Even putting aside the more outlandish (not “implausible”, just outlandish) theories about what Trump might be up to here, this is an objectively insane thing for an American president to say. He just announced to the world that ~$700bn of the US cash reserves are stored in a location that is not secure enough to prevent theft. At a time when the US debt to GDP is already skyrocketing and foreign lenders are getting increasingly concerned about America’s ability to make good on their debts. Is he trying to engineer a bond market crisis? Because this is the sort of thing you’d do if you were.

Once again the MAGA primary accomplishment is sending billions of dollars overseas, while patting themselves in the back for ending millions of dollars of humanitarian aid.

Funnily enough, there are reports that after that F-15 went down, Trump had to be removed from the situation room because he got so panicky. And he was very specifically freaking out about the idea that this was going to be his version of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. So in this particular case he at least has some vague recollection of history (easier when you actually lived through it). It just wasn’t enough to stop him bumbling face first into a total shitshow, because Trump is, above all else, unbelievably arrogant. He thought he could solve the Iran problem where every other president had failed, at least in his mind. Never mind that Obama made huge progress on Iran and then Trump was the one that tore up his deal.

Pretty sure being a hardcore alcoholic is just about the only way to handle being stuck in Trump’s presence constantly. Either that or you gotta start doing ketamine like Elon.

Lemmy.ml: “Waah, protests don’t do anything, wake me when there’s a general strike.”

No Kings: “We’re doing a general strike.”

Lemmy.ml: “Oh, fuck, shit, I didn’t… Um… WELL SCREW YOU, YOU’RE PROBABLY GOING TO DO IT WRONG ANYWAY.”

Both parties refuse to remove the limit because once one of them does, the other has no excuse not to. The GOP knows that they can basically get whatever they want in budget reconciliation (the one bill a year that ignores the filibuster) and the Dems know that if they actually start passing laws people will expect them to improve their material conditions. So it remains a useful fiction for both of them.

I mean, that’s a reasonable assumption in most cases, but with the way this legislation is written I don’t see how that’s possible. It changes the entire process for registering to vote, and you have to be registered in order to vote. This isn’t like bathroom bills where they’ll target people who “look trans”, this is an actual bureaucratic process that they’re rewriting. Stuff goes on file. There are records. There are whole departments of people involved in processing this stuff, not just one single guard at the gate who can wave you through.

Political capital isn’t just voter approval, it’s your ability to cut deals and draw together coalitions within your own party. Trump is burning a lot of goodwill among Republican reps and senators pushing this do or die approach to this bill.

That would be the smart play, yes (although I don’t believe, constitutionally, that they can actually prevent a new congress being seated… But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s politically valuable to have legislation fail so that you can invent a problem that you “tried” to fix). However Trump doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. The thing about that gambit is that you have to look like you tried, but don’t actually, y’know, burn every bit of political capital you have trying to make it happen. Trump, on the other hand, is now saying he’s going to completely roadblack all legislation until this passes. He’s making it a do or die bill, a "If this is the only thing I pass in my entire term I’m fine with that’ piece of tentpole legislation, which is definitely not what you do when the point is to fail nobly.

That is the most bizarre thing about this legislation; dem voters are shown to be more likely to own passports, and are more likely to keep their original name when getting married. This will obviously fuck over poor voters the hardest, so maybe that’s the point, but it still seems ultimately self-defeating.

I think Trump is just throwing himself behind anything that vaguely sounds good for him because he’s panicking.

And for the “Trump is going to rig the midterms, we’re all screwed” crowd, yes, he’ll try, but if he was confident he was going to succeed he wouldn’t be acting so desperate right now, would he?

The greatest military power in the world can’t handle the fight they chose to start.

Excellent addition, thank you.

Yeah, Hitler understood that you needed the bread as well as the circuses.

That said, the degree to which he improved material conditions in Germany is overplayed in popular media. While the Nazis did push programs like the VW Beetle and cheap holiday packages, their relentless push to rearmament came at a serious cost to Germany’s ability to produce or import consumer goods, and the average German frequently struggled with empty shelves in the supermarkets.

“Heartwarming! One twin wants to feed all trans people into a giant meat grinder, other wants to raise minimum wage by $0.25, but they still get along despite their differences!”

This is about self-preservation. Now that the US government has decided that “Supply chain risk” means “Didn’t bend over and take it like a good boy”, everyone has a gun to their head.

My brother in Christ, the Nazis studied America to learn how to be more racist. This isn’t new.

Fun fact, in Canada our total exports have actually been going up, including our total exports to the US. But as a preventage of our exports, exports to the US have shrunk because our exports to the rest of the world have grown faster.

We should send Trump a gift basket.

No one knows. This entire thing is a temper tantrum.

He’s apparently applying these tariffs under a different law than the one they used previously, which does explicitly allow the president to apply temporary (150 days) tariffs of up to 15%. So you would assume this is meant to replace the tariffs the SC struck down.

But he’s also stated that the previous tariffs are going to stay in effect, just under a different legal theory. So in his mind, it’s possible that he thinks this 15% is on top of the existing amounts, and he’s literally just tariffing the whole world harder because he’s mad about a decision by his judiciary.

Then again, maybe he’s just a dementia-ridden old idiot who can’t keep his own bullshit straight for more than 30 seconds.

That’s not exactly what’s happening here. He hasn’t refused to follow the supreme court ruling. Instead he’s claiming that other laws grant him the authority to impose tariffs.

In some respects he’s right. There is a law that very explicitly grants the president the authority to impose tariffs, but only up to 15%, and only for 150 days. It’s this law that he’ll be using to impose this new 10% global tariff.

He’ll likely also be trying to find any kind of legal wiggle room to maintain the existing tariffs, but I doubt he’ll get very far with that. At best he might be able to impose a bunch of sector specific tariffs.

Edit to add: I’ll note for the sake of completeness that Trump has claimed that the existing tariffs will remain in place. But again, his claim is not that the court has no authority over him, just that there are other legal mechanisms that still give him that power. I suspect that this is just Trump mouthing off. But either way, he’s being very careful not to actually defy the court’s authority here, and that’s a distinction that matters.

Unfortunately, yes. I’d rather them not have a majority, gives the NDP a lot of room to manuever. But Pollievre kinda fucked that one.