it’s like you believe you can tariff them expecting they won’t do the same. Why do you believe the rest of the world is not going to retaliate and why do you believe America can prosper without the rest of the world?
What’s the point of having a military alliance with countries you puts tariffs on? That’s unfriendly to say the least.
If they were capable of thinking critically, they wouldn’t be Republicans in the first place.
Good luck finding many of them around here. They find out pretty quickly that they aren’t welcome.
They don’t care about cooperation, everything is a deal to them. If some other country has something, we don’t. The entire worldview of Republicans is just capitalism, if something can’t be framed in terms of profit it’s not worth pursuing.
They’re fucking Ferengis
Edit: as others have correctly pointed out, at least Ferengis have standards. This might be a disservice to them.
Don’t insult Ferengis. They’re actually smart.
And comply with contracts
Trump only ran to stay out of prison. Now he’s ripping the copper out of the walls to get as much money as he can before it all collapses under his ineptitude.
Elon thinks he’s gonna be a trillionaire at the top of a technofeudal oligarchy. (He wants to be Arasaka from Cyberpunk but he’s gonna have a hard time doing that while all his businesses fail.)
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Classic fascist strategy.
This country is circling the toilet FAST.
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You guys do know that facism tends to be left leaning right?
Hitler put all the leftists in camps and also purged the left wing of his own party, he came to power by being appointed by center-right big business interests specifically as a way to crush the left and destroy labor unions, and those interests did quite well under his rule, the term “privatization” was literally first coined to describe the Nazi economy.
So those are the points showing the Nazis were right wing. The points showing the Nazis were left wing are… they censored speech (which the right also does, all the time) and they have socialist in their name (curious on whether you consider the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea a democracy).
New troll account, ban speedrun.
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To cripple the US so it is no longer a threat to Russia, and they can move in to “reclaim” all those Baltic nations and maybe even cop the EU.
Not just Russia. Any kind of meaningful restraint on multinational corps & billionaires requires international cooperation, or the entity just changes the region where it stores/performs/recognizes whatever thing.
I think we’re gonna learn the hard way its actually not okay to let corporations become more powerful than most nations.
The answer is disappointingly simple: emotional satisfaction.
For decades, these people have been told that they are incredibly generous towards their allies, and that they get nothing in return. That their allies are abusing their relationships. Of course this is false, but they’ve been told so every day.
Now they get to abuse their “abusers” right back.
Victimhood is a requirement of conservatism. Like any cult or religion.
Going to steel man this since theres obviously no one on here answering this question seriously. Not a republican and don’t agree with all this, just imagining what my republican dad would say about this:
For ukraine and Europe, we have no interest in protecting them besides sentimental attachments. Ukraine is not our problem, it’s Europe’s and if they want to dump money into a lost cause by all means go ahead, but leave the u.s. out of it unless your going to compensate us for it. The u.s. isn’t threatened by Russia, we have an ocean, the world’s largest navy and nukes to protect us. The larger threat is China and we should be focusing on them, not russia which can barely invade it’s neighbor, much less march across Europe and the atlantic. Europe can handle its own problems.
For Canada and Mexico and tarriffs in general. We need to bring manufacturing back to America and revitalize the rust belt. We can’t do that if companies find it more profitable to go over seas and pay people pennies when they’d have to pay Americans much more. The only way to get them to come back is to make it too expensive to import things.
This is all about putting America first. For decades America has been spending billions to protect Europe and has been sending billions of dollars over seas to build factories owhile factory after factory closes here in the u.s. We need to stop all of that and spend our money in America for Americans.
Feel free to use this comment as a punching bag, I don’t care, just trying to give OP an actual answer if this was a legitimate question and not some rhetorical question seeking affirmation on how dumb the Republicans are. They are, don’t get me wrong, but just say so and don’t dress it up in questions like this.
When we spend money in other countries, we are spending it on Americans. When free people thrive, America wins. When people around the world have stable governments that at least try to look out for their own people, America wins. Even if 49% of it is wasted to fraud and abuse, we’re still coming out ahead: the only Americans who have lived through a draft are in their 60s, and a nuclear attack in their 80s.
This hedgemony has staved of world war three and nuclear war for 75 years, and kept the world a relatively stable and safe place for virtually everyone.
Even if you completely disagree with me, and feel like voting for conservatives is the better alternative, two facts completely undermine that decision. First, the times America has failed to live up to its ideals or faltered in its highest pursuits have been exclusively presided over by conservatives. Second, the number of times conservatives have cut spending and passed the savings on to the 99% is exactly zero, but their track record of increasing spending while only significantly cutting taxes for the 1%…is 100%. And, as a bonus fact, this the wealthiest nation ever to exist in the history of the world. The diea that we can’t afford to help Americans and keep up our global spending is meritless, for example, we could eat like three billionaires and end global hunger, provide healthcare and education to every American.
Great post! And I can see the point of most of that take.
My riposte, which I bring up frequently, is that a smart capitalist isn’t going to invest in American factories, knowing damned well they’ll be left holding the bag on a multi-million dollar facility when the tariffs drop.
That’s not even mentioning the employment costs, which are far more than most on lemmy understand. tl;dr: If I’m paying you $15hr., it’s costing me $30hr.
Nailed it on the head. I think also that you need to include that Canada’s relationship vis-a-vis trade with China will be affected by tariffs the US is placing on Canada, and same with Mexico. I think much of everything is from the viewpoint that China is a bigger problem than Russia at the moment. China is also recovering from some economic turmoil, and one way to do so includes expanding their reach, and so the intent is to limit China in other areas.
Isolating the US and breaking US hegemony. Trump is a Putin puppet, and what’s best for Russia is crippling the US economically and diplomatically. Alienating the EU cuts off the EU from the US who would otherwise help the Europeans against the Russians as they try to reclaim their former territories.
This also helps China who is trying to replace the US as the world superpower. BRICS is doing a good job of creating a competing economic alliance, and the US falling apart helps make it more attractive.
Not a conservative, by the way. Just someone who follows the news.
Not a Republican but big US billionaires recently cashed out their stocks.
https://finbold.com/warren-buffetts-cash-pile-hits-334-billion-record-high-what-does-it-mean/
Trump imposing moronic tariffs will crash the market and the Billionaires can buy back cheap.
Buffet has a long history of stockpiling cash when the market becomes far too speculative. He’s also flat out said millionaires and billionaires aren’t taxed fairly compared to the working class.
I think Trump is trying to appeal to blue collar workers who have seen their jobs disappear. Tariffs are his ham fisted way of trying to appeal to them.
Trump is a fool though. It isn’t the 60s anymore and manufacturing won’t work in the US without inputs from Canada and Mexico.
Many billionaires have recently cashed out not only Buffet. Of course it could be them predicting Trump being bad. But collusion would be possible.
I cashed out in November.
Its painfully obvious to anyone who can do math that Trumps policy’s would destabilize an already weakening market.
this question could be rephrased to:
dear idiots, why are you so stupid?
OR
dear sociopaths, why are you so selfish?
the motivations don’t matter. they can;t be reasoned with.
conclusion: guns.
This feels so much closer to the real truth than anything. It really can be this simple for the trump cult.
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they have brain damage.
Our allies do!!?? /s
No, the MAGATS
That’s… The joke…?
man this comment is, one of the comments of all time. I think.
The president is a Russian asset
It pleases Putin.
I was just watching a panel discussion about Trump and the tariffs and had a thought. He’s started adding exemptions. He just added one for the automotive industry following discussions with the big three auto makers. What if the tariffs were a grift all along? What if he put the tariffs on to generate tax dollars that he can use to give billions of dollars to the wealthy but what if he’s double dipping and selling exemptions? Like, what if when he talked to the big three auto makers he said, “I’ll make an exemption to the tariffs for the auto industry if you give me $100 million”?
