Trump will not be president for another two months but he is already dominating the Washington agenda again. This week a flurry of controversial and extremist picks for his cabinet and other high-ranking administration positions came at a hectic pace and with a level of provocation that made heads spin.
The choices included a Fox News host, a tech billionaire, an anti-vaccine activist, an alleged apologist for Russia’s Vladimir Putin and a congressman once embroiled in a sex-trafficking investigation. The lineup raised fears of authoritarianism or chaos – or both – once Trump and his allies are back in the Oval Office.
Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “Their entire political brand is shock and awe. Prior to Trump’s re-election it was notional. Now they have the power to execute all of their depravity with the full backing of American government power virtually unchecked. I don’t think the people who voted for Donald Trump, allegedly because of economic angst, have a full appreciation for what that means.”
My cynical take is that those voters have already tuned out again, and aren’t even paying attention to the consequences of their vote.
When it comes time to personally experience said consequences, they’ll have forgotten their complicity and accept whatever feel-better answer is readily available. No lessons will be learned.
Since the economy/inflation are already on a rebound trajectory after the pandemic, he’ll likely have a better economy at the start of his presidency than Biden, which will be credited to Trump’s “day 1 dictator” policies.
If the economy declines further in the latter half of his presidency, once all of the tariffs are more widely felt and income inequality continues to worsen, that decline will be attributed to a probable loss of the Republicans’ Senate or House majorities (or both) come 2026.
And if you read that and come to the realization “Don’t you mean in 2027, when the newly-elected folks actually begin their terms?” Just consider how much of the US’ poorly-planned pandemic response in 2020 was attributed to Biden…before he took office in 2021.
Hell, I consistently have to remind people that Bush bailed out the banks in Aug 2008. Obama didn’t get to make a decision. He continued on the path Bush took, because doing anything else would have further tanked the economy.
I doubt we’re going to have midterms.
Oh we will, question is if they will be more like in Russia.
There’ll be hell to pay if there isnt.
Anecdotal but that’s how all the magas in my office are acting. However myself and a few others are more than ready to remind them that they fucking asked for this when their precious eggs cost $30 a dozen
Honest question: are eggs going to be affected? Corn feed for chickens is mainly domestic, there’s a lot of US factory farms. I’d expect tarrifs to primarily hurt foodstuffs that are heavily mported, like avocadoes, bananas, grapes, tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers, etc.
Its unlikely that anything will be unaffected because of how meshed the entire global supply chain is, can’t harvest corn without equipment and the parts for tractors and other tools either comes from China or John Deere which is gouging farmers as much as they can
Short answer: yes, maybe not $30/dozen and maybe not instantly but probably quickly.
Mechanized farming requires mechanized parts and transportation, even if domestic supply lines exist, the global market supply contributes to price. If that global market is heavily resricted through tariffs, price increases will propagate throughout the system.
The sudden and massive tariffs like trump has suggested (60% on all chinese goods, and 10% on all import goods) could be enough to spur a general global economic collapse. That is a huge amount of extra friction on a system tuned to extract maximum profit rather than be resilient, and we saw with the covid supply shocks how a string of comparatively local and sporadic events were able to wreck havoc.