So I guess 2016 claimed its biggest victim yet - America

“If you can peel away the noise and the tweets and all that, which is virtually impossible to do, but if you peel all this away, from a Republican standpoint the things that he’s doing by and large are really good things,” he said.

Wrecking the environment?
Check.
Handing over the nation’s wealth to the military and donor class?
Check.
Erosion of democratic norms in order to maintain power as the minority party?
Check.
Screwing over consumers and labor in favor of corporate America?
Check.
Ignoring democracy and freedom in favor of “American interests” (aka “oil and natural resources”) regardless of oppresion in developing nations?
Check.

Etc.
Yep, all very Republican things.

This Matthew Yglesias sounds suspicious. Why is he not under investigation? Also, Trump can do what he wants - he’s the President! MAGA! Fire Samantha Bee! Fire Jon Stewart!

Really though, he’s blatantly stealing from the country already and has set his friends up with tax breaks, etc. I’d actually be surprised if he specifically mentioned this to friends/family to help them out. It’d be like unlocking the secret back door to the castle when you’ve already thrown open the gates for the invading army.

i had CNBC on, when Trump did this tweet

With the exception of Joe Kearn, who is Trump supporter, everybody was just shocked. By the time I looked the S&P future were already up. Kearn, tried to justify it by saying the Trump was trolling.

I guess, “trolling his opponents”, is the new Trump-speak for leaking inside information.

This whole crowd is such a nightmare.

Hey, what you call “leaking inside information,” Trump calls brand marketing! Now every investor and world leader knows he or she must follow Trump on Twitter or risk missing important info.

#4dchess

2016 feels like a different universe, at this point. Even if Trump chokes on a chicken bone tomorrow, he’s normalized so much crap that I just don’t know where we start to right the ship.

Well, Japan and Germany normalized far worse and now they’re swell places. All they had to do was be pounded into brutal submission during an epic world war.

ahem

Man, this is all headed toward a world war where the US is the bad guy, huh?

Well, that’s certainly what us premature Godwinners are afraid of.

I’d be more afraid of the USA being the bad guys without a world war. At least the Nazis lost, you know?

Should I be looking forward to a Russian/Chinese inspired Marshall Plan that will make America great again?

With nuclear weapons I think everyone losses a world war.

Civil war first, then world war.

Abridged version, this was one of the first things I noticed about Turmp in 2015:

Trump having a zero-sum worldview goes part and parcel with him being a pathological narcissist.

It’s one of those things that has always been visible in him. But many people didn’t want to believe it, so they found ways to wave it away (“It’s just a negotiating tactic,” “He’s just playing to the camera,” etc.) until it was too late.

I’m sure a lot of his base take the zero-sum view as well. Mercantilism has got to be intuitively attractive.

I have a hard time explaining the benefits of free trade without using graphs and/or pulling out my ancient Paul Samuelson Economics textbook. In fact google “benefit of free trade” takes you pages of links, with multi-page explanations. None of which intuitively feels as obvious as “in every transaction there is a winner and loser”
Think of buying a car or an airline ticket, no matter how good a price you got, you know that somebody else somewhere got a better deal.

We touched on this on the previous discussion about the LTV.

It’s tempting to imagine that things have inherent value, and that when you buy something, you are either paying less than that value (and winning) or more than that value (and losing).

The reality is that nothing has inherent value. Trade is facilitated by buyers and sellers coming together where both agree upon a price which is amenable to both. It’s below the value placed upon the commodity by the buyer, and above the value perceived by the seller.

Trade is a process by which goods and services move to people who value them more. It benefits both parties.

Trump has an infantile grasp of trade and economics. Republicans used to stand for free trade, and they would be the ones to fight this kind of bullshit, but they have become the party of sucking Trump’s dick, so i don’t think we are going to have anyone really pushing hard to fight against this.