It’s what he did during his first term - what the US gained in tariff collections, it pretty much lost in excess farmer subsidies, to make up for the fact that China (et al) were no longer buying from them, causing sales and sale prices to slump, permanently. Still didn’t completely make up for their losses, as bankruptcies and suicides among farmers increased dramatically. Farmers still overwhelmingly voted for Trump again, though.
Funny how these people (both Trump and the farmers) who are so explicitly against “socialism” are so into practicing it, albeit selectively.
If existing patterns hold true, they’ll hail him as savior even as he screws them over.
Yeah, I mean it’s one thing to call out “welfare queens” while being huge recipients of welfare because it’s a matter of “the other” getting a different sort of welfare from what they’re getting (even if farmers are getting far more, to literally do nothing), but it’s just weird that they so explicitly call out “socialism” in general as this great evil while very unambiguously practicing it - it’s almost like no one has any idea what the word means.
Immigrant women say they were held “like animals” in ICE detention and subjected to conditions so extreme they feared for their lives.
Chained for hours on a prison bus without access to food, water or a toilet. Told by guards to urinate on the floor. Held “like sardines in a jar,” as many as 27 women in a small holding cell. Sleeping on a concrete floor. Getting one three-minute shower over three or four days in custody.
“We smelled worse than animals,” one detainee said. “More girls were coming every day. We were screaming, begging them, ‘You can’t let them come.’ They didn’t have space.”
I was expecting this sort of trend, but the numbers…
Even allowing for a certain amount of idle talk, it still means that foreign universities will skim off the cream of US scientists and researchers, especially the younger ones at the start of their careers.
There’s a video from early last year where you can see him workshop it out in real time. He openly noted how the biggest response he’d gotten over anything was when he made transphobic statements (yeah, I’m paraphrasing) and then proceeded to test it out with a live audience. It wasn’t long afterwards that he made it a major part of his campaign.
He may not personally feel any particular way about us, but he’s sure as hell willing to let others kill us to gain praise for himself. To me that’s even worse than hatred; that’s the very definition of evil.
Sure, America might lose scientists studying DEI things like climate or medicine or physical reality. But surely that will come with new opportunities for people studying fields like human biodiversity and phrenology!
We get closer and closer to Neal Stephenson’s depiction of “Ameristan” every day.
I hate it.
… mostly given over to the question of what it’s like for Dodge’s friends and family to live in a post-truth society after the “Facebookification of America.”
In this new world, America has split itself in half. In the rural parts of the country, there’s “Ameristan,” where the poor and uneducated live steeped in misinformation, hoarding ammunition for a war that will never come and crucifying those they deem to be heathens.
But the coasts and the cities are full of wealthy elites who pay to have professional editors weed out fake news from their digital feeds, and regard the rest of the country with a kind of disgusted anthropological fascination.
“Their fathers believed that the people in the cities actually gave a shit about them enough to want to come and take their guns and their property,” says one character of an Ameristan gun cult. “So they put money they didn’t really have into stockpiling trillions of rounds and hunkered down waiting for the elites to come confiscate their stuff.”
It’s an elegantly plausible near-future dystopia that neatly replicates the power dynamics of our own time. …
ETA: I blurred this text block after realizing some people may not want spoilers if they have yet to read Stephenson’s book.
Yeah, it’s going to be so, sooo much worse, dismantling the government aside, because food exports will be getting about as low as they can go (because, unlike last time, every trading partner now has tariffs).
In related news:
Trump was right! He is a uniter - he’s uniting everyone against the US! (I mean, it’s pretty impressive to get China, South Korea and Japan, despite their significant differences, to come together in this way.) The US is getting permanently shunned as a trading partner.
