Nearly every day, I wonder what the top Republican leaders honestly think about these foreseeable outcomes. They made a deal with the devil -power at any cost.
It is going to be a rough ride as America re-calibrates to a world which no longer relies on it. We took enormous amounts of benefits for granted.
That will not be that easy this time. Too direct is the elemination of any international collaboration a result of the Trump / Project 2025 leadership.
They've literally been doing it for over 50 years at this point while winning races, respectfully I think you overestimate the intelligence of the average voter.
There's a significant percentage of voters who will believe, no matter what, that what's going on right now is the fault of the Democrats. Hell, Federal agents are killing people in the streets on camera and a significant percentage of the population is OK with it.
No, they haven't. There's a complete shift in US foreign policy and things are happening which are unprecedented. There's no continuation of anything of the past 50 years, Republican or Democrat.
Wrecking the economy and blaming the Democrats are exactly what the GOP has done the last 50 years. I'm not saying that their current foreign policy has precedence, but their plan to deal with whatever fallout is coming is going to be to blame the dems, because that's what they've always done.
What's unprecedented? And since when? USA has been invading places and pushing their empire for decades. Maybe you mean unprecedented in your (short?) lifetime?
What’s unprecedented in the context of the past 50 years is undermining NATO, getting cozy with the Russians at the expense of allies, making territorial advances at the expense of allies, politically and economically attacking EU, enacting protectionist economic policies and granting unlimited White House access to Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Reagan destroyed the pre-existing political system, racked up the debt, and cut taxes on the rich, and Republicans have ran and won on that ever since.
There will be voters who are children now or not even born yet that will be suffering the consequences of Trumps actions and policies 20 years from now, and he will be long dead and too far removed for them to blame anyone but whoever is charge at that moment*
Just like there are young voters today who blame consequences of Reagan and Bush on current leaders. Just like literally every cycle for the last 30 years Republicans fuck an insane amount of shit up and try to break the economy and then dems have to work doubly hard to do a shit repair job while being fought tooth and nail and then they get blamed for the lack of progress.
The Greenland topic has the potential to disrupt the relations with Europe (and the NATO, by association) even more than the Ukraine/Russia one. Today he announced new 10% tariffs, to be increased to 25% in June if Greenland isn’t sold to the US.
Enforce is not the right word. The court can't enforce anything really, they don't control and police or army, they rely on the Executive to enforce anything. Really they only have moral suasion.
There was a "Never Trump" movement of Republican leaders. It's dead.[1]
By now, most of the Never Trumpers are either out of power or have groveled to Trump.
The National Review, a conservative publication, wrote: "At no point did Never Trump possess the basic traits of a political movement: a small number of leaders and large number of followers." It was all leaders, or former leaders, or people who thought they should be leaders. The article says Never Trump was composed of "1) experts in foreign policy, economics, and law ... 2) campaign professionals ... and 3) public intellectuals ..." Not Republican governors and members of Congress.
Not big donors. Those people only matter when they're in power. There are small conservative journals in which they still write. Few read them. They're not on Fox News.
It's not at all clear what the GOP looks like after Trump. The most likely Republican successors are said to be Vance, Rubio, and DeSantis. The last two have failed badly at presidential bids before.
No. You can see this on what happened to a recent bill for a drinking water project in Colorado.
It was so uncontroversial that it passed the House by unanimous consent. That doesn't mean 100% were for it, but it means any who were not didn't think it was worth making even a token effort to stop it.
In the Senate they passed it on a voice vote, which is what they use for routine and completely non-controversial bills. They are all asked to say yea or nay, and the presiding officer calls it for whichever they think they heard the most of and if no one objects that they misheard it passes.
Trump vetoed it. The official reason given was some bullshit about costs, but no one believes that. The leading theories are that it is because it is important to Lauren Boebert's district and because Colorado won't release Tina Peters from prison.
Boebert upset Trump by being one of the Republican House votes to force the release of the Epstein files.
Tina Peters was an election official who did various illegal and shady things [1] that Trump approves of.
The House failed to override the veto. They are so afraid of angering Trump that they couldn't get 1/3 of Republican House members to to go against Trump on something that they themselves had just recently found completely uncontroversial.
I wonder how many will simply become "Trump Republicans" and follow some other leader when he's gone? Or will some simply pretend to wake up and have realized they had Trump Derangement Syndrome the whole time and are ready to come back to reality?
These people aren't temporarily insane, they have always been this way. The same hatred and stupidity have been prevalent in US dinnertable discussions for decades, but much less in the actual halls of power because we used to have more collective sense to not grant people like that authority over others in general. If the rest of American society regains its agency, the toxic %25 will just go back to corroding the country as they were before. They are secure in knowing they will not be treated in the way they would treat others if given the opportunity.
My guess is politics are so divisive and social media so effective that until something significant breaks/Trump succeeds in complete Putin-esque capture of the government that we will see the president flip parties every 4 years indefinitely. People will continue to vote for whoever the current leader of their "team" is no matter their actual politics or values or even how they were chosen as leader for that matter because the perceived cost of the other side winning is always greater.
As soon as Trump dies there will be an increasing avalanche of "always never-trumpers", until 40 years from now it will be almost impossible to find anyone who admits to having voted for him. I already have anecdotal experiences of having conversations with people (on tape) in early 2017 celebrating/defending their vote of Trump who now claim to have never voted for him and say that anything on video was just a joke or sarcasm.
Agreed completely. Part of this deal is that the Canadian auto market is no longer protected against Chinese EVs which substantially undercut the legacies. There is also news that the Europeans are making about to make a similar deal with China. Imagine what the United States economy will be like if Stellantis, Ford, or GM or all of them go bankrupt. 3-4 million in lost jobs alone.
Trump wants to tariff countries that support Denmark and Greenland. That's like all of the other NATO countries. What happens if NATO doesn't exist? No more bases to support Middle East operations and no more intelligence sharing.
It will mean more support from the Canadians and Europeans for moving trade to be denominated by Renminbi.
I don't think the Republican leadership has thought through the implications to the US with their deal with the devil.
This is a negative-sum choice being made by everyone but China. Chinese cars will decimate the European motor industry. Volvo is already gone. BMW, Porsche, Volkswagen will follow. This will hurt Europe a lot more than it will hurt America.
The pressures of a democratic society will force Western governments to extract money from their productive sectors and redirect them to their comparatively unproductive auto sectors.
Watching an increasingly aging Europe try to sustain its expensive welfare state while losing its biggest industries and facing a war citizens don't have the heart to prosecute is going to be interesting. Already French retirees make more than the average working man there.
They won't fight. They won't work. They won't provide children. To retirees, replacing local industry with Chinese manufacturing is a no-brainer: everything gets cheaper. With the resulting loss of well-paying jobs, healthcare for the elderly and wait staff will get even cheaper. A bonanza for a generation soon to disappear leaving the bits to be picked up by their most ardent fans.
Everyone is going to be hurt, but if you're not the US you need to hedge. Being firmly aligned with the US is too dangerous right now. Lots of negative costs and outcomes come with that hedging.
China is the only vertically integrated economy left. In a multipolar/bifurcated/low trade world they will be the strongest.
The NAFTA/EU trade blocks were extraordinarily strong, this Greenland business is exactly the kind of issue which can shatter the entire block. It benefits no one to give Greenland to the US, so they won’t do it without a fight. It provides no benefit to the US to take it.
The only thing that would really be settled by the US annexing another country on a presidents whim is the formal end of the U.S. separation of powers.
Yup. They're damned if they do and damned if they don't. They question is, place your eggs in one basket and become subservient to one country or diversify and try to play others against each other.
I don't see EU making a deal with China that lets them sell their slave built cars without tariffs. As I feel it there are a lot of public opinion against buying Chinese cars atm. Some did like 5 years ago but not any more. They are almost as dead as Tesla.
German car makes do have issues, but I'm sure they will work it out.
I don't think you understand the bigger issue. Locking out competitors will save these jobs for now, but it will not last forever. This is exactly what happened to the US automakers in the 80s and look at them now.
> This will hurt Europe a lot more than it will hurt America.
It will hurt Europe a lot. But Donald Trump keeps repeating that it is going to declare war on the EU. Sadly, it makes sense for the EU to align more closely with China.
And yeah, the only winners from the Trump administration so far are the mega-rich, Russia and China. At the expense of strictly everybody else.
>Imagine what the United States economy will be like if Stellantis, Ford, or GM or all of them go bankrupt. 3-4 million in lost jobs alone.
They wouldn't go bankrupt. They will be saved and protected by government bailouts and tariffs, and the situation will become similar to say Russia car industry. Though, naturally, the situation with Russian cars has become so bad that even they are forced to massively open market to Chinese cars (and even "Russian cars" become more and more just simple rebadge of Chinese cars).
In short - if you don't compete by increasing productivity, efficiency, quality, you will be overtaken by the ones who do. The government actions may prolong your complacency time, yet ultimately such prolongation is just the time you actually lose falling more and more behind.
The whole world by now, 20 years after Tesla roadster, should have been driving American EVs, yet instead we have classic paradigm shift there US is Sun Microsystems and EVs/solar/wind/batteries is Linux/x86.
If he has his way, Trump will kill Canada's automotive industry. If you accept this as forgone, maybe partnering with the Chinese to create a new auto industry is a good idea.
I mean, but they're not feeding into the US's power. So they're like, buying into a depreciating asset. This actively signals the US is losing power to China given that it's _formerly top ally_ is making trading partnerships with one of it's nominal "enemies". Anyone who can think more than a month out, can see this will result in the US losing power in the long run.
> So they're like, buying into a depreciating asset
Part of the issue is that the average age of the House is ~55 and for the senate it's above 60. So they have a lot less incentive to care about that, or about climate change.
I wonder how much this makes them resistant to understanding global change. Even in my own short lifetime, China went from a place of villages and cheap factories for low end products to the plausibly dominant center of technology and manufacturing.
Those in congress may still imagine a world where China’s strength is no more than an illusion.
Reminds me of Russia post-Soviet collapse when all of the SSRs rushed to form their own blocs or align with the West, while the Russians thought they would continue to align with their former overlords in Moscow.
USA will definitely turn into the new Russia if it continues to go on this path. It has already exhausted most of its cultural and moral capital, and its tech sector is already under threat in its major allies. It will continue to stay relevant for maybe a generation or two but it will turn largely irrelevant by the turn of the century, just like the British Empire or Russia today. Assuming, of course, that it doesn't correct course.
> I wonder what the top Republican leaders honestly think about these foreseeable outcomes
It doesn't matter what they think. Trump's message resonates with the electorate much more effectively than theirs, partly because of his political brand and partly because he has a network of social media acolytes who broadcast his messaging to each segment and demographic. It's a positive feedback loop wherein anyone who dares to go off-message or criticize his decisions gets instantaneous blowback from the MAGA audience themselves, so they quickly recalibrate. At this point, Trump has built a metaphorical tower of skulls of political foes within the party (e.g. Marjorie Taylor Greene).
Despite everything that has happened over the past year, the Democrats only have a few percentage points lead over the Republicans in current midterm polling. As an outside observer: Absolutely wild. I know a lot about the reasons, but it still feels completely surreal.
Trump is not unique. You can find similar parties and figures in most of Europe. Usually the would-be autocrat populist is even more popular than in the US in two party systems. Multi party systems dilute it which just leads to paralysis until eventually >40% of your population is ok with abandoning democracy because the impacts of paralysis are stacking up (France).
The democrats have been an absolute failure of a party for the last decade and the fact their voters refuse to hold leadership accountable for those failures says everything you need to know.
There should have been a house-clearing of leadership up and down the party apparatus in 2016 and again in 2024 but nope. We'd rather hope those perpetual losers get their act together out of fear of the unknown.
The Democratic party is the reason Sanders did not win. Their refusal to back progressives in any meaningful way is exactly what I'm talking about. The dems would sooner let Trump have a 3rd term than allow a progressive like Mamdani to win the presidency, which is precisely my point.
He can’t actually do much with votes in Congress he doesn’t have. Take money from programs via executive order? Ok, I guess. Cut checks to voters with that money? Even the Supreme Court would blush at that.
They don't share Trump's message, or not exactly. They share an edited version of it. That seems to be why Trump has started insisting he's serious repeatedly. The conservative media is ignoring or toning down the least popular ideas.
It matters to me, because they were not powerless to stop this scenario. The point of a representative democracy.
After January 6th, Mitch McConnell could have whipped up the votes to impeach Trump. Forever banishing him from office. Or over the past four years, when asked, "Did Donald Trump lose the election" instead of equivocating, every Congressperson could have said, "Of course he did. Donald Trump is a loser who lost a fair election, but threw a tantrum when the result did not go his way."
Liz Cheney took a stand, and the party punished her for it. Trump was too popular, Republicans preferred to latch onto that energy, despite the consequences.
No raindrop thinks it is responsible for the flood. These leaders enabled this scenario, because they (correctly!) predicted it could help them hold onto power. Now we watch the results unfold as the world does everything to extricate itself from the USA.
I think the game is a lot bigger than even Trump recognizes, but some individuals in his circle see it. The only other country that matters is China, and the timeline is decades.
The high prices due to Donnie's policies absolutely impact me. I paid $5 for a piece of plastic that before used to cost $2. I paid $55 / fire alarm - this used to be under $30. I paid $55 for 2 dishes at a "cheap" Chinese take-out. At these prices I balked at buying some Chinese food for myself - I only bought these dishes for my son to eat.
A few weeks before the tariff idiocy, I paid $320 including shipping for an ebike battery from the EU. When it arrived, it included a bill for an additional $350 from US Customs. That's insane, I refused.
When returning to sender, the package disappeared, presumably into Customs. I'm out $320 and still no battery.
Don’t know how to tell people this, but the world doesn’t really need America to be the country everyone relies on. We may be better off with diversity. Increase your international exposure.
True. But the US want to remain the country everyone relies on if it wants to preserve the dollar as the world's primary trade, reserve and settlement currency.
Dollar dominance gives the US disproportionate leverage over global finance and allows it to shape the rules of the system. Absent this asymmetry, it is difficult to imagine US tariffs or financial pressure (or any kind of pressure) would carry comparable global impact.
Totally - it is the best outcome for the world. As an American, it is sad to see the loss of status, power, everything that is coming our way in the near future.
Likely soon corporate owned drones will protect commercial shipping routes I would think. Not sure if bad actors (pirates?!) will have their own drones.
They are laser focused on making this a whiter nation with lesser rights for women and no ambiguous LGBTQ. From all the literature it seems like they believe that this demographic reversion will over the long term solve all their problems. They are not looking to optimize for anything else now including the loss of hegemony and influence. This is going to be completely and irreversibly devastating for the United States.
I do not believe that. Project 2025 was a documented plan and is executed. Someone is profiting of that. So the outcomes are what was the plan. Question is: will it suck for the general population. Answer is yes
Agree mostly, but there's a couple outliers. I think this mentality is also shared across the isle, but the right just says the "fuck you" part wayyyy louder.
I wonder why these alternative points of view always try very hard to deflect blame away from Russia when it comes to Russia's invasion of Ukraine (which Russia began in 2014).
Russia wasn't governed by a bunch of easily to bait and inexperienced morons. They saw an opportunity and went for it, no different from their involvement in Belarus or Georgia. And it worked. They took Crimea, started crap in the east, Ukraine's government was weak, etc.
Before 2022, the US even sent the CIA director to Russia to warn them not to go ahead with the full scale invasion[0]. Multiple warnings were made[1]. If it was bait, then it was pretty bad bait or some pretty advanced "4D chess" moves.
I'm not saying that there wasn't any US and EU meddling in Ukraine (alongside Russia's own meddling), but you don't just bait Russia like that.
Regarding your comment, I'm sure you can understand why I raise my eyebrow when I see someone blaming a 3rd party for the war in Ukraine and nothing about the country who actually invaded Ukraine. Russia, not the US, is responsible for Russia's own actions.
Lots of unsourced speculation and indeed conspiracism here. It would be so nice if this forum could be a haven from those things. There's all but nowhere else to go.
This was deliberate engineering to bring in fresh air. After the 1918 Flu, there was a desire for more fresh air inside homes. All of the apartments I lived in Chicago were built decades later, but the radiator layout persists.
Article[0] on it
I’ve heard a story, and I don’t know if it’s an urban legend, that steam heat became popular after the 1918 flu pandemic because it was going to force overheating of units and make people open their windows and let the bad air out.
I’ve never heard it put that way, but the flu pandemic had a huge impact on heating systems, because they actually changed the code requirements for heating systems when the pandemic was around, because they didn’t know what was causing this. They thought there was something in the air that was causing this. And so what they did is they started requiring buildings to be ventilated. Essentially, they changed the requirements for heating buildings so you had to maintain 70 degrees in the building with all the windows open in the sleeping rooms. So people see these great big huge radiators and think that that’s what they have to have in the house. Usually, the reason those radiators are so big is because they had to heat the house with windows open.
TIL. Never used a modern gas stove, so I had not considered that without a pilot light, there must be a way to disable the flow or constantly spew gas into the house. Then again, I have had a pilot light go out for some amount of time without obvious ill effect, so the volume of gas must be low.
Pilot lights stay lit all the time so no igniter is required. My range has electric spark igniters. They don't work when the power is out but there is also no pilot light expelling gas. I just manually light the burner when the power is out.
My gas stove has spark ignitors for the burners and the oven has an incandescent ignitor. The oven has safety interlocks so the gas valve won't open if the ignitor is not hot. The oven cannot be lit manually, but the stovetop burners can. So in a power outage, I can cook in pots and pans but not bake.
This is a class of device usually called an "auto dialer" and have been around for quite some time. This one appears to be fairly low-featured. Newer devices will automatically send a text when a safe has been opened and the better ones are programmed with knowledge of the internal plate schematics so they can shorten the brute force process.
I keep hoping the EU comes out with a "No Means No" legislation to end this "Ask Again Later" nonsense.
Tricky to thread the needle on what would/not be allowed, but the pattern has been abused long enough. Maybe even saying it cannot re-ask for 30 days would be a significant improvement.
I hate to assign him so much agency. The man seems a complete buffoon who lacks the ability to plan anything beyond real estate fraud. Instead, I look to all of the people in his orbit who can orchestrate long term goals. Sure, he will self sabotage many schemes, but will directionally go where the handlers want. Vance, Miller, Heritage Foundation, etc are the ones guiding most policy decisions.
That tariffs have been so absolutely scattershot, says Trump actually is the one calling the shots there.
His orbiters/handlers are totally throwing all kinds of stuff at him to see what sticks to his cooked brain. It's clear he's barely aware what's happening anymore. The only coherent things he can focus on are things from the 80s and 90s heydays and old and recent grudges.
It’s clear that he’s very easily persuaded on many topics that he already has a slight bias towards, but that he also has his pet projects that his handlers don’t want to mess with because that would jeopardize their political capital (ball room).
Quick heuristic I have is: vanity project = Trump; neocon pet project = Heritage Foundation; anything related to racial purity = Stephen Miller; quackery = RFK and other grifters.
The tariffs are partially his bias, but also Navarro who lost his mind somewhere around 2015 and became an economics pariah.
I'm not sure that the tariffs are just bias plus bad economic theory. I think it's that Trump sees tariffs as a source of revenue under his personal control - that is, not subject to the congressional budgeting process.
It remains to be seen whether the courts will agree with that. Last I saw, they didn't, but it wasn't a final decision.
Ultimately it still comes down to someone in the chain giving a damn. There are obvious, surface level bugs across most technologies. Yet, developers, PMs, VPs all sign off and say, "Close enough".
I befriended the guy in high school who built a Tesla coil. For his next trick he was building a laser to read sound off of plate glass. The decoder was basically an AM radio. Which high school me found slightly disappointing.
I basically asked my math and physics teachers in high school what the Fourier transform was, but none of them knew how to answer my questions (which were about digital signal processing -- modems were important things to us back in the early '90s). If I had to do it over again, I would have audited the local university's electrical engineering and math courses in evenings. The first time MIT ran 6002x online back in 2012, the course finally answered a lot of those questions when touching upon filters and bandwidth.
Yeah I wish I had known about or had access to that stuff when I was a kid. To really learn and internalize ideas like negative frequency early would have been quite fun.
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