Summary
Global leaders criticized Trump’s new tariffs, which range from 10% to 49%, warning of trade wars and economic fallout.
The UK and Italy urged negotiation, while Brazil passed a reciprocity bill. China and South Korea vowed countermeasures.
Australia and New Zealand rejected Trump’s logic, citing existing trade deals and low tariffs. Norfolk Island was baffled by a 29% duty despite having no exports.
Financial markets dropped, oil and bitcoin sank, and leaders warned of inflation. Analysts say Trump risks fracturing global trade with little to gain economically.
UK and Italy are playing Trump’s game. He doesn’t negotiate. He demands tribute and only honours agreements if they are a win for him and he feels like honouring it at the time. Canada has a Trump negotiated trade agreement - the best agreement ever, in his parlance. It is apparently not worth the paper it is written on.
Countries must negotiate trade agreements - with everyone except the USA. And citizens must support their countries by not purchasing any thing from the USA. As for the few Americans that didn’t vote for Trump, so sorry but your fellow Americans still fully support him. So it isn’t “just Trump”, it is America that is the problem. Trump is simply reflecting who the majority of Americans really are.Vlad Vexler makes the point that the point of is not at all economics but that it does have a basis in logic: it is about asserting that he can do this, that his political power is above economic rationality. It is a political move, not an economic play.
It’s also chaos.
He’s making it so nobody can even trust their own country or economy.
You just have to listen and trust him and Trump will make it right …
There is simple logic in it. Punish everyone, and then let them come to you asking for exemptions. Then he can demand things in exchange. After that it’s “Pray I don’t alter the deal any further.”
UK already asked for an exemption and he said they should buy chlorinated chicken first. If every country responds in the same way and gives in he’s making bank. If they respond with a boycott on anything American, especially digital services, things get bad.
Chlorinated chicken…?
Is that as mouth-watering as it sounds?
For when your food grows up in so much squalor that you need to dip them in chlorine to fake the bacterial culture tests.
Because Trump is getting demented. This is all his idea
Trump’s government has made the US a village idiot - and if the idiot gets into a fight with the whole village, the idiot will have more bruises.
Why he does that - I don’t pretend to understand.
He’s preparing for an authoritarian takeover.
Almost every dictator in history enacted massive tariffs so they had a way to control the economy. Loyal businesses are given tariff exemptions while all the other ones are suppressed. That’s what Mussolini did, that’s what Putin did and now it’s what trump does.
I’ll wonder if that “we need guns to defend ourselves against an oppressive government” statement was true.
All the guns on the world won’t do any good against a missile. Gun nuts are just waiting for an excuse to shoot their neighbors. Jokes on them because no gun can save them from getting 🗡 In their sleep or getting their food ☠️.
And the United States won in Vietnam.
The village idiot has more guns than the whole village together. So I’m not sure he will accept the bruises.
Until nukes start flying. I pray every day for the light of a thousand suns. We deserve it.
He’s trying to destroy the country. Amassing as many bruises as possible is the point.
Dead horse economics:
Wake up you lazy horse!
Someone asked chatGPT how to apply tariffs to give America an equal playing field and it spit it a formula that looks shockingly similar to how trump calculated the tariffs
Try grok and you’ll get an exact match.
Have we forgotten that he has done this each month since he was Inaugurated?
Today the stock market will crash on this news. The wealthy will buy on this massive dip, and in a few days, HitlerPig will announce that the countries on his list have responded to his tariff threats, so he is postponing them for a month or so.
The stock market will recover a bit, and the wealthy will make a fortune. In a month, he’ll do it all over again.
It’s deliberate market manipulation.
I am stealing “HitlerPig”
I’ve been using it ever since i heard thats what the younger staffers in the Biden White House called him. I found it simultaneously hilarious, vicious, and accurate. I encourage you and others to use it often.
Agent Krasnov is an acceptsble alternative.
Other suggestions:
Kapo Stephen “PeeWee Himmler” Miller (my favorite)
Steve “Unwiped Asshole” Bannon
Empty G
Lauren Boobert
Big Boobie Bondi
Couchfucker Vance (not very original, but a good reminder)
Gold Digging Whore (the Propaganda Secretary, I can’t be bothered to learn her name)
Traitor also works for all of them. Nazi, too.
D-bag works well enough for my purposes
Sure, whatever works for you.
And we’ll all be destitute for it. Everyone loses when they do this, yes, even they do in the long run. Once nobody can buy a loaf of bread I’m sure we’ll collectively decide right at that moment that the rich actually do taste good and maybe they should pay more in taxes.
You know what’s fun? Cancelling stuff and citing the reason as ‘tariff-related inflation’. It’s too new and there is no response script yet, so customer service doesn’t really argue.
ok, then…
i have a huge trade deficit with walmart.
i buy way more from them than they do from me ($1200-1500 a year vs $0); just like the u.s. buys more from many countries than those countries buy from the u.s.
like the leaky diaper’s new
tariffsimport tax, i should charge myself a ridiculously high extra tax on purchases from walmart until they buy $1200-1500 a year of some mythical product from me to even out the ‘unfair’ imbalance?yea. that’ll work.
the “logic” is pretty much as you described it. Only, after charging yourself with the extra tax on Walmart purchases, you obviously can’t afford Walmart any longer, so you learn to make your own soap with ash and the fats of animals that you have started breeding in your own flat.
Or your neighbour does all the work instead of you, so you decide to buy soap from them. They’re next door, while Walmart is across the county line, so you decide you won’t charge yourself the extra self-tax with your neighbour.
Walmart"s soap, which used to be $2, is now $3, while your neighbour’s soap is $2.50.
A week later your neighbour sees that demand for their soap is huge because everyone is self-taxing. So they raise their price to $2.95 to make extra profit.
In case you think this is just a contrived fiction, this is exactly what happened to many goods, like solar panels, with Trump’s first-term tarrifs. Americans paid over double the average world price for solar panels.
Worse still, Trump knows this happened, yet somehow this time will be completely different. <sigh>
So sad and so true. You made me giggle and frown at the same time. Have some 🥇.
I think Trump doesn’t want to trade at all. He wants us to produce everything we need.
Just like Mussolini.
and see how well that turned out?
I am really afraid that this is what America is coming to. The problem is that we have a third of the country that supports the Mango Mussolini.
We’ll have to see if that holds true after people watch their retirements get obliterated by a drastic drop in stock values across the board. Biden didn’t do enough to show the people that the economy was doing well, and recovering better than other countries around the world, under his watch. Trump won’t be able to pin this downward economic trend on Biden cause it happened too fast and multiple sources have cited the import tax, or fear of them, at the reason for the stock market tanking.
If owning the libs is so important that tRump voters will still vote for the ones actively hurting them, then those people are truly beyond help.
One can only dream. Joking there is no Resistenza in the USA.
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Well, artificially increasing the price of all the raw naturals we use to make those things will certainly help with that goal…
I’m actually pretty down with that that. We should be able and ready to produce whatever we need in case another country does what trump is doing or something happens that would prevent trade. If China attacks Taiwan, we should be able to produce our own chips. We should be able to function with as little dependence on other countries as possible.
In no way do tariffs fix that. You invest in yourself, slapping your friends because they’re better than you at something is really fucking stupid.
He’s hoping the foreign companies are going to open up shop in USA to avoid the tariffs.
Which they’re not going to do as that takes time and meanwhile he keeps moving the goalposts.
Which they’re not going to do as that takes time and meanwhile he keeps moving the goalposts.
And they’ll just fill in the gaps with China, or other non USA alternatives.
Meh, I think it’s fine and good for countries to specialize and be dependent on each other. Keeps the peace through mutually assured economic destruction. Global upticks in isolationism preceded the World Wars. Also, it just makes sense, because different countries have different resources, and their populations are differently skilled.
That’s actually a pretty good and understandable explanation of what’s going on.
Sounds like you had better open a diaper factory in your house. Then you wouldn’t have to pay the tariff that you are charging yourself.
Thank you! Neither the BBC nor the Flemish public tv seem to say this yet (they just repeat the statement Trump gave)
This is the only person I have seen say this so I can only guess no one is repeating it but it appears to be correct when I checked a few countries.
Its fucking insane to think Cambodia has a 97% tariff, and he thinks they are getting rich off of it.
Nope, not for every country. Russia is missing from the tariffs
Overview In January 2025, United States exported $34.9M and imported $196M from Russia, resulting in a negative trade balance of $161M.
Just unfathomably stupid.
Norfolk Island was baffled by a 29% duty despite having no exports.
Ahahaha. For a day, I want to be inside his head and see the world through his eyes. It would be the most valuable insight for humanity… If only to learn exactly what not to do.
No thoughts. Only anger at being confused.
More then racism, Trump’s appeal is being a simple answer to a complex question. Which happens to mean racism when applied to race relations, but also harebrained economic policies or injecting bleach into yourself. This is the same man who used a sharpy to change the path of a hurricane on a map rather then admit he misspoke.
It would be like that scene in Braveheart, where the Prince is having servants walk in front of him holding a full length mirror, so he can constantly admire himself.
So, now $1 per banana is now real, wow. A complete bunch on my country costs that… We are banana exporters we are the banana republic…
It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost? $10?
None of Trump’s policies have any basis in reality
I’ve been saying this for years - why does anyone listen to him? He has no credibility - his whole life bio shows this clear as day.
Americans are trained from birth to value ignorance as the greatest virtue. Donald Trump represents everything that American culture venerates.
Failing upward. Trump Steaks, Trump University, hell, he couldn’t make money running a CASINO: Trump Castle Hotel and Casino, bankrupt. Trump Plaza Casino, bankrupt. Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts, and Trump Entertainment Resorts… all bankrupt.
Now he can add the US economy to his trophy case of participation ribbons.
I hope the EU reacts with something non-tariffy. Like forbidding US online platforms to serve ads and collect personal data, with severe punishments if they still do.
I recently read an article that suggested the best retaliation would be to stop enforcing US intellectual property in the EU. One of the biggest exports they have is media, if we would stop enforcing their copyright it would cost them a lot of money.
You don’t even have to go that far. Just adopt sane copyright laws, like copyright only lasting the life of the artist.
Thats still too long imo. Patents are 20 years, so should every IP protection.
If it’s good enough for inventors, it’s good enough for musicians, writters and software developers.
Exactly. Especially when you figure in the longer scale up time with an invention. You can’t just flip a switch and start making money.
Yeah, but think about the grandchildren of the CEO who bought that IP from the artist‽
Do you want them to
starvehave to work for a living?Copyright and patent laws should just go away entirely.
The amount of resources we spend enforcing them, just so we can spend more resources on the products themselves, could all be spent improving the lives of people who need it.
Most great art doesn’t make much money anyways, barely more than a service job if you’re lucky. It’s the trashy-shit for low-standards morons that makes an egregious amount of money, like the marvel crap we keep seeing every year.
I’d be fine with less marvel-crap in the world. It’ll make what we do get more impactful, and we can dedicate more resources to fewer, higher-quality products.
That’s a great plan for letting those mega corps steal from the little guy EVEN more than they already do
Not really.
Corporations aren’t going to be making billions of dollars off of, say Photoshop, if copyright and patents laws didn’t exist.
Same goes for hollywood movies.
You’re peddling rhetoric that was put here by your oppressors so you will work against your own interests. Congratulations.
The entities with the established distribution networks will make the money, not the little guy who makes their own little story.
If I write a little seld published novel, under your system, Hollywood can just take that story and make a movie of it without my permission. How is that better? You think more people pirating will take down these mega corps? Your system is chaos that’s even worse than the current model.
They can do so currently by making a couple of minor changes and settling for a pittance because your lawsuit would bankrupt you.
“Chaos” is a better system than one benefitting corporations only.
Your dilemma essentially translates to “wahh, he stole my idea!”
You’re also missing the forest for the trees, again. How is hollywood going to make an egregious amount of money off of ‘your’ idea without copyright and patent laws? Without them, piracy isn’t piracy. It’s just a normal and legal way of sharing media.
Sad watching how hard you people go to bat for your oppressors, but it really puts into perspective why things are the way they are.
The average person just can’t see past their conditioning or how hard they’ve been indoctrinated to support a system that works against them. In the words of Mark Twain, “it’s easier to fool a man than to convince him he’d been fooled.”
Your mistake is thinking that Marvel is art.
Everything done with skill is art. From Citizen Kane to the design of a candy wrapper.
Sure, but that wording becomes detrimental when you only expect high-quality things because that’s what you associate with art, forgetting that there is also entertainment that doesn’t need to be high quality necessarily.
MY wording?
You were the one claiming marvel movies weren’t.
Official EU website hosting American-made media for a nominal fee. Can’t tariff data!
I think a lot of that kind of stuff is going to happen. I don’t think other countries are insulted, as much as they find it ridiculous, and to be ridiculed, I think they’re going to do some inventive chaos. I think we need to be building some world bingo cards, and I’ll bet we won’t guess all the (hopefully hilarious) petty revenges about to snowball.
Would also save the EU an enormous amount in monitoring and enforcement
Of that I am not convinced. This will work with a lot of smaller countries that don’t have much of a copyright portfolio, but not with Europe.
Yes that would be amazing and a great stimulant for EU companies to start developing a competing platform of it’s own (we have BeReal, Dailymotion, Medal and Dumpert, but they aren’t very big AFAIK)
Having Non-US platforms would be nice, yes, But leaving the US-based ones without ad revenue and a shit-ton of users would be nice, too.
Why not both?
Advertising should just be illegal.
It gives an unfair advantage to those who already have an unfair advantage.
I recommend installing an addon called AdNauseam to block ads in addition to sending data that you’ve clicked them.
Please everyone. Try to understand that being a useful idiot is the norm these days. It’s what’s cool.
Nice mention of AdNauseam, here is a link:
It’s based on uBlock Origin, so still state of the art in ad-blocking.
Someone needs to create plugins not to block data being sent, but to send inordinate amounts of trash data.
Make the whole system pointless.
or something ultra specific that is super easy to source from any other country, to exclusively hurt the american businesses
or something ultra specific that is super easy to source from any other country, to exclusively hurt the american businesses
That was part of what went into how Canada chose the targets of out first rounds of counter-tariffs.
Product categories that we also make here, or can easily get elsewhere or can comfortably do without for an extended period of time.
That combined with a consumer led boycott of anything "made in the USA " and even staunch Republicans like Mitch McConnell are starting to push back against Trump.
We can only hope.
