SpankyMcFarland

There is such a thing as a core right-wing constituency in the US. Even now Trump has a solid base of support. His brand is incredibly strong. I think debates matter less than they used to esp. in the US. People are exposed to the candidates for years and party affiliation has become a profound signifier of personal identity down there. One trend that is strong in the US at the moment - anti-incumbency. The sitting party has lost three presidential elections in a row.

Even the discussion of polls has become a partisan matter. Is it because you think polls favourable to them will produce a Liberal win? We’ll have to wait and see whether this poll is a random blip or a change in the trajectory of voter intentions.

The MAGA tribe don’t care about debates. I guess the Tories are hoping new Liberal voters are more open-minded than that.

The Wall Street Journal on VAT (value added tax) that Trump imagines is a tariff:

We’ve seen solo bombing campaigns that have continued for years with much less justification, eg the Unabomber. Don’t underestimate our ingenuity and resilience. The more fragmented and cellular the campaign is the harder it will be for the Americans to join the dots. BTW I don’t know why any patriotic Canadian wouldn’t want to see resistance if we were invaded by a foreign power. I’ll leave you with these words:

You don’t need many personnel in active service units, ie fighters, for an insurgency. A few thousand can cause havoc if they have support among the population. The IRA had about 300 in the field. I think we could manage that from 40 million.

Bigotry? I have great difficulty understanding how that word applies here. I have no hostility to Trump based on his wealth, nationality, race or religion or membership of any other group but merely to his actions over a lifetime and particularly as a feckless head of government clearly hostile to our country. My anger is perfectly reasonable under the circumstances.

I have just made and I will continue to make it. This is a disastrously bad businessman who ran an empire riddled with fraud and incompetence on an extraordinary scale which should have disqualified him from any political office. Way back when, he half-digested some primitive ideas about tariffs and he’s run with them ever since. Incredibly, he’s now in a position to implement this destructive, childish nonsense. The only reasonable position for any Canadian is to condemn him without reservation.

I’m angry because he’s an unstable sociopath of limited talent completely unfit for the job he has. And his ideas are terrible. The fact that his minions are quoting opinions from the 19’th and 18’th century to justify his policies says it all. Do we look to Alexander Hamilton for advice on AI or antibiotics? Tariffs are war by other means. They are costly and should be applied sparingly with a specific, strategic goal in mind. In a globalized economy they are very dangerous. I believe the market will recover eventually, which is why I still have money there, but America’s credibility has taken a serious hit. I fear most investors will pay a price for this in reduced growth over the longer term.

Smith is a low functioning narcissist who has brought unnecessary conflict to everything she’s been involved in.

That’s not true of conservatives. They’ve usually been better at message discipline.

It’s an utterly transformative deal for NL if it happens. The province will be sustainable.

The cult members who think this is just a negotiating tactic and part of some ingenious 4D Trump plan miss the point. Even if this ill-considered nonsense was removed tomorrow, America’s image as a serious country, the home of the world’s reserve currency, has been seriously compromised. Investors won’t think of it quite the same again. Again, on basic messaging, these clowns can’t come up with the same story because even Trump doesn't know what he’s going to do next: https://thehill.com/homenews/5234671-brooke-rollins-dodges-questions-trump-tariffs/

The way this policy was implemented couldn’t have been more primitive. Even the basic PR was disastrous. The countries tariffed weren’t listed in any easy order but were hurriedly lumped together. There was no need to tariff every state in the world they could find on Wikipedia and omitting Russia etc. instead of including them with existing tariffs was a political gaffe which was clearly going to attract attention. There was no serious consideration of the tariff barriers faced by the US abroad or its ability to produce the products tariffed in the US. Is America going to become a behemoth in the vanilla industry now that it has hit Madagascar with crippling tariffs? The sight of massively tariffing some of the poorest countries in the world robbed the US of what little prestige it has left. What a gift for China.

In the 1565 siege of Malta, the Knights of St. John invented a weapon called the Trump, a tube packed with explosives and attached to a lance: ‘When you light the Trump, it continues a long time snorting and belching vivid, furious flames ... several yards long.’ https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n06/ferdinand-mount/this-is-the-day

Most of the Nobel Laureates in Economic Sciences since 1969 have been American. https://www.statista.com/statistics/262901/nobel-prize-winners-in-economics-by-nationality/ What a humiliation for the country that produced them to inflict such a moronic tariff formula on the world. An amateurish effort - grade F.

A close relative just died of Stage IV lung cancer. He was on death’s door five years ago when he was started on Tagrisso and had all those wonderful extra years with his family thanks to science.

Such amnesia might apply in South East Asia but we won’t forget this in Canada for decades at least. When was the last time they did something like this?

There are great deals to be made in Trump’s America. I see Mordor just got its tariff rate down to 10% by agreeing to sell the Eye of Sauron to Google.

This song comes to mind: I don't want to start any blasphemous rumours But I think that God's got a sick sense of humour And when I die, I expect to find him laughing

I know mine did because I’ve seen the names of the companies I’m in going down, down, down but I just can’t bear to look. It will probably take a few weeks for me to summon up the courage.

Harold Wilson, a UK PM, once said that “a week is a long time in politics”. Two years is an eternity. Trump won’t be given that long to sort things out even by the cult followers in his own party. I did get the joke.

Not the death of America, no, but I can’t see how it will fully restore its reputation in the world. There’s such a thing as goodwill among free nations and that is in very short supply at the minute. There’s also no question that isolationism is not the self-destructive doctrine of one man alone but has infected many south of the border.

Irish eyes are certainly not smiling. They’re deeply worried about the profits booked by US companies in their country.