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> tariffs to shield American blue collar jobs

Except that Trump's tariffs are causing massive financial uncertainty for small/medium-size businesses. If you want to onshore manufacturing and production, and specifically build up the blue-collar class, you don't implement tariffs immediately and unilaterally. You plan for them to be implemented over time and give businesses the opportunity to shift their procurement and production to domestic sources.

When you implement tariffs with no warning, the only businesses that can absorb those increased costs are the largest businesses. Then those large businesses can also start to buy up every other business, or at least outcompete on price long enough to monopolize the market.

As I said,

>Trump is dangerous because he is an idiot and recklessly pulling levers

Trump says everything basically and then just repeats what his MAGA crowd cheers the loudest about. "Trump said..." isn't a meaningful indicator of his intent, his beliefs, or his "plan".

> Trump said yesterday he wants to raise taxes on people earning over $2.5MM[1]

This has been countered better elsewhere, but the gist is that this proposed taxation is for posturing only -- it's taxes on wages, not on income, and the rich don't get their wealth from wages.

Seeing as the majority of words coming out of Trump are hyperbole or just straight up lies.. well believe it when it’s written into law.

Not sure why you're downvoted. It's part of Trumps schtick. He says contradicting ideas, and since everyone knows he lies, people pick the idea they want to believe. Pretty wild actually.

Where's Trump's socialized medicine plan? That's by far the most populist desire of populist America. It's very easy to get caught up in the name of things and not look at it substantively, which is what you seem to be attacking the other poster for.

Trump might have a populist appeal, but it doesn't make him a populist. The weight of Trump's actions and promises lie in all this deportation and culture war nonsense, not actually populist solutions to popular problems. None of these cuts are going to benefit the American populace at all. I doubt there will be a reduction in the taxes most Americans pay (this is just some new rhetoric from Trump, likely stemming from his horrible approval ratings because his administration is operating like shit), but there is already a reduction in the services populist America receives like social security and medicare.

The idea that a politician who seems to fundamentally want to destroy the mechanical functions of the government, operate an executive branch that is beyond the reproach of the courts, and privatize America's crucial social programs, does not comport with populism.

I don't even think the notion that Trump isn't working for billionaires because he tanked the stock market even makes sense. Did you not see the video where he points to his friend who made hundreds of millions that day? While smiling, joking, laughing? He's letting his best friends do inside trades on the huge market-moving moves Trump makes in the news and you think it's somehow not cronyism? I'm sorry, but your intuitions are off.

As I mentioned:

>People on the left don't recognize it [populism] because they don't recognize the tools that right wing people use to stimulate the working class.

I'm not going to go down the rabbit hole because it takes years to escape the ideological camp you grew into. But suffice to say, both sides ultimately want the same things and disagree on the route to take to that destination (while telling their base that obviously they are right, and obviously the other side is just evil).

I'm not sure how your post doesn't fall for exactly what you claim to be criticizing. You do not engage with the substance of anything I said and instead just name call.

I'm not talking about the route, I'm talking about the destination. A socialized medical plan is incredibly popular on both sides of the political spectrum and polls well with Trump's supporters. That's not an avenue, that's a destination. I have a feeling you will twist this around and try to make it how it can either be served by market forces or the gov't and that's just "idealogical" but populism is an ideology which I am accusing you of not understanding. You didn't engage with that. You just repeated your premise.

The thing about populism is that it doesn't require any plans as such. You can just say things like, "we'll have the best healthcare system in the world, you've never seen healthcare as good as what I'm going to give you, I guarantee it!".

For as long as you have the cult of personality going, anyway. Which is plenty of time to put your men in key positions of power for when your charisma is no longer convincing enough.

It's because most people on the left are not aware that there even is a right wing populism. To them it is an oxymoron.

Pulling someone out of that "it's an oxymoron" hole takes a long time. I don't want to go back and forth with you here trying to explain what right wing populism is here, and the philosophy behind it.

Once again you are just talking about "left" and "right" not engaging with anything I discussed while accusing me of being in denial of "right wing populism" which is facially not the case.

I don't "not believe" in right wing populism, I disagree with your assertions of how it functions and what its goals are and how that relates to your notion that populists want the same thing regardless of whether they are "left" or "right" and that it's just "different paths."

>It's because most people on the left are not aware that there even is a right wing populism.

This isn't even remotely true. What "left"ist stuff are you reading?

I don't particularly care about anything Trump says. He says a lot of things. A lot of what he says is just outright lies. A lot of what he says is just to make a particular audience happy at a particular point in time, and ends up having little relation to any actions he ends up taking. Even when it seems likely that something he says is something he actually wants to do, he'll walk it back in a heartbeat and pretend the opposite was his position all along, if he believes doing so will make him look better.

What actually matters is what he does. And nothing that he has done suggests to me that he will actually push for tax increases on the rich. It would be great to be proven wrong here, but I'm not holding my breath.

(Regardless, Trump can't raise taxes on anyone. Congress does that. On tax policy, it's not clear that even the MAGA fools in Congress will play ball if it upsets the rich people in their states.)

Yes but:

> He is clearly not working for billionaires...

Not working for Wall St or Main St.

It's a food fight between opposing elites. ("The grass suffers when elephants fight.")

As you surely know, some do advocate crashing our economy, enabling them to seize even more power. They use shibboleths like dark enlightenment, free enterprise, taxation is theft, yadda yadda.

He is a billionaire himself, his admin has the most billionaires of any admin ever. He passed tariffs, which are a direct tax on the working class, he passed massuve tax cuts profiting mostly the wealthy, he cut every welfare programs which only benefit the poor.

> Trump said yesterday he wants to raise taxes on people earning over $2.5MM[1]

He also said he would end the Ukraine war on day 1.

> He is clearly not working for billionaires when he tanked the stock market and spiked bond rates playing his tariff game. Stop using that dog whistle because it makes it clear you are ungrounded from what is happening, unless all you care about is praise from other detached people.

Of course not. Why would anyone get the idea that Trump is working for billionaires? It's not as if he hawked cars on the White House lawn for the world's richest man.

Speaking of ungrounded, detached people..

You don't have to be a billionaire to purchase a cabinet position in the Trump White House, but it helps.

Trump makes the billionaires work for _him_.

>Trump said yesterday he wants to raise taxes on people earning over $2.5MM[1]

Great, so he won't need to cut the NSF then?

According to the national debt clock, we're at around 36.8T in debt. I don't know if that's his motivation or not, but we're not starting all this from a balanced budget.

That's not a reason to cut anything in particular, especially something as cheap in raw cost and valuable in ROI, among federal programs, as the NSF.

I'll believe it when I see it.

"Trump said..." is the precursor to winning the fooled me again award.

Trump cannot raise taxes, he only can impose tariffs under laws that Congress could rescind if they wished to, and only Congress can change tax laws. Trump also took both sides on issues while campaigning and low info voters ate it up and ignored the parts they did not like, it's the gish gallop, and Trump never stops campaigning with rallies even after winning office. Nothing that he says matters, it's what actions they have taken that matter. The bill in Congress now does not have anything like what he said yesterday about raising taxes on millionaires.