> Friendly reminder to please not confuse the Trump administration with all U.S. citizens. None of us do at the personal level. At the international level we a

> Friendly reminder to please not confuse the Trump administration with all U.S. citizens. None of us do at the personal level. At the international level we are compelled to. Even in an ordinary administration, internationally a state is indivisible from the government it chose, and any strategy to pretend otherwise is doomed to failure or various kinds of corruption. The larger the amount of money that is staked on ignoring/going around/subverting the national policy of the state in which a business partner is based, the greater the chance of encouraging turning-a-blind-eye grift from elected officials, at the very least. "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" But this isn't an ordinary administration. Trump is fully into "l'état, c'est moi" [0] and he goes there more and more by the day. From the outside, the degradation just in the last seven months is extremely obvious. Given that international trade policy seems to have been entirely handed to the executive, anyone wishing to trade with a US business must simply assume the USA is Trump. None of the old sense of continuity can be trusted. It's all new. This is deliberate, it's what his voters wanted, but it's also our reality. [0] I anticipate some pushback here. I would accept the criticism that if we're talking about the USA as a single entity, it's intellectually dishonest to focus on matters of internal policy to back that up. To people who want to make that criticism I would simply ask: what international policy, separable from Trump's own grievances, explains the tariffs on Brazil?