Trump only ran to stay out of prison. Now he’s ripping the copper out of the walls to get as much money as he can before it all collapses under his ineptitude.

Elon thinks he’s gonna be a trillionaire at the top of a technofeudal oligarchy. (He wants to be Arasaka from Cyberpunk but he’s gonna have a hard time doing that while all his businesses fail.)

The point?

I see it like this.

Profit profit profit at the expensive of all Americans for 4 years.

The next 4 years let Democrats clean up the mess, Democrats are weak anyway.

Then milk the American people again for another 4 years. The cycle is nonstop.

This is malicious greed but everyone keeps thinking these people are idiots.

there’s no republicans on lemmy lol

You probably won’t get too many of those to answer your question on Lemmy.

Project 2025. The goal is to remove all tariffs and other limitations against the US.

Canada for instance has laws on antibiotics for dairy, foreign ownership for banks and telcos, various things like that. India has tariffs on everything.

The document outlines crazy things like capital punishment and a border wall, its clearly Trumps handbook. It’s all in there.

Stock market manipulation. Look at who moved in to make big trades after the market plunged. Follow the money.

fascism must always create more outsiders, must always create more enemies to keep control, to keep things directed.

remember, fascism appropriates genuine upset and the fact that to the privileged, equality feels like persecution. it steers itself by creating enemies to hate. remember: people’s lives are genuinely fucking miserable. there is dystopian shit happening. and all of that is really complicated, and if people stopped to think about it for five minutes, they would pull a 1789.

so they just keep adding more enemies, and more derangements like what the qanons call ‘baking’ but hitler just said was the way everyone should read books, until they live in a totally unhinged fantasy world, and any method of social control must engage with the fantasy.

tl;dr: sacrificing external allies to fuel a persecution complex, keep control, entrench the madness, keep attention off the american elites that were at least rhetorically some of the initial targets.

I haven’t seen any republicans here so I’ll also offer my opinion as a sane person ….

1. Narcissism. There is only me, and other. There are no allies, just suckers. it’s all about me. Right here. Right now.
2. Bullying. Trump styles himself as a great negotiator but from the outside it looks a lot more like bullying. And if you believe his commitments, you’re a sucker. He thinks this is “making deals” but is the only way he knows how to operate

Not a Republican. I assume Trump is making backroom personal deals to get the world’s politicians and businesses to bribe him in some way. Aligns with how he seems to operate with everything else.

The people you need to hear from aren’t using Lemmy.

You won’t get logical answers to this because there isn’t one. Maybe they’re just that dumb. Maybe they just want to tank the economy a bit so the rich and gobble up more during the dip. Maybe they just actually love Russia. Maybe they’re being secretly black mailed by Russia.

Easy answer. The entire Government of Putin is working for shit Kremlin.

I’m not a conservative but there’s a logic to it beyond this, “because Putin!” circlejerk nonsense. Tariffs are a reaction against Neoliberalism and the economic intelligencia that has fucked everyone over. Many of them blame NAFTA and the offshoring of union jobs to other countries with cheaper labor and fewer protections, and they think they can bring them back through tariffs.

Many of these people understand well that they have been fucked, but can’t really name capitalism directly because it’s a sacred cow. Still they’re going to react poorly to “the establishment” telling them they’re dumb and wrong, and that includes libs screaming at them that they’re “serving Putin” without even understanding what they’re actually trying to do.

Tariffs aren’t going to bring those jobs back, at least not without significant subsidies that the government will never do. Also, for the record, those jobs have raised the living conditions of the people they went to, and are one of the reasons China was able to lift 800 million people out of extreme poverty in the past 40 years, but the pitch of, “You might not be able to find a decent job, but hey, at least a poor Chinese rice farmer can afford a washing machine now,” doesn’t exactly go over well with the right. We should be focusing on the super-rich who have enough hoarded wealth to make everyone rich, regardless of national borders and whatnot, but they see that as communism, because it is communism.

Ultimately, tariffs are a way of rebelling against an economic orthodoxy that isn’t working for a growing number of people and they fit into the nationalist narratives about why things are so bad (because of foreigners) without having to name capitalism itself as the problem.

This follows a long historical trend in America where people don’t want the government to do anything ever but also need the government to do things to address crises and allow society to function so we have to come up with convoluted approaches that “don’t count” as government interference, for whatever reason. For example, the New Deal was too restrained to actually end the Depression, but once WWII happened we could take the gloves off with government spending (on the military) which was economically necessary, and since then, military bases have served as an inefficient and corrupt way for the government to infuse cash into local communities by paying people to just walk around with guns in like Nebraska. This goes all the way back to people like Jefferson, who absolutely hated the idea of big government but also casually doubled the size of the country with the Louisiana Purchase. There’s also the classic psychology of, “Keep your damn, government hands off my social security!” A big reason American politics are insane is because there is a battle in everyone’s mind between ideology and material interests, and the way in which material interests are persued is roundabout, convoluted, and ineffective, because everyone’s trying to avoid being/sounding like a communist.

deleted by creator

Isolating the US and breaking US hegemony. Trump is a Putin puppet, and what’s best for Russia is crippling the US economically and diplomatically. Alienating the EU cuts off the EU from the US who would otherwise help the Europeans against the Russians as they try to reclaim their former territories.

This also helps China who is trying to replace the US as the world superpower. BRICS is doing a good job of creating a competing economic alliance, and the US falling apart helps make it more attractive.

Not a conservative, by the way. Just someone who follows the news.