4 ms·

Uh, no? Trump discussed tariffs as part of his campaign platform. Anyone who voted for him should have known these were coming.

mdhb 2y ago
I know what you’re saying here and in some academic sense, sure, you’re right. Back in the real world though, trump voters are explicitly not the kind of people who read, let alone vote based on policy. They are literally the group of people that people point to in order to say the idea that an economy is actually based on rational actors is one of the most flawed assumptions in the entire field of economics.
ElevenLathe 2y ago
I think most voters probably assumed, as has been the case for the entire life of anyone alive today (including during Trump's first term!), that "Republican" meant "good for business" and small-c don't-rock-the-boat conservatism. There were pre-tremors of this going back decades, but they always seemed far-fetched: surely the business interests in charge of both parties don't wanna fuck up the bag? It turns out that some of them do.
- krapp 2y ago
  >I think most voters probably assumed, as has been the case for the entire life of anyone alive today (including during Trump's first term!), that "Republican" meant "good for business" and small-c don't-rock-the-boat conservatism. Were they just not paying attention during Trump's first term? Did they just assume everyone shouting from the rooftops really did just have Trump Derangement Syndrome? Did Trump's conspiracy laden post-electoral twitter rampage or Jan. 6th really not clue anyone in? I mean, the economy improved under Biden but I guess the meme about egg prices just kind of short circuited people's brains.
  - ElevenLathe 2y ago
    The sky didn't fall in during the first term, so why would it during the second? I didn't vote for him but slightly less than half the voters did (according to best estimates -- one thing MAGA is right about is that our election security is a joke, with a few private voting machine companies and an army of partisan local officials having unauditable sway over a good chunk of elections). In any case, it's not productive to blame voters. The point of a democracy is to court voters. Shaming them and calling them idiots only pushes them away.
    - krapp 2y ago
      >Shaming them and calling them idiots only pushes them away. I'm not a representative of any political party, nor am I running for office. I'm just another woke libtard cuck who has to live with the consequences of Trumpist malice. So I'll shame them and call them idiots all I like.
      - ElevenLathe 2y ago
        Feel free! I'm just a lone left wing lunatic trying to make common cause with the libs, but it's tough. Hopefully we can at least get together on trying to defeat Trumpism but unfortunately your attitude also persists in the Democratic party apparatus itself.
        krapp 2y ago
        The big reason the Democrats lost is that they tried to appeal to the right and only alienated their own base which was already disillusioned by Biden. They keep running as the status quo party when neither side wants the status quo. These people put up a gallows and noose on the Capitol, but ours is the side which has to remain civil? You don't defeat fascism by capitulating to it.
        ElevenLathe 2y ago
        Both things are true, which is actually crazy: the 2024 party tried to outflank Trump on the right by doing bizarre stuff like parading around Liz Cheney and sending Bill Clinton to Dearborn. Now, when they should be formulating a positive view of why people should vote for them, they're trying to figure out why Trump voters are so dumb. They're not a serious political party anymore. The only route I see forward is the long road of organizing normal people in things like labor unions, tenant unions, leftist gun clubs, etc. Most of the infrastructure that the right builds with money can be replicated in 2025 with dedicated volunteers and little actual cash.
crazygringo 2y ago
Trump said a million contradictory things on the campaign trail. Even the smartest businessmen who donated money to him didn't think this was coming. After his election, the market didn't expect it at all either. If you look at polls and read interviews, the #1 reason voters gave for voting for Trump was that he was a businessman who would lower inflation after Biden had raised it. Now he's doing the polar opposite. This is not what Trump supporters voted for.
- silverquiet 2y ago
  My coworkers and I have been discussing how to prepare our company for tariffs since last November. I didn't realize that we were smarter than then smartest businessmen. Perhaps that is no great feat. Trump promised his voters "vengeance"; that is what they voted for.
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    That's fantastic for you. But yes, you can clearly see from the market that you have been much smarter, if your company was confident enough to take action to spend a lot of money to hedge against this. You'll make out like bandits if the tariffs remain, so congratulations. Truly, anyone who saw this coming and shorted stocks appropriately is now rich. That's how unexpected this was. But Trump was promising vengeance on cultural issues and immigration. Not on prices. Again -- voters expected him to follow through on his promise to lower prices. Not to raise them massively.
    - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
      The global 10% tariff was mentioned repeatedly. As was the constant focus on trade deficits. But he's been saying crazy stuff for a decade now, and didn't implement stuff like this before so I can see how people were surprised.
    - Marsymars 2y ago
      > But Trump was promising vengeance on cultural issues and immigration. Not on prices. Again -- voters expected him to follow through on his promise to lower prices. Not to raise them massively. This is easy to reason through if you just remember that Trump and his cronies are not smart or competent. They have basically no concept of how to follow through on a promise if there’s any complexity to it. Take a look at the list of kept promises from the first term: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/list/?promise_group=trumpometer&ruling=promise-kept https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/list/?prom... And the list of broken promises: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/list/?promise_group=trumpometer&ruling=promise-broken https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/list/?prom... The kept promises are trivial, while the broken promises include everything that can’t be accomplished by executive diktat. (Such as lower prices, unless he directly puts a price limit on goods in an executive order.) Basically the only value in reading into his non-trivial promises is in considering “how could he make things worse if he follows through on attempting this?”
rstuart4133 2y ago
> Anyone who voted for him should have known these were coming. Every time I read a comment like this, it tickles my "someone on the internet is wrong" neuron. In countries whose political systems have devolved into a 2 party system, this isn't true. The two choices will both be a curates egg - some things they want to vote for, and some they want to vote against. Someone people will agonise over it, trying to weigh every policy. I suspect that strategy is more common among the HN crowd. It's tilting at windmills. It's a huge multidimensional problem, politicians will change their mind or the fine print, and some outright lie. It isn't solvable in any real sense. At the other end of the scale people will pick the most important issue and vote on that. The issue is nearly always the same, as it how they measure it: it's the economy stupid, do I feel better off now than I did under the previous guy? Because of inflation triggered by the COVID bazooka the answer for Biden was no, so Trump got elected. Most countries had a COVID bazooka, all them subsequently suffered from the inflation hangover, those that then had elections did the same thing as the US voters - they threw out the incumbents. It had nothing to do with right or left, as nations flipped both ways. Personally I used to weigh policy. It took me decades to recognise the futility of it. Now I try to gauge the character of the people I vote for, which seems impossibly nebulous but we humans aren't too bad at reading others. The downside is: it seems a lot of other have done the same thing, which is how we got tribal politics - the other kind of voting hell. If you want to a different outcome, you need a different political system that doesn't yield a barren 2 party choice. MMP does that by giving the voters a range of view to choose from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...

mdhb 2y ago

I know what you’re saying here and in some academic sense, sure, you’re right. Back in the real world though, trump voters are explicitly not the kind of people who read, let alone vote based on policy. They are literally the group of people that people point to in order to say the idea that an economy is actually based on rational actors is one of the most flawed assumptions in the entire field of economics.

ElevenLathe 2y ago

I think most voters probably assumed, as has been the case for the entire life of anyone alive today (including during Trump's first term!), that "Republican" meant "good for business" and small-c don't-rock-the-boat conservatism. There were pre-tremors of this going back decades, but they always seemed far-fetched: surely the business interests in charge of both parties don't wanna fuck up the bag? It turns out that some of them do.

krapp 2y ago
>I think most voters probably assumed, as has been the case for the entire life of anyone alive today (including during Trump's first term!), that "Republican" meant "good for business" and small-c don't-rock-the-boat conservatism. Were they just not paying attention during Trump's first term? Did they just assume everyone shouting from the rooftops really did just have Trump Derangement Syndrome? Did Trump's conspiracy laden post-electoral twitter rampage or Jan. 6th really not clue anyone in? I mean, the economy improved under Biden but I guess the meme about egg prices just kind of short circuited people's brains.
- ElevenLathe 2y ago
  The sky didn't fall in during the first term, so why would it during the second? I didn't vote for him but slightly less than half the voters did (according to best estimates -- one thing MAGA is right about is that our election security is a joke, with a few private voting machine companies and an army of partisan local officials having unauditable sway over a good chunk of elections). In any case, it's not productive to blame voters. The point of a democracy is to court voters. Shaming them and calling them idiots only pushes them away.
  - krapp 2y ago
    >Shaming them and calling them idiots only pushes them away. I'm not a representative of any political party, nor am I running for office. I'm just another woke libtard cuck who has to live with the consequences of Trumpist malice. So I'll shame them and call them idiots all I like.
    - ElevenLathe 2y ago
      Feel free! I'm just a lone left wing lunatic trying to make common cause with the libs, but it's tough. Hopefully we can at least get together on trying to defeat Trumpism but unfortunately your attitude also persists in the Democratic party apparatus itself.
      - krapp 2y ago
        The big reason the Democrats lost is that they tried to appeal to the right and only alienated their own base which was already disillusioned by Biden. They keep running as the status quo party when neither side wants the status quo. These people put up a gallows and noose on the Capitol, but ours is the side which has to remain civil? You don't defeat fascism by capitulating to it.
        ElevenLathe 2y ago
        Both things are true, which is actually crazy: the 2024 party tried to outflank Trump on the right by doing bizarre stuff like parading around Liz Cheney and sending Bill Clinton to Dearborn. Now, when they should be formulating a positive view of why people should vote for them, they're trying to figure out why Trump voters are so dumb. They're not a serious political party anymore. The only route I see forward is the long road of organizing normal people in things like labor unions, tenant unions, leftist gun clubs, etc. Most of the infrastructure that the right builds with money can be replicated in 2025 with dedicated volunteers and little actual cash.

crazygringo 2y ago

Trump said a million contradictory things on the campaign trail. Even the smartest businessmen who donated money to him didn't think this was coming. After his election, the market didn't expect it at all either. If you look at polls and read interviews, the #1 reason voters gave for voting for Trump was that he was a businessman who would lower inflation after Biden had raised it. Now he's doing the polar opposite. This is not what Trump supporters voted for.

silverquiet 2y ago
My coworkers and I have been discussing how to prepare our company for tariffs since last November. I didn't realize that we were smarter than then smartest businessmen. Perhaps that is no great feat. Trump promised his voters "vengeance"; that is what they voted for.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  That's fantastic for you. But yes, you can clearly see from the market that you have been much smarter, if your company was confident enough to take action to spend a lot of money to hedge against this. You'll make out like bandits if the tariffs remain, so congratulations. Truly, anyone who saw this coming and shorted stocks appropriately is now rich. That's how unexpected this was. But Trump was promising vengeance on cultural issues and immigration. Not on prices. Again -- voters expected him to follow through on his promise to lower prices. Not to raise them massively.
  - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
    The global 10% tariff was mentioned repeatedly. As was the constant focus on trade deficits. But he's been saying crazy stuff for a decade now, and didn't implement stuff like this before so I can see how people were surprised.
  - Marsymars 2y ago
    > But Trump was promising vengeance on cultural issues and immigration. Not on prices. Again -- voters expected him to follow through on his promise to lower prices. Not to raise them massively. This is easy to reason through if you just remember that Trump and his cronies are not smart or competent. They have basically no concept of how to follow through on a promise if there’s any complexity to it. Take a look at the list of kept promises from the first term: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/list/?promise_group=trumpometer&ruling=promise-kept https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/list/?prom... And the list of broken promises: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/list/?promise_group=trumpometer&ruling=promise-broken https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/list/?prom... The kept promises are trivial, while the broken promises include everything that can’t be accomplished by executive diktat. (Such as lower prices, unless he directly puts a price limit on goods in an executive order.) Basically the only value in reading into his non-trivial promises is in considering “how could he make things worse if he follows through on attempting this?”

rstuart4133 2y ago

> Anyone who voted for him should have known these were coming. Every time I read a comment like this, it tickles my "someone on the internet is wrong" neuron. In countries whose political systems have devolved into a 2 party system, this isn't true. The two choices will both be a curates egg - some things they want to vote for, and some they want to vote against. Someone people will agonise over it, trying to weigh every policy. I suspect that strategy is more common among the HN crowd. It's tilting at windmills. It's a huge multidimensional problem, politicians will change their mind or the fine print, and some outright lie. It isn't solvable in any real sense. At the other end of the scale people will pick the most important issue and vote on that. The issue is nearly always the same, as it how they measure it: it's the economy stupid, do I feel better off now than I did under the previous guy? Because of inflation triggered by the COVID bazooka the answer for Biden was no, so Trump got elected. Most countries had a COVID bazooka, all them subsequently suffered from the inflation hangover, those that then had elections did the same thing as the US voters - they threw out the incumbents. It had nothing to do with right or left, as nations flipped both ways. Personally I used to weigh policy. It took me decades to recognise the futility of it. Now I try to gauge the character of the people I vote for, which seems impossibly nebulous but we humans aren't too bad at reading others. The downside is: it seems a lot of other have done the same thing, which is how we got tribal politics - the other kind of voting hell. If you want to a different outcome, you need a different political system that doesn't yield a barren 2 party choice. MMP does that by giving the voters a range of view to choose from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...