Tariff like it's 1897, Trump's Great Economy, Maybe the Best Ever

Am I correct though? I’m seriously wondering how this works.

From my understanding all of these tarriffs have been lodged as required for “National Security” which the WTO has an exemption for. It’s obviously bullshit but the administration is (probably rightly so) betting no one will challenge us on it at the WTO directly.

I’d like to challenge the past 30 years worth of stuff to show the hypocrisy.

The news in Canada are making it sound like Mexico and the US have signed a separate peace.

That’s what Trump wants everybody to think, but that ain’t what’s actually going on. Much like North Korea, he’s declaring his complete and final victory when in fact little has happened other than agreements to talk about making agreements.

Read the above linked article. (Also note that Trump can’t do squat to end/alter NAFTA by himself; for anything to actually take effect it has to pass Congress.)

Meanwhile Trump is sabotaging the WTO by refusing to allow judges to be appointed to its court.

Also, this seems to be a strange position for a common law country to take:

What trade deal? Is there a trade deal? Or just talk of maybe a trade deal yet to be done?

I hate when the media wittingly buys into his stupid.

To be fair, there’s more of a trade deal than there was when he announced one with Juncker, but no there’s not an actual deal ready to sign.

Trump’s (made up) deadline for Canada is today, and this morning this happens:




Wow.


Donne: And now those dishonest reporters are accurately reporting what I said!

(Dimwit Donnie almost surely made a n00b mistake and told the Bloomberg reporter his remarks were “off the record” when there were other people in the room not bound by Bloomberg’s promise to leave them off the record.)

And yet many in his base are so stupid they will actually believe him!

That said husband last statement is accurate, they do know where he stands now.

I had to click on that to make sure it wasn’t Denald.

They are indistinguishable.

I’m going to be honest here – I kind of agree with Trump on this one.

Not on the tariff stuff, which is objectively stupid, but with his comments about Bloomberg. Officials should be able to make “off the record” comments to newspeople in order to set context or simply to bounce some ideas off of the reporters and get the “lay of the land” as people outside the White House bubble see it.

If there were non-Bloomberg people in the room, the Bloomberg folks should have pointed that out. And I imagine that no one at Bloomberg is particularly happy about this – at absolute best they’ll get a reputation as unprofessional.

I doubt this typically-Trump incident will give Bloomberg a reputation as unprofessional.

As someone with many friends in the media, this is definitely viewed as unprofessional by even the most liberal. You can’t be in a room of journalists and claim that “off the record” only applied to one. Everyone needs to live up to their professional code of conduct if we’re going to demand that of government officials (and we should, of all).

I think that the reality is that someone ELSE in the meeting, like a whitehouse staffer, leaked it to other media outlets… and those outlets were not at all bound by any notion of it being off the record.

The guy who published it is with the Toronto Star. Suppose Putin, in “off the record” remarks, laid out his negotiating strategy with the US. Would a US journalist who got their hands on it be bound to respect Putin’s wishes?