys rides on trust and goodwill, and zeroing trade deficits would wreck the world economy and destroy trust in the US dollar as a safe haven. Just like paying down the national debt would.
(Pedantically: it means the rest of the world has exactly as much US currency as the US has the rest of the world's currency)
We just hit pause on a major product development effort in order to go back and re-evaluate some of our vendor choices. Specifically to see how we can eliminate as many dependencies on US companies as possible. Fortunately we were relatively early in a 18-24 month development cycle for a somewhat complex hardware device.
The company already started a project two months ago to look at how we can migrate off AWS and Azure and instead use domestic alternatives for our online systems.
For the hardware components this is a bit more work, but it looks like we can find replacements for most of the key items. Though there are a few components where we would have to rearchitect some of the systems to eliminate US components.
For us it is simple: we need stability and predictability. We have long development cycles and long lifecycles for the things we make. Stopping development and trying to eliminate things that depend on the US is a bit unreal and shocking, but management have to deal with the world as it is.
I know some of my colleagues at other companies in the sector are going through similar exercises.
Right now changes are taking place that will not be visible for years, but that will stick around for decades. The current administration in the US is doing real, long term damage to the US.
It is really weird for us (Europeans) to read hacker news and it see mostly indifference to what is happening in your country. You probably should worry a bit more about this than you do.
Of course, you won't make the same margins as EU+US business. Not sure if that is enough incentive to onshore consumer manufacturing.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/07/21/are-you-i...
But it's also always been protective of the internal market and e.g. added tariffs on Chinese steel recently.
The EU has always been export driven.
Whether or not some third world country is worth developing is an economic question, not a moral one. And even if it is, the question of whether or not you will be able to monetize that relationship by the end of it is another one. What the chinse are doing now is basically IMF-style debt trapping of other nations, which doesn't seem like a successful strategy historically.
The bottom line is that if the natives don't want to cooperate with whatever civilization you're building, it's not going to work out. Look at what happened to the USA in afganistan (and pretty much every empire that stepped foot in there). I don't think that's racist, I think it is pretty optimistic outlook towards the sovereignty of nations.
There is a really great movie called Bitter Lake about this, by Adam Curtis.
If tariffs go down then moving manufacturing to the US was the losing choice for any company that chooses to do so.
Either way betting on current US consumption levels with US manufactured goods is a losing bet.
Then some future administration decides on detent and signs a free trade agreement to open markets or whatnot, yada yada. China marches right in and eats your lunch. Again.
Trade barriers do not do anything to address fundamental inequities in production efficiency. To be blunt: China is great at making electronics not because they have all the talent. They have all the talent because China is poor, still. The US is not (though it looks like we're aiming that way). Ergo Chinese production efficiency will be higher.
What trade barriers with China actually do isn't to bring manufacturing back to the US, of course. It's to move production from China to Vietnam or the Philippines or India or wherever isn't tariffed. Then of course we'll need to apply tariffs to them, and so on.
Since he's even taxing empty islands, I doubt the end result will be anything else than either not selling to the US or selling to the US with a grey market.
If you put tariffs on the whole world, it's basically the same thing as a global economic sanction, similar to what Russia suffered.
But they are going off a demographic cliff, and that is why they are investing heavily in automation. They just won't have the people to do this work in the future, and expanding abroad and investing in robots are the only options for them.
The average household income in China is equivalent to making $17K salary in the US, and on average, Chinese work 25% more hours than Americans
Average home in their Tier 1 cities is 20x annual salary, compared to a 7x ratio in NYC
It's still pretty bleak for the average person there- you see that reflected in the "let it rot" youth movement online
Having lived in China for 9 years, and left 9 years ago, I can't really justify calling China poor anymore. Ya, they have a huge rural area and they still have lots of poor people, but they have a huge middle class (even if it isn't a majority of the country) that can afford a lot of things.
That’s why China has (somewhat) inexpensive labor. It does not explain why China has far more plastic engineering talent, electrical engineering talent, etc than the US.
The US wasn't sleeping though. We trained a generation of software engineering talent that remains the envy of the world. There are whole web sites devoted to this "Hacker" subculture, even. Maybe we can find one.
Seriously: there's no problem here. This is the way economies work.
As to the poor part, after Xi is done with dumping treasuries, and subsequent US default and USD cratering, the salaries would be on par on both sides of the ocean (as they should be).
Which would also automatically solve the illegal immigration problem. And fentanyl problem (no money no honey).
Unless there is some hunker down period of isolation that'll make US manufacturing globally competitive somehow, all this will do in the long run is either isolate US manufacturers to the domestic market, or provide a temporary advantage that will disappear the minute the barriers are dropped.
Stable markets with bad outcomes are not worth defending on stability alone.
> It does not create very accurate business decisions
The business environment is not great. It does seem some part of that is the result of cheap Chinese goods that have displaced labor _and_ environmental costs flooding foreign markets. That China even uses proxy countries to push out even more is instructive.
So, if not tariffs, then what should we use to solve this?
I’d argue that tariffs that increase at a known rate are better than surprise large ones. Even a 1% increase a week every Monday for a year lets everyone’s supply chain adjust gradually. You’ll know within a few weeks how your product is affected and you’ll plan for the increase over the year. That’s probably still too fast though, since factories take time to build and the whole point is to encourage local manufacturing. Given the 4 year term trump could have gone for 3 years of increases with the hope that companies would start building factories and have them running by year 4.
Not imposing ludicrous tariffs based on flawed economics on the entire world at once?
Not imposing tariffs with no warning on your closest allies and attempting to bully them into submission?
Not imposing huge tariffs on some of the weakest nations you trade with (e.g. Laos, Vietnam).
Not changing trade policy radically every few days and announcing it on social media?
Not crashing the stock market, announcing a reverse on your social media platform, then boasting about how much money your billionaire friends made?
Not calling one of your largest trading partners peasants and the then very clever, alternating between insults and praise like a two-bit mobster?
This administration has made America a laughing stock; I don’t think many Americans realise just how much trust has been burned with allies since ‘liberation day’.
It's a simple formula based on balance of trade.
> tariffs with no warning
Some Hacker News types like to bury their head in the sand when inconvenient political news occurs but to say this happened without warning simply flags you as part of this group.
> on some of the weakest nations you trade with (e.g. Laos, Vietnam).
There is room for these countries to buy more American goods. These two countries also rebadge and ship out a lot of Chinese goods to evade tariffs.
> changing trade policy radically every few days and announcing it on social media?
So, do you want warnings, or not?
> Not crashing the stock market, announcing a reverse on your social media platform, then boasting about how much money your billionaire friends made?
If you didn't make any trades during this period how was your portfolio actually impacted? I would assume this is the majority of non billionaire investors. So the only ones who lost in the crash were the same billionaires.
> calling one of your largest trading partners peasants and the then very clever, alternating between insults and praise like a two-bit mobster?
Does that trading partner also act like a two bit mobster? If so, wouldn't this just be turnabout, or why is deference to hostile economic partners justified?
> has made America a laughing stock
That's an absurdly biased point of view.
> I don’t think many Americans realise just how much trust has been burned with allies since ‘liberation day’.
Not much. They didn't actually "trust" us before. I'm not sure how you'd measure that anyways. From my reading of foreign news they're mostly taking it in stride, having seen this coming since last year, and not being particularly surprised by it. This zeitgeist only exists in half of America right now.
It certainly is simple.
> Does that trading partner also act like a two bit mobster?
The US is comparable to the dictatorship of Xi now? I suppose the new leadership style is similar.
> From my reading of foreign news…
The very high level of these tariffs and their global scope and speed of imposition was a huge surprise to (former) US allies, and even to many in the US.
PS I’m not American
"Simple" is why it put 10% on an island with no humans and no manmade structures separately to the country which owns that island, and also tariffed another island that's technically British but which the British leased to the US military.
"Simple" isn't what you want to decide a complex trade policy for a complex economy.
> That's an absurdly biased point of view.
Hello, I'm in one of those foreign allies. We are, in fact, laughing at USA for shooting itself in the foot like this. On the other hand, the bit where Trump is also refusing to rule out military force to annex some of us? We take that seriously.
> Not much. They didn't actually "trust" us before. I'm not sure how you'd measure that anyways.
We used to hold the US in high regard. "Leaders of the free world" etc.
But also, relatively stable economic position, stable currency, reliable government that repaid debts, etc.
Even though Trump 1 happened, we knew it would come to an end, and we thought you would finally be over it — especially given how it ended.
Now, we don't. And many of us will be looking to China as a more reliable (for us) trading partner.
It's hard for me to overstate how wrong this is. In my country Denmark, everyone, everywhere is talking about this and people are generally worried. I hear it in the supermarkets. We absolutely did trust the US until now. For instance, the entire Danish public sector runs on Microsoft. Nobody ever considered that to be an issue. Now there is political talk about how that can be undone. Several of my peers who read HN and considered US-based, YC-backed to be the ultimate way to launch a startup are talking about the liability involved. Mind you, this is not the typical "I hate America!" rhetoric that has always existed to some degree everywhere, this is risk management: "Can I trust that the US is stable enough for me to bet on?"
You may not think it matters because the US is as strong as it is, or maybe you don't care. But the trust and thereby soft power that has been destroyed in these few months is generational.
The simple fact Trump was voted in again denotes that the people of the US is not to be trusted.
At this point, it doesn't matter if Trump disappears into a void at the end of his term.
22% of people in the US voted directly for Trump. That's 22% of people that think his mode of operating is great presidential material.
I cannot trust doing business in a society with such a large proportion of either idiocy or malice, which includes wealthy and influential individuals!
The last 15 years has changed the fundamental stereotype of a US citizen. And while I personally know a few US citizens who are trustworthy, competent, lovely people, this marks an inherent bias in decision making.
From here, whatever Trump does is simply reinforcing the stereotype.
That might be the read, but it was people who were not happy with their lot in life and just saw same old same old as options while Trump was different. People in the US mostly don't think about the EU.
Cognitive dissonance suggests they have to keep supporting the current regime and whatever it says,because to change their mind is to realise the horror of what they've done.
* Reshoring incentives
* Regulatory reform to remove barriers to building things
* Strict export controls around AI, robotics, and fusion
* Massive subsides for production of useful humanoid robots and deployment of useful fusion power generation
To the extent that tariffs are considered at all, it should only be if they're implemented with bipartisan support, selective with specific strategic goals in mind, gradually phased in, and explicitly long-term policy. Extreme tariffs without clear staying power are just disruptive for no good reason. They won't change business behavior; they'll just temporarily jack up costs, create an unnecessary customs backlog, and roadblock some commercial activities entirely.
Even if implemented carefully, I would argue that tariffs in general are counterproductive in the long run. If a domestic industry isn't internationally competitive, the goal should be to fix that, not insulate it from competition.
So, Trump's policies should be seen as an attempt to reverse for Americans' benefit damaging policies from before which are still active. Now, whether that will do good or harm in the long term is anyone's guess. We already see companies investing more in American infrastructure, though.
Single player, multiplayer.