President Trump 2.0

[Sephiroth]

Trump has his lucid moments. Like decrying (and I hope stopping) the Chagos travesty, albeit in retaliation for Starmer’s stupid refusal to allow the US to use Fairford as a bomber launch base.

Yeh, just want we need from the Leader of the most powerful nation on the planet, with a military budget bigger than the nine next largest countries military budgets (and three times more than the next largest, China) - lucid moments…

[papa smurf]

Originally Posted by Sephiroth

Trump has his lucid moments. Like decrying (and I hope stopping) the Chagos travesty, albeit in retaliation for Starmer’s stupid refusal to allow the US to use Fairford as a bomber launch base.

why would the words most powerful military need any help from "freeloaders"

[Sephiroth]

Originally Posted by papa smurf

why would the words most powerful military need any help from "freeloaders"

How are you, me and Carth going to successfully run the UK if you publicly question my words!?

No - seriously though; the UK hosts the USAF so less of a freeloader. Our closest ally needs our support, even though that narcissist is in charge. This one is a good cause, imo.

Whoopsie!

https://wapo.st/4cEDyIH

The Supreme Court on Friday struck down most of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs, a ruling that deals a major blow to his signature economic policy and represents a stinging political setback.

The justices ruled the president did not have the authority under a 1977 emergency economic powers law to impose a vast array of import levies on goods from nearly all of the nation’s trading partners.

The decision is expected to reverberate widely, affecting global trade, consumers, companies, inflation and the pocketbooks of every American.

The stakes of the ruling are enormous: The tariffs affect trillions of dollars in trade and the government has collected nearly $134 billion in levies through Dec. 14 under the authority challenged in the case. The Tax Foundation estimated Trump’s trade war cost American households roughly $1,100 each in 2025.

This was a 6–3 decision - Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Jackson. Justice Kavanaugh dissented, joined by Justices Thomas and Alito.

From BBC

The tariffs affected by Friday's ruling:

The country-wide tariffs Trump imposed on most of the world.

The ruling centres on Trump’s use of a 1977 law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), that gives the president the power to "regulate" trade in response to an emergency.

Trump first invoked it in February 2025 to tax goods from China, Mexico and Canada, saying drug trafficking from those countries constituted an emergency.

He deployed it again in April, ordering levies from 10% to 50% on goods from almost every country in the world. He said the US trade deficit – where the US imports more than it exports – posed an "extraordinary and unusual threat".

The unaffected tariffs

The industry-specific steel, aluminium, lumber and automotive tariffs, which were implemented under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, citing national-security concerns.

---------- Post added at 15:30 ---------- Previous post was at 15:17 ----------

Originally Posted by Sephiroth

How are you, me and Carth going to successfully run the UK if you publicly question my words!?

No - seriously though; the UK hosts the USAF so less of a freeloader. Our closest ally needs our support, even though that narcissist is in charge. This one is a good cause, imo.

[thenry]

Originally Posted by Hugh

Whoopsie!

done a poopsie

Well that's shit news ain't it. To become more reliant on itself it has broken rules. How shitty trying to do right thing for its own cause.

Originally Posted by thenry

done a poopsie

Well that's shit news ain't it. To become more reliant on itself it has broken rules. How shitty trying to do right thing for its own cause.

Yeah, how awful that governments aren’t above the law.

Originally Posted by thenry

done a poopsie

Well that's shit news ain't it. To become more reliant on itself it has broken rules. How shitty trying to do right thing for its own cause.

Originally Posted by Chris

Yeah, how awful that governments aren’t above the law.

I think this article from King’s College last year sums it up…

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/trumps-tariffs...will-they-work

“To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff, and it’s my favorite word”, Donald Trump said in 2024*. He wasted no time following his inauguration on 20 January 2025 in announcing a 25 per cent tariff on Canada and Mexico, which he said were taking advantage of the US. “I look at some of these agreements" he continued*, "and I'd say ‘Who would ever sign a thing like this?’". Fun fact: the US-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) trade agreement was signed by Donald Trump in 2020.

And here is the central problem with trying to make sense of what the Trump administration is doing on trade. There is precious little coherence to the pronouncements he makes, and little exposition of precisely what the administration wants to achieve. Some of the claims are obviously nonsense, but are endlessly repeated by the administration regardless. An example is the assertion that the tariffs will be paid by foreign governments, not consumers – a claim that should be self-evidently false. Or the stated justification for targeting Canada being the flow of Fentanyl and migrants across the border, when both are insignificant.

And a second problem is the lack of direction. Tariffs are announced, then postponed, then put in place, then partially cancelled again, then increased when affected countries retaliate, and so on in an endless confusion of mixed messages and disorder.

This factor has prompted the question whether the Trump approach to tariffs is (i) strategic – in which the chaos is a deliberate ploy to make trading partners more willing to offer concessions, fearful of what is coming next from an president that is carefully crafting a reputation for unpredictability; or (ii) just chaos with no real underlying strategy, being made up largely on the hoof by a president who does not know much and is uninterested in the complexities of public policy. Alan Beattie at the Financial Times* examined this question, coming down on the side of the latter option.

The model of manufacturing that underpins Trump’s approach simply hasn’t existed for the best part of 40 years, and is not coming back.

Moreover, the loss of manufacturing jobs is much more a result of increased productivity than foreign competition. The Center for Economic Policy and Research has done a rough calculation* on this that is a useful yardstick. If Trump were to succeed in balancing US trade exclusively through expanding manufacturing, they would need to increase production by around $906bn. This equates to an increase of 12.6% of current manufacturing production. Since roughly 12.8 million workers are currently employed within manufacturing, a 12.6% increase would lead to about 1.6 million new jobs. While this may sound significant, it is only around 1.0% of the current total US non-farm employment.

In short, manufacturing jobs are not coming back. Once upon a time the majority of people were employed in agriculture, but increased farm productivity put an end to that. The same is now happening in manufacturing. Reversing this trend is no more likely than great swathes of workers returning to farming.

tl;dr - Trump’s not trying to do the "right thing", because he keeps changing his mind about what the "right thing" is…