I'm not sure even Tesla unambiguously qualifies here. Looking at the NHTSA part 583 list for 2025 [0], none of the Tesla vehicles have a "US" content higher than 75% (which I think includes Canada?). The highest is the base Kia EV6 at 80%. This seems to be coming from the Kogod manufacturing index. That's a more qualitative ranking that attempts to deal with things like corporate structures rather than just origin like the NHTSA numbers.
As someone who works in the industry, "where" something comes from is an inherently fuzzy concept. Different parts of the government use radically different definitions. For example, under NAFTA "domestic" parts are usually things manufactured anywhere in North America. This was done to onshore automotive manufacturing that wasn't realistically going to come back to the US, but political leaders didn't want to stay in Asia. One result of these tariffs may actually be that more auto manufacturing moves to Asia as the advantage of North American manufacturing is lost.
Interesting, does the proportion by weight, size, value or count? eg a EV battery is 25% of the weight, 50% of the cost and 0.1% of the number of parts.
Fuzzy in the sense of "you need a bunch of experts and lawyers to sit down to determine what the correct answer for the government is in any specific situation". The work is exceedingly tedious and expensive.
I was involved in similar efforts to remove Chinese parts from the supply chain during the previous Trump administration. It was a nightmare that involved dozens of people reviewing tens of thousands of parts across hundreds of components with multiple revisions. I was involved for two years and that wasn't even the entire thing. Most changes required multiple layers of analysis/engineering review, change proposals (which often had to pass change review boards), vendor negotiations, manufacturer negotiations, reams of documentation about changes to refit procedures for previously produced HW, testing, validation, etc.
Removing Mexico and Canada from supply chains would be even worse. Probably nigh-impossible for some OEMs.
Even in normal times regulators don't take kindly to origination fraud even, so it's highly unlikely anyone will risk it with an admin like the current one. Look at what happened to Amazon earlier today and SentinelOne last week.
Most manufacturers will eat the cost and raise prices to a certain extent. Base models of any product tend to be manufactured in such as way that they have much looser margins.
I meant 2 weeks ago - Chris Krebs "resigned" and S1 had to do a lot of damage control around their Fed business (which is significant as a cybersecurity vendor).
Won't be surprised if Stamos quietly "resigns" in a couple months as well.
And that was under the Biden admin, which was much less pushy. The Trump admin is much more vindictive, especially with a policy that appears to be backed personally by DJT.
Here are some interesting legal articles discussing this very thing in the Trump admin
This is political corruption, the rule was created for Musk because he is a political ally of the president. Why wasn't it 70% or 90%? Because the number was chosen to give Tesla an unfair advantage. So while your technical points are valid, they miss the big picture.
That's pure speculation, but quite possible. Corruption is nothing new in Washington.
The real question is whether people support bringing auto manufacturing back to America. As always, people who like the policy/candidate/official will overlook the corruption, while people who dislike the policy/candidate/official complain about it. The people who demanded evidence about Biden will accept speculation about Trump, just as the people who speculated about Biden will demand evidence about Trump.
With that in mind, I'm curious, what's everyone's stance on American manufacturing? Do you agree with Steve Jobs that "Those jobs aren't coming back"?
You can extend the "free market ideologues" to include more groups such as those who were very concerned about free speech for exactly four years from 2021-2024. Same people were concerned about politicization of justice department, but only when certain Presidents are in office. Same goes for "respect for constitution". "Family values" was abandoned quite a while ago.
I have come to believe that many people's political attitudes can be boiled down to a single uniting element: an overwhelming fear that other people might do to them the kinds of things that they would absolutely do to other people if given half a chance.
This captures a large part of their psyche well. They harp on about the dangers of a "low trust society" because they project their lack of trust onto the world, assuming the immigrants/gays/whoever are as cutthroat and dangerous as they are.
Freedom of religion as well, and the age and mental acuity of the president. And handling of secret information. And being involved in foreign conflicts.
As a 20th century political theorist once said, "the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy." If you hear someone talking high-minded rhetoric and idealism but they won't make a friend or an enemy over it, they don't believe it.
Most of these examples are good ones, but this one actually isn’t. I don’t know what part of the country you’re from, but in the south violence against the government is treated as distinct from violence against fellow citizens. I don’t want to debate the substance of the view, I’m just pointing out that it’s not actually contradictory like you’re implying. I grew up in virginia when it was a red state, my first reaction would’ve been relief that it was still possible. But it also would’ve been my first reaction 25 years ago when I was a Gore supporter in a Bush county. Jefferson’s tree of liberty and all that.
I suspect this divergence comes from people who have internalized the 1960s civil rights movement view, and whose chief concern is the government protecting minorities from the majority. Meanwhile, the more traditional Anglo-american view is chiefly concerned with protecting the majority from the government.
Or, in my city, the cops who blew the whistle on other cops for electrocuting people's testicles as a means of extracting forced confessions. The "back the blue" crowd absolutely hates those guys.
It's hard to label Trump a free market ideologue. He's more Mr tarrif man.
If you want free markets look more to Lee Kuan Yew and Singapore (#1 on the "Index of Economic Freedom").
One of the virtues of proper free markets is the markets largely figure which companies win in a relatively non corrupt way, rather than politicians leaning on the scales.
The Singaporean government's hand in it's own economy is larger than a lot of self-professed communist states - Temasek Holdings, Mediacorp, DBS Bank, Singapore Airlines etc etc.
Trump has literally been prattling about his love of tariffs for decades and was explicit about his plans to heavily leverage tariffs during his campaign..
I think you might just want an excuse to believe what you already believe
I just think a lot of democrats really haven't paid attention to how Trump has morphed the Republican party and the realignment that has been going on. They still think of a Republican as George w. Bush / John McCain / Mitt Romney even though they have all been effectively excommunicated from the party. I think part of it was hope was Trump was a momentary blip but that's obviously no longer the case.
Everyday people have been clamoring for some sort of change for a long time. 00s at least. It reached a boiling point in the late 2010s and you had a nearly parallel rise of Trump and Bernie. The difference is that the republicans couldn't keep a lid on Trump and his backers like the democrats did to Bernie. So Trump got in and then politicians "built in his image" started getting elected all over the place. So now the republicans have a party that more accurately reflects what people want. And they'll use that to mop the floor with the democrats until the democrats turn their own party over to reflect what voters want.
Nation-wide Chesterton's Fence happening right now, with people learning a hard lesson soon enough. Let's just hope it won't be too late to repair their broken systems.
A rational theory of spite suggests that even if they know that it will be worse for them too, if the level of their spite is great enough, they are still better off because the joy of the suffering of others is greater than their own induced suffering.
Because Fox, and Newsmax work overtime to convince people that Trump wouldn't do the things he said, and he'll actually do the good things people want. And that if anything bad happens, it's the aftershock of previous administrations (of which, Trump's is exempt, of course).
You don't have to be tapped in to see that whatever is said on Fox becomes Republican dogma very quickly. That's why half the country is more concerned that Zelenskyy is, somehow, a dictator, and less concerned that we ushered Russian state media into our white house. It's an embarrassing state we're in.
Trump was never actually a "free market" idealogue. And the GOP officially dropped any mentions of it from their party platform a few years ago.
If anything, they are doing exactly what they promised. They were against globalism and elites and international agreements and governance and they are being true to their words.
If I was forced to say one good thing about the guy, it's that he is quickly and faithfully delivering on his campaign promises, moreso than any other president that ever served in my lifetime. He's blasting right through the Project 2025 checklist and doing exactly what he said he'd do. Those campaign promises are destructive, thoughtless, cruel, and self-serving, but he said he'd do them, was elected, and then subsequently did them. So, I'll give him that.
He never backed that officially though, right? It's just that everyone rational knew what's happening anyway, but otherwise - even the not knowing about it was a lie, not an explicit promise.
While I agree with the sentiment that he is not backing down from a lot of his batshit promises, let's not forget that he made a lot of promises. The Russian invasion didn't end on day 1 or day 100 and he decided to only strongarm one side - iirc he said he would threaten Ukraine with withdrawing support and threaten Russia with giving obscene amounts of support to Ukraine.
His predictions about what other people/countries would do were, of course, wrong, but his promises about what he (and his admin) would do or try to do themselves are for the most part being delivered.
It's not for the most part.
He's delivering far lower percentage of his promises than most presidents.
He made a shit ton of promises and many were nonsensical and contradictory. But that doesn't change that he hasn't delivered on them. The problem is people see him doing the most ridiculous stuff people thought he would drop and assume that means he kept most of his promises
He lied and said he had no idea about Project 2025 - when people say "he's doing what he said" no - he's lied about everything and double backed a half dozen times.
> He's blasting right through the Project 2025 checklist
You are confusing that with Agenda 47. While Project 2025 was all those things you describe, that Trump endorsed any of it or is implementing any of those destructive things simply isn't true.
He's faithfully implementing Agenda 47, just like the majority of people in this country elected him to do. And all of those people expected the storm before the calm.
When I read "elites" it always makes me wonder what kind of elites are meant. Surely not elites in intelligence or wisdom and knowledge. Does it mean just having tons of money? What does it mean to be an elite university in contrast to being an elite person?
The behavior I’ve seen from so many libertarians from 2017 onward, especially during the pandemic, January 6th, and Trump’s reelection, has revealed so much to me and has made me rethink my libertarianism. So many libertarians, when pressed, would gladly align themselves with the far-right for their own benefit, whether to accelerate the destruction of the state they hate so much, or whether because, deep down inside, they agree with the far-right on social views, and libertarianism was simply a cover for them to promote abhorrent social views.
I’ve read a lot of Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell back in the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s. I also voted for Ron Paul in the 2008 and 2012 primary and regular elections. I used to consider myself a Rothbardian-style libertarian. While I still view the Austrian School of Economics with high regard, my biggest problem with Rothbardianism is Rothbard’s 1990s turn to the right before his passing around 1995, and its deleterious effect on libertarianism. Rothbard supported “right-wing populism” as a way for the libertarian movement to advance. Rothbard supported Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential run (though Rothbard would fall out with Buchanan over the latter’s support for protectionism), and Rothbard even went as far as to support the notorious David Duke’s gubernatorial campaign in Louisiana. This right-wing populism strategy led to the paleolibertarian movement, which is limited-to-no government fused with a culturally conservative outlook. However, it’s this cultural conservative mindset that has led so many libertarians to be so enamored with Trump. Trump, after all, is a much more bombastic version of Buchanan, who has a similar ideology. It seems protectionism can be overlooked when people view “wokeness,” and not a breakdown of rule of law, is the biggest problem in American society…
Ironically, it was Rothbard himself who complained earlier in his career about right-wingers who “hated the left more than they hated the state,” yet so many libertarians today are willing to embrace the far-right because they view the left as enemy #1. If I had a dollar for every time I saw a post or article sympathetic to Pinochet, I’d probably have enough for a nice MacBook Pro.
I realized over the years that while I’m still very skeptical of government power, I don’t hate the state, and I prefer good government over chaos. I value liberal institutions and feel they should be defended.
Thanks for the thoughtful post with the rich historical references. For what it’s worth, I experienced a drift which is the mirror image of yours, starting left, developing my appreciation for the necessity of economic competition, and then coming to grips with the limitations of government intervention.
Perhaps it‘s the “no true Scotsman” fallacy, but I find it hard to consider anyone enamored with Trump to be legitimately libertarian. The guy basically regards himself as a dictator and his edicts are mega-authoritarian.
To me it is logically impossible to reconcile the two positions. You simply can’t be a pro-authoritarian libertarian.
You can’t really espouse libertarian values while being what is coded as “culturally conservative”, because that worldview demands conformity and the mechanisms to enforce same, which are inherently anti-liberty.
A good rule of thumb is that anyone who had any issue whatsoever with other people wearing masks during the pandemic are pretty obviously not pro-individual-liberty and just factional culture brawlers.
There seems to be a lot of definiton drift in the term “libertarian”, and that seems wrong to me. (The same thing happened to my other primary identifying social group, “techno”. I spend a lot of time yelling at clouds now.)
One of the biggest challenges with the libertarian movement is that it attracts people who like libertarianism not because of the non-aggression principle, but because it enables them to legally engage in certain activities.
An example would be how Barry Goldwater, a proto-libertarian, was able to win some solidly Democratic Deep South states in 1964, the first to do so since Reconstruction. It wasn’t because those Southerners had a libertarian moment. No, it was because Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although Goldwater supported civil rights and voted for previous civil rights legislation, he felt that the 1964 act was an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of private businesses. However, there were many voters in the South who were swayed to vote for Goldwater not because they were libertarians, but because they supported discrimination, and despite their support for Democrats from Reconstruction through the New Deal, anti-discrimination laws were enough for them to break nearly a century of party loyalty.
During the pandemic, I was dismayed by anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers who used libertarian rhetoric to engage in reckless behavior that harmed not only themselves, but others, especially the immunocompromised. It’s one thing to be saddened and taken aback by the extraordinary powers governments at various levels took during the pandemic. Unfortunately, any type of principled opposition to government overreach during the pandemic was overwhelmed by all sorts of selfish, reckless acts. I was completely dismayed by the behavior I’ve witnessed, disappointed not only with various levels of government, but also with some conservatives and libertarians who managed to make COVID a “culture war” matter.
It turned out many of the libertarians I’ve looked up to were just very articulate right wingers. When push comes to shove, they’d excuse people like Trump, Le Pen, Putin, and the like, justifying them under the guise that we’d be worse off under a standard-issue Democrat or a social democrat like Sanders or AOC. I’m not a Democrat by any means, but the past decade has shown the damage that MAGA-style right-wing populism could do to a country. I’m not a Bernie Sanders supporter, but Bernie or even AOC would be less destructive to society than Trump and his allies.
I am completely saddened by the culture wars and how we are unable to solve structural economic and political problems in America because we are mired in the culture wars. This is tearing our country apart and may make the world worse off as other nations fight to fill in a power void made available by a descending United States.
> Integrity, honesty, and principles is literally what they mean by the word "woke"
No it isn't, and saying things like this just adds noise. What they mean by the word "woke" is a worldview that delegitimises the things they aspire to or worked hard for (status based on power based on individual agency), and prioritises other forms of social currency (victimisation by external forces) in a way they find performative.
There is not and has never been any trace of free speech or free market "ideology" from Trump. Perhaps as a talking point but never in any policy or action. Trump is the anti-libertarian, severely authoritarian and moving things toward a centrally planned economy!
I don't know if it's the same people but many of the comments here seem the opposite of the comments on EUs rules where people say they're targeting specific companies and comments say "no, the rules are such than all companies over a certain size are covered".
If the rule is 85% domestic than any company can do it.
I'm not saying the tariffs are good. Only that their point is to get things made domesticly
It's not just the idea in isolation though. I don't think anyone would complain much if the rule was "in N mths the threshold is X". Everyone could do the necessary adjustments and play by the same rules. But if the rule applies immediately, favours the guy who gave you millions, and impacts the competition financially where they need to make me investments to comply with the rules... yeah, that stinks even if it looks like a generic rule.
Ideally that's the long term goal though, right? You want good local production, but not impair the trade forever. The best tariff would be a future one that achieves the shift by threat, then gets cancelled because the goal is complete and there's no point is impacting trade otherwise.
If companies believe today that in 4 years the tariffs will be dropped and that their investment in a manufacturing facility with 25% higher costs than the foreign competition will become effectively worthless, they will be reluctant to invest all that much.
Just a coincidence that the only company that currently fits the criteria is Tesla then.
Everyone else can start rearranging their supply chains and building new factories to comply. Easy peasy right? Be up and running in a few weeks, at most, right?
With the assumption of course that tariffs won't change before new factories even have come online in a less optimal place. I'd be hard pressed to invest huge amounts of money like that when we are on tariff policy change 80-something in 100 days while I also hearing about imminent "trade deals".
I think Honda already has like 75% American parts in the cars they produce in Indiana. It was actually listed on the Acura ILX I bought from them awhile back.
> where people say they're targeting specific companies and comments say "no, the rules are such than all companies over a certain size are covered".
The rules are written with full knowledge of the current market situation and the understanding that companies can't re-engineer their supply chains overnight.
The rule-writers had full knowledge about which companies would and would not immediately benefit from this rule. They wrote it accordingly.
This doesn't compare to the EU rulemaking discussion for that reason. If the EU rules were written so that only a single company was hit by the rule, people would be saying the same thing.
I'm sure the targeted aspect of that one is applauded by the same side that is unhappy about this tariff.
At least in the tariff case, it's an objective numerical target and probably even achievable by other manufacturers. Ford is only 5% away from the target for some of its models.
I would go as far as saying, that almost no one outside the US knows about state specific rules. People watch or read some news, but they are usually not that much into the US inner political theater, that they additionally make an effort to learn what state has what other rules.
I am not even sure how impactful it is, that Washington state does something different. Like ... Are things built or sold there by a large amount? What makes Washington state special? And what are their intentions? And can their lower level rules actually override what is decided at the country level by Trump's gang?
It is bad enough, that people have to deal with hearing about all the crazy stuff the orange clown or his henchmen do on a daily basis. There is a limit to how much people want to deal even more with political stuff from the US, you know?
The key is the “…over a certain size” solely benefiting the richest man in the world, who just so happens to be heavily involved (despite no election) in the very government setting the policy and determining the size.
>If the rule is 85% domestic than any company can do it.
To be making this claim, you must be an vehicle supply chain expert, so can you tell the rest of us which parts can be domestically sourced in the US and which can't?
You can tweak the rules infinitely to get the outcome you want. It's suspiciously convenient how the only company that's exempt from those tariffs is owned by the guy that gave Trump $200+ millions during his campaign.
You can't argue in good faith about "well, that's the rule" when the rule was very obviously constructed that way to achieve this specific purpose.
Why 85% and not 80%? It’s an arbitrary cutoff that happens to benefit Elon.
Ford will quickly get to 85%, but you can’t deny this is yet again a move that is touted as “pro-America” yet somehow mainly benefits Musk (or Trump or someone in their orbit).
I’d note the ones that meet the threshold are by far the vast majority of Tesla sales and profit. This puts them at a structural advantage. Those three models account for 95% of deliveries in 2024. The rules as stand only impact their highest margin vehicles, which account for 4.8% of their total deliveries.
The fact that Elon Musk is personally involved in the decision making and cabinet level discussions and personally benefits immensely- and exclusively- from this special carve out looks like rank corruption on the surface and at face value. Any other administration in history would be investigated until the cows come home if something comparable had ever happened. Even if it somehow eluded the rule makers that they exempted 95% of one companies sales to the exclusion of all other companies and that companies CEO had curried extensive favor with the administration and this was a mistake, the appearance of gross impropriety and conflicts of interest should cause a rapid reset and roll back. I suspect, however, it will not be rolled back, and that they were entirely aware of what they were doing. This is what kleptocracy looks like.
They search space for criteria is practically limitless. They have and would absolutely fish for precisely the criteria benefiting Musk.
This playbook has been applied well by the crony capitalist class in the 3rd world, and is always a moving target. Most players know that and will not chase the moving target, knowing that another set of rules will emerge that will create new hurdles protecting the crony capitalist. A few will, and get burned.
There are two reasons to believe this is applicable here:
1. Trump has a track record of quid pro quos (Adelson being a salient
example). Musk is definitely seeking his pound of flesh
2. Lutnick urged people to buy Tesla (shocking and explicit favoritism)
The view that this is just incentivizing local production is naive.
I wonder how much their lack of union plays into this. The auto factories fled Flint/Detroit due to the UAW basically an attempt to limit the scope of strikes and violence from the UAW. Tesla doesn't have to worry about unions (at least yet), and so they have very centralized factories where an enormous amount of work is done. Probably makes it easier to do everything in the US if you can do it all in one building
In the long run, unions can be blamed for this whole Trump Presidency.
Biden was pressured by unions to snub Tesla at the EV summit. This personally offended Elon, who then went to support Trump with all sorts of tactics including buying Twitter to amplify his voice.
Is Citizen's United the only thing that allowed one person to donate $150 million? This is the obvious flaw. We would need a RICO type framework to identify the basket of vectors that one person/organization can use to funnel money to a candidate. This is a bipartisan issue but I don't know how we can surface the narrative so more people can talk about it.
I think you are confusing Citizens United v FEC (2010) with Buckley v. Valeo (1976). (CU is largely “corporations are people applies in the application of Buckley”.)
Though, also, neither decision impacts limitations on donations to candidates, both address limitations on expenditures (in Buckley’s case by non-candidate persons independent of campaigns, by candidates from personal funds, and by candidates in aggregate; CU mostly deals with the first of those where the legal person is a corporation and not a natural person.)
I agree that allowing elections to be influenced by spending money was a mistake. Campaign spending is way out of control and it reduces our leaders and politicians into desperately begging for donations.
Citizens United has no impact on what an individual can do with his money. It’s purely about corporate spending by entities like IBM, the Sierra Club, or the New York Times Company.
The democrats also tried to pass legislation in 2021 that excludes Tesla from an EV credit due to it being not built by unions, even though Tesla has by far the largest share of electric vehicles and is the most productive and innovative company in this sector.
I would be surprised if Ford does anything drastic with their supply chain. Probably just wait this out. POTUS is going to be stripped of this ridiculous tariff "power" one way or another.
* Bogus emergency is up for review
* Congress discussing stripping power
* Constitutionality in question
* Public going to to bury them in the midterms if this keeps up
I've been thinking that reason must prevail for nigh on a decade and while there have been moments where it seems to, overall I can't say that I'm particularly optimistic at the moment. I have been told that "degrowth" (for the purpose of slowing climate change) is the most unpopular policy imaginable, but it seems like we are taking a stab at it for different reasons. Perhaps that unpopularity will have some effect; it does seem (both anecdotally for me and in some data that I've seen) that swing voters are already regretting their decision.
So how does this encourage a shift to domestic manufacturing? It's basically a reward for those who have already done what you want rather than incentivizing those who's behavior you'd like to change. It's a carrot for sure, but the carrot is out of reach since now you're putting financial stress on those you're hoping to bear the cost of moving onshore by giving an advantage to their competitors.
It's similar to giving special status to Apple by not penalizing their China-based manufacturing, then hoping that OTHER not-too-big-to-fail companies will be able to do what Apple couldn't (manufacture at a competitively cheap price onshore) while additionally facing this unfair competition.
It seems it'd be more effective to have incremental (based on % domestic manufacture & labor) rewards/penalties for those making changes rather than carve-outs for those too-big-to-fail and making competition even harder for those you are trying to incentivize.
Also, never mind manufacturing - how about addressing IT offhsoring, which is something far easier for US companies to change if incentivized/penalized appropriately. Is it really domestic clothing sweatshops that we want to encourage, not domestic high-tech industry with well paying jobs, paying high taxes, and helping retain onshore talent in an area of importance to national security?
That was yesterday's narrative, keep up! Now tariffs were a plan to pressure our allies to renegotiate their trade deals with us in our favor, and that worked great! (According to the white house (Also forget that not a single deal was made)).
Oops! Scratch that, now that China won't back down on their retaliatory tariffs, they were always a tool to make China "fall back in line" or something. Yeah, destroying our own economy ought to teach them a lesson.
This shit is so transparent, I'm amazed as to how 30% of the country can still endorse this clown and his circus. My mental image of the average republican voter is now that of a toddler trying to fit a square into a circle hole while drooling on themselves.
I am kind of surprised that the collection of people at the tops of all the big companies commanding so many billions, don't have some sort of behind the scenes levers they can pull to make him squeal like a pig, elected office or no.
I can only assume they're all actually largely ok with it.
I would not have imagined that they just never thought about things like that in general and now have actually no idea what to do now that this kind of situation has happened. I have no previously considered reactions or plans for most things and life just smacks me in the face like I've been walking with my eyes closed, but I'm a hapless midwit.
>now have actually no idea what to do now that this kind of situation has happened
They know what they would do, if this were under any other president: make phone calls, write editorials in major newspapers, start donating to future political rivals.
But this is Trump. He's surrounded by equally corrupt lackeys, and immediately fires anyone showing a shred of morality. The entire federal government does his bidding. He sues news media until they settle with him for millions, signs executive orders banning specific law firms from working with the federal government until they offer him millions in legal services, cuts off money from states that dare defy his will, and demands universities let the federal government investigate all staff in Middle East studies. Any business leader who stands up to him will be crushed. The best way to keep making money is to get on his good side, like Elon.
This is literally tyranny. Thank goodness there are plenty of judges willing to stand against the obviously illegal acts.
Most people feel like hapless midwits, and we know that most of us actually are. Yet we have this tendency to assume, for some weird reason, that people in important positions have their shit together more than we do. Only in emergencies and times of crisis do we see that no one has their shit together. When we see that, we want to blame it on conspiracy or some sort of 5-dimensional chess being played, because it goes against the safe notion that someone, somewhere, is steering the boat (even if we don't like where they're taking us). But the safer bet is that no one is steering, and no one actually can steer, and that it's incompetence all the way to to the top.
I don't mean to imply that I believe they are excellent people who will take care of us all, nor that there is any illuminati cabal like that other ludicrous comment.
I only mean to imply they are people who know how to get what they want, and are willing to do more or less anything.
There is a new story that Amazon is going to overtly display the tarrif on every price. That is like 1% of the kind of thing I'm thinking of.
You've missed the tail end of that story - Trump made an angry call to Bezos, presumably full of threats, after which Bezos announced that they weren't going to do that and totally never planned to.
He didn't pull it but that's a seperate issue and actually exactly my point, why not? Or for that matter, maybe he did pull it, maybe he caused the story to even appear in the first place, or maybe they will do it regardless what he just said. Maybe he has something less obvious he's working on, or maybe he's somehow fine with the tarriff.
Yes, accidental, hapless stumbling onto major windfall on multiple occasions clearly is an indication of nothing more than pure, unadulterated, McDuck level of luck and not, I repeat, not indication of anything but simple return of a favor.
> I am kind of surprised that the collection of people at the tops of all the big companies commanding so many billions, don't have some sort of behind the scenes levers they can pull to make him squeal like a pig, elected office or no.
The "US is an oligarchy, the corporations are in control" was always a false narrative.
Huh? If anything, it now should be clearer than ever that it has been for a long time. The only difference is that the oligarch that happens to be benefiting from it is in the public spotlight, associated with and part of the current administration, and at the same time main guy for several publicly owned companies.
If the other oligarchs seem to be doing nothing, it is not because they have no power to wield.
Good grief. There are times when I read some posts and it is like reading youtube comments under madtv skit 'apple i-rack' asking what it means... how do you not know what it means?
What part of oligarch is hard to translate into sufficient amount of evidence that does not require me to prove that 1000 million dollars might result in an ability to wield influence that a a simple individual like meself would consider mildly outsized? At this point it is like gravity. You don't have to believe it. It is just is.
You're so wedded to your overly simplistic and conspiratorial worldview that everything is a secret plan by "the elites", that now you've had to invent a new conspiracy about how they all had a secret plan to lose themselves billions of dollars.
Sometimes a stupid guy gets elected by low-information voters, and enacts stupid policies that crash the economy. There isn't any secret illuminati meeting where they can tell him to stop.
There seems to be a (largely American) misconception that people in positions of power are there because they earned such a position through being capable and competent.
Most people in power lack critical thinking skills, having earned their position primarily due to the circumstances of their birth and the people they know.
It is incredibly rare for someone who is competent enough to weild such levers of power to be granted access to them.
It appears that the American Automobile Labeling Act measures domestic content on a value basis (that is, the amount the manufacturer pays the supplier for it):
The tariffs cover parts as well as whole vehicles. The thing announced here is that they'll have a rebate program if the car is 85% manufactured in the US, and the rebate will be in effect for 2 years. So you still pay the tariff on parts, but you get some or all the money back if you meet that threshold. The idea being that it gives the company two years to move their parts manufacturing or sources. But the threshold is so high that only Tesla gets to enjoy the rebate, not any other company.
But even Tesla only maxes out at 75 - how are they eligible? Also wouldn’t surprise me if this carve out is special purpose to give Tesla and only Tesla this rebate.
> Right but presumably 85% of the parts aren't imported?
85% of parts != 85% of cost
The rules for calculating what percentage of a vehicle is domestic or foreign made are obscure. It's not clear what rules they're going to be using for this tariff exemption yet.
It could be possible that the 15% foreign content of a car could make up 30% of the cost of goods sold, for example. If the parts come from China they could have a 125% or higher tariff applied, pushing the share of BOM cost even higher.
The article is really bad. Even the original source is just an off-hand comment from Lutnick, not the final regulation.
The idea is that automakers will get special exemptions from the tariffs for what they do import.
Handing out tariff exemptions was one of the red flags people were raising during this process. It becomes a lever the administration can pull to grant favor to specific companies. Everyone else suffers.
And, all used goods bought at secondhand stores are tariff-exempt as well. And so is FB marketplace, Craigslist, and others.
My protest is meager, but effective for us - we just will buy used and use 'Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle' where we can. EnEnough of us doing that will slow and hamper the economy (read: rich peoples' money).
I think the meaning was not "You can import used cars without tariffs", but "If you buy used cars already in the country, you don't pay the new tariff, so just don't buy new cars."
If you're importing it it doesn't matter it's condition other than it's worth less so the tariff would be less. What they mean is if you buy goods that are already here there's no tariff, but they will also go up in price too as the new item goes up.
The parent comment was a confusing statement. They were saying that buying a used car or goods from a second-hand store does not go through the tariff process because the produce is already here.
There was a loophole in the past where you could take delivery of a car in a foreign country, drive it for a while, and then go through the process of importing it as if you were moving back to the United States. I don't know if the new tariffs honor that loophole or not.
Isn't that actually what they've been doing in Cuba since the revolution? I'm sure those old cars should have been retired by now and replaced with cheap Chinese imports, but for a few decades, they were refurbishing American-made cars continuously.
If new cars become much more expensive, used cars will become much more expensive. This isn't even a theoretical idea. The exact thing happend in 2020-2021 when you couldn't buy a new car.
This is what many don't understand about tariffs in general: you put tariffs on foreign goods and anything exempt will simply raise their prices to match.
Are you saying if I import a used car, I don't have to pay tariffs? Factory delivery programs would become a lot more popular.
Or are you just saying that if I buy a car that's already in the US and has already had any import tariffs due at time of import paid, I won't have to pay them again? That's a lot less interesting.
Yes. Volvo has had a program for decades where they fly you to Sweden where drive a vehicle around long enough for it to be "used", buy it then they ship it over to the US to avoid US new car import tariffs.
Seems to me that it's probably worth the incremental cost to buy one that's already here and registered in your state; there's a lot of unknowns in customs and vehicle licensing, and I'd rather not deal with it. But I spent my weird car slot on a 1981 Vanagon instead of a kei truck/van.
What I personally find more interesting is that they consciously did not choose a more conciliatory number ( like 80 ), which would capture more cars and have the benefit of being able to deflect attacks. Almost like it was intended to cause uproar.
Otoh, I listened to conservative ratio the other day and the general tone was "good, he is making them mad and he doesn't care."
Apparently you get a credit of 15% of the car price to use against imported parts so presumably something like a Mustang with 20% imported parts would pay tariffs on a quarter of the value of the parts.
There appears to be someone in my local city that is using their cybertruck as a billboard. They drive around during rush hours and every week or so they switch the wrap to a different company. I wonder if it's being widely done elsewhere.
I haven't seen anything like that where I live. I see the same businesses over and over, and often see them parked at or near the business in question.
My wife says the wrapped ones of any color look better than stock. She thinks the stock ones look like toasters, and that Tesla should have painted two red/orange stripes along the tonneau cover to complete the stock look.
I mean, they do. Wraps also ruin the stainless steel finish, so you are committed to wrapping for the rest of the car's life. Wraps aren't meant to last more than 5 years or so.
This was predictable and frequently predicted when musk got involved. Of course there would be new rules that would be written specifically so hurt his competitors and not him. That's why tesla stock rose sharply when trump won.
But Ford can probably get the USA content for gas-powered Mustangs up from 80% to 85%. The electric version is made in Mexico, but once Ford's Blue Oval City plant in Tennessee comes up in 2027, that will move to the US.
Tesla builds Model 3s and Ys in their Shanghai factory using almost entirely domestically sourced components, and even exports a fair number from there. But perhaps the trade war will reduce demand.
Unfortunately companies have a bigger voice than people. Until that isn't the case there will always be doubts about the 'neutrality' of a particular law/policy/etc. The bigger thing here is that this particular administration rarely, if ever, does things in a 'neutral' manor. It is always 100% transactional with Trump. There is absolutely no doubt that the 85% is designed to give Tesla, and more specifically Musk, a huge win. It is foolish or outright disingenuous to even pretend that this isn't the case.
I was thinking about buying an EV in the next several years, but I'll never buy a Tesla, until I see Elon Musk in prison. And I don't think I'm alone.
Major effect of Trump's trade war is yet to be felt. I think Americans' perception of Trump will get much worse soon, and Tesla's brand image will follow suit. A tariff exemption is cute but I don't think that's enough to save Tesla.
> Then the exact same discussion will come up with a different number
No?
The point is there is no reason for the number 85 other than benefiting Tesla. The metacognitive question should be how one should estimate that variable in a way which balances disruption with incentivising the desired outcome.
Your answer to the question “Is the 5% between 80 and 85% worth a double-digit tariff?” here is “Yes. A double digit tariff on a car that is 80% made in America makes sense.”
and then there is the other side of the 14.9% coin, which will be fought over by Canada(read ontario), Mexico, China, and the rest
when it comes parts and cars made in Canada and Mexico, that is going to be tricky, as both countrys have historicaly bought a lot of US cars and other stuff, but will now be in no possition to also play along with the anti china stance in the US and tarrifs, and all the other issues at the borders.......geoplotical has more meaning now.
And yet DOGE (Elon Musk) is actively pursuing cutting resources at the Loan Programs Office which helps American companies like Tesla attempt to innovate.
Nonsense. Does anyone seriously think the military is going to defy SCOTUS at the end of the four years? Does anyone seriously think Jan 6th, bad as it was, was going to end the republic[0]? Such hyperbole is dangerous at best when people take it seriously.
[0] Especially because what it tells our enemies. Iran, take out just this one specific building, and America is done for!
> Such hyperbole is dangerous at best when people take it seriously.
The same is true about the sitting president and some of his staunch supporters repeatedly "joking" about, and alluding to a third term[1][2][3][4] - including merch[5].
What did the military do on Jan 6? They stood back and did nothing.
That wasn’t an actual coup because some Capitol Police had the balls to do their job and Vice President Pence is a patriot.
I’m sure the next time around anyone “untrustworthy” in the police force will have been removed, and the national Guard in surrounding states will have routine training in Alaska.
The mob was literally minutes away from congressional people. They further kept those same congresspeople surrounded and locked up for hours until Trump called them off.
Ashley Babbitt died because she broken through the last barrier between the mob and congress. Had this mob been armed (and there were plans of being armed that were ultimately scuttled), it could have been a blood bath. There was only a handful of LEO between the mob and congress.
This wasn't a "mosquito bite".
Now, what would have changed if the mob had their way with congress or the supreme court? Who knows. For the SC, it'd have given trump the ability to put in more yes men to rubber stamp his election loss narrative.
For congress, the plan was literally to have congressional collaborators challenge the validity of the election (which still happened) to take power. If many democrat reps lost their life, then yes, congress could have rubberstamped a trump victory. Very few republicans stood up to trump or his plans.
"What could they have done", the answer is kill a bunch of congress people in the opposing party to empower their party.
I very much doubt even had they managed to kill some congressman that it would have helped them in any way. In fact im more likely to believe that had they actually gotten to a congressman we would have seen far more meaningful response and push back against them, Republicans, and Trump.
I don't think the point was to kill a bunch of Democrats. I think the point was to either kill or pressure Vice President Pence, so that he (or his successor) would accept the "alternate" (false) electors as legitimate. I think the shouts of "hang Mike Pence" were aimed that direction.
You're exaggerating to try to make a point, but I'm not convinced.
You're saying that it could have been much worse if the mob had gotten into Congress, followed by if the mob had offed Democrats, followed by if the Republicans then rubber stamped it and didn't have their own objections, followed by if the Supreme Court was also killed or if the Supreme Court chose to take no action and if the states involved like California also decided to go along with everything and if the military leadership also had no objections assuming of course that no republicans or Trump himself died at any point through the process.
That's so implausible to chain it all together, I might as well make a similar case for a group of guys with bombs in their cars.
I will say this, because I worry that some may have missed the memo. If you keep repeating constitutional crisis like it is some sort of magic word, each time you say it without some level of substantiation, it will continue to lose its power. It is mildly annoying to me that, some, democrat party adherents do not seem to understand this. I can give few more examples if necessary, but my subtle point is:
If everything is a constitutional crisis, nothing is.
Correct, which we have documents, conversations and even zipties which show that was the plan.
> if the mob had offed Democrats
Again, multiple conversations and recordings of mob members specifically saying this was the plan.
> if the Republicans then rubber stamped it and didn't have their own objections
There are literally court documents which ended up getting Eastman disbarred because, you guessed it, this was literally the plan. We even know who the collaborators were because we have recordings between them and Trump/Rudy about executing the plan.
> if the Supreme Court was also killed or if the Supreme Court chose to take no action
The supreme court is literally right around the corner from congress. But I admit, they weren't a part of any documented plan that I'm aware of. However, as we are seeing with the current Trump term that doesn't really matter now does it. If the executive and congress doesn't care about the SC then they are toothless.
> if the states involved like California also decided to go along with everything
It was an attempted coup. Who knows what Cali would do, they'd certainly object. But now you have a crisis where congress has declared trump the winner and the military has to choose whether or not they follow Cali or the Executive which they are bound to. How that would have played out is anyone's guess.
> That's so implausible to chain it all together, I might as well make a similar case for a group of guys with bombs in their cars.
You are now extrapolating past what I did. What would have happened in the aftermath of the coup isn't something that anyone could know. There's no way to know if it'd be successful. But that's entirely not the point. The point is the coup was attempted and it was damn near the point of having multiple congress people killed.
My point, which you are trying to get away from, is that this was more than a mosquito bite. This very well could have caused a huge amount of turmoil and that turmoil was planned and documented. And, of course, those that planned this turmoil were all pardoned by Trump.
What you are doing is downplaying how serious J6 was. You want to act like just because it wasn't successful, it wasn't serious. Or that just because it might never have been completely successful, it wasn't serious. That is ridiculous.
No, you’re stuck with trying to overplay how significant J6 was. Even if it was considered by the participants to be a coup, it’s irrelevant because it simply did not have the manpower, or any chance at taking out all of the branches of government to a significant degree. Even if all of Congress and SCOTUS was killed, there is a line of succession (created in case of nuclear war) which states would then follow.
The claim that J6 was a serious threat, by stringing one improbable event into what could have happened if a dozen additional improbable events also occurred, is the Democratic Party’s favorite conspiracy theory. Both sides have them.
I don't think anyone would deny that. But the question is really, would it have mattered even if some got killed? Congress sure as fuck isn't standing in the way of executive overreach right now. I don't see why we should be so overly worried about politicians getting killed, most of them are less than useless, especially considering how many citizens are killed per day already thanks to garbage political legislation that makes it legal.
Since you're convinced it couldn't be a coup, would you mind helping see your point of view? How many people would be needed and/or what outcomes would we observe for you to believe it was a coup?
It's not one event that destroys a republic, but a series of little ones that slowly erode the norms, until all of sudden there's someone willing to cross the Rubicon. You've got 44 months of erosion to go.
Oh I thought the military takes orders from the Command-in-Chief. Silly me. Maybe Alito and Thomas can tell the Joint Chiefs to provide protection to the Proud Boys to storm the Capitol in 2028.
They do, but Congress and the Supreme Court selected by Congress together define who this figure is. There is no sign that the military was prepared to defy either.
> Does anyone seriously think the military is going to defy SCOTUS at the end of the four years?
You know, probably not? It's not particularly comforting to know that democracy will probably survive in 2028.
> Does anyone seriously think Jan 6th, bad as it was, was going to end the republic[0]?
Did Yoon Suk Yeol seriously think that temporarily obstructing a National Assembly vote would make it impossible for them to end his coup? Yes, and so did the National Assembly - they worked hard to get into the legislative chamber, and once they got in they refused to leave until they were sure the coup was defeated. If the January 6 mob had made it onto the floor while it was in session, and "convinced" even a subset of Congress that they need to say Trump won the election, he would not have agreed to leave office on January 20th.
The irony here is that Democrats, for more than a decade, did anything and everything, by bankrolling taxpayers money into incentives and subsidies, to protect Tesla, help it compete and even flourish and scale, in the auto market where margins are razor thin and true innovations are hard to come by, even less so from smaller players. Nobody, except Republicans, batted an eye because climate change, science and environment comes first supposedly.
Climate change, science, and the environment are indeed valid reasons (as was plainly stated at the time) for subsidies to electric cars (amongst hundreds of billions of dollars of other environmental subsidies Democrats passed). The CEO spending hundreds of millions of dollars to curry favor with the ruling party, which is almost certainly the reason this specific number was chosen, is not.
Tesla's success/threat pushed traditional automakers to actually build EVs at scale. It convinced consumers that EVs are viable and kickstarted charging infrastructure. The left accomplished its goal even if it probably would have preferred Elon not go all Kanye on us.
I don't know if I can actually believe that. EVs were already coming. Yeah the rollout was a bit slower than the demand for them in established companies, but not by much. People had already been driving hybrid vehicles for quite awhile, and some electric cars already existed even if most were lower mileage/smaller battery models.
To me it is like claiming without iphones we wouldn't have gotten smartphones or touchscreens until a decade later. Except PDAs and touch screens already existed, apple just got a few years jump start on a big brand model before many other companies did the math on how cheap mobile computing and touch screens were becoming.
Yeah we allowed a deranged billionaire to transform auto industry, even if it cost us democracy and threats of fascism and authoritarianism for the foreseeable future.
A lot of people, including me, realized even as early as circa 2018 that he was a nutcase. Imo the point of post hoc ergo should've been when he said zero Covid case by April (2020).
The fact that Trump was democratically elected changes nothing, Hitler (and Putin) were too.
Threats of fascism and authoritarianism aren’t baseless fear mongering, it’s all already happening.
While fascism might be too strong of a word the amount of hate administration creating against particular group of people (immigrants, especially undocumented) is huge; just take a look at this wall https://www.borderreport.com/regions/washington-d-c/white-ho...
How you can consider following not to be signs of authoritarianism?:
– sending people into foreign prison without (criminal) due process
– attacking law firms which used to represent opposing parties to yours
– attacking universities representing views different from yours
– attacking media through FTC to exhibit control over their reporting
– attacking platform for donations for opposing party
– routinely abusing power by issuing lawless executive orders every day
– literally dismantling federal government and international position of the country
– turning the state into police state, with ICE being modern day gestapo
If you read constitution you know we’re land of the people and laws. President isn’t a king. President is a person elected for faithful execution of the laws, and it’s hard to underestimate how deep in the woods we’re towards authoritarianism. Calling it baseless fear mongering is nothing but being truly delusional.
Thanks, I am indeed talking as a neutral observer. It's been almost 7 years since I realized how much of a nutcase he is. Some democrats only realized it 8 months ago.
I'm not sure even Tesla unambiguously qualifies here. Looking at the NHTSA part 583 list for 2025 [0], none of the Tesla vehicles have a "US" content higher than 75% (which I think includes Canada?). The highest is the base Kia EV6 at 80%. This seems to be coming from the Kogod manufacturing index. That's a more qualitative ranking that attempts to deal with things like corporate structures rather than just origin like the NHTSA numbers.
As someone who works in the industry, "where" something comes from is an inherently fuzzy concept. Different parts of the government use radically different definitions. For example, under NAFTA "domestic" parts are usually things manufactured anywhere in North America. This was done to onshore automotive manufacturing that wasn't realistically going to come back to the US, but political leaders didn't want to stay in Asia. One result of these tariffs may actually be that more auto manufacturing moves to Asia as the advantage of North American manufacturing is lost.
[0] https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2025-04/MY2025-A...
Even if there is proof the government will not enforce tariffs on Tesla and if the courts compel them they will just change it to exclude Tesla.
Interesting, does the proportion by weight, size, value or count? eg a EV battery is 25% of the weight, 50% of the cost and 0.1% of the number of parts.
If the origins are so fuzzy, I guess other manufacturers would very soon adjust their part lists/part origins to avoid the tariff?
Fuzzy in the sense of "you need a bunch of experts and lawyers to sit down to determine what the correct answer for the government is in any specific situation". The work is exceedingly tedious and expensive.
I was involved in similar efforts to remove Chinese parts from the supply chain during the previous Trump administration. It was a nightmare that involved dozens of people reviewing tens of thousands of parts across hundreds of components with multiple revisions. I was involved for two years and that wasn't even the entire thing. Most changes required multiple layers of analysis/engineering review, change proposals (which often had to pass change review boards), vendor negotiations, manufacturer negotiations, reams of documentation about changes to refit procedures for previously produced HW, testing, validation, etc.
Removing Mexico and Canada from supply chains would be even worse. Probably nigh-impossible for some OEMs.
> Probably nigh-impossible for some OEMs.
Impossible meaning the parts aren't yet manufactured in the US, or that they can't be for some reason?
There's no doubt that they could be. Just not as cheaply.
Even in normal times regulators don't take kindly to origination fraud even, so it's highly unlikely anyone will risk it with an admin like the current one. Look at what happened to Amazon earlier today and SentinelOne last week.
Most manufacturers will eat the cost and raise prices to a certain extent. Base models of any product tend to be manufactured in such as way that they have much looser margins.
what happened to SentinelOne last week? :o
I meant 2 weeks ago - Chris Krebs "resigned" and S1 had to do a lot of damage control around their Fed business (which is significant as a cybersecurity vendor).
Won't be surprised if Stamos quietly "resigns" in a couple months as well.
What regulators lol
Most recently, Ford for violating the "Chicken Tax" - https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/ford-p...
And that was under the Biden admin, which was much less pushy. The Trump admin is much more vindictive, especially with a policy that appears to be backed personally by DJT.
Here are some interesting legal articles discussing this very thing in the Trump admin
https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2025/02/us-administration-t...
https://natlawreview.com/article/what-every-multinational-co...
This is political corruption, the rule was created for Musk because he is a political ally of the president. Why wasn't it 70% or 90%? Because the number was chosen to give Tesla an unfair advantage. So while your technical points are valid, they miss the big picture.
The corruption issue is the point of the article. It’s the obvious thing here.
Person above is pointing out that even Tesla isn’t 85% USA
That's pure speculation, but quite possible. Corruption is nothing new in Washington.
The real question is whether people support bringing auto manufacturing back to America. As always, people who like the policy/candidate/official will overlook the corruption, while people who dislike the policy/candidate/official complain about it. The people who demanded evidence about Biden will accept speculation about Trump, just as the people who speculated about Biden will demand evidence about Trump.
With that in mind, I'm curious, what's everyone's stance on American manufacturing? Do you agree with Steve Jobs that "Those jobs aren't coming back"?
The amount of corruption from this administration is off the charts. Elon wants his money back he spent and then some to elect Trump.
I have zero faith in "free market" ideologues, because what we actually get when they gain power is just favoritism for "free market" ideologues.
You can extend the "free market ideologues" to include more groups such as those who were very concerned about free speech for exactly four years from 2021-2024. Same people were concerned about politicization of justice department, but only when certain Presidents are in office. Same goes for "respect for constitution". "Family values" was abandoned quite a while ago.
Wilhoit’s Law has never been truer.
I have come to believe that many people's political attitudes can be boiled down to a single uniting element: an overwhelming fear that other people might do to them the kinds of things that they would absolutely do to other people if given half a chance.
This captures a large part of their psyche well. They harp on about the dangers of a "low trust society" because they project their lack of trust onto the world, assuming the immigrants/gays/whoever are as cutthroat and dangerous as they are.
Freedom of religion as well, and the age and mental acuity of the president. And handling of secret information. And being involved in foreign conflicts.
As a 20th century political theorist once said, "the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy." If you hear someone talking high-minded rhetoric and idealism but they won't make a friend or an enemy over it, they don't believe it.
Can't forget being "for the rule of law".
Back the blue, unless of course it's the Capitol Police.
Most of these examples are good ones, but this one actually isn’t. I don’t know what part of the country you’re from, but in the south violence against the government is treated as distinct from violence against fellow citizens. I don’t want to debate the substance of the view, I’m just pointing out that it’s not actually contradictory like you’re implying. I grew up in virginia when it was a red state, my first reaction would’ve been relief that it was still possible. But it also would’ve been my first reaction 25 years ago when I was a Gore supporter in a Bush county. Jefferson’s tree of liberty and all that.
I suspect this divergence comes from people who have internalized the 1960s civil rights movement view, and whose chief concern is the government protecting minorities from the majority. Meanwhile, the more traditional Anglo-american view is chiefly concerned with protecting the majority from the government.
Or, in my city, the cops who blew the whistle on other cops for electrocuting people's testicles as a means of extracting forced confessions. The "back the blue" crowd absolutely hates those guys.
Funny thing about the fictional "Wilhoit’s Law". It's nothing but an Internet snipe from a blog post by a music composer.
https://slate.com/business/2022/06/wilhoits-law-conservative...
It's hard to label Trump a free market ideologue. He's more Mr tarrif man.
If you want free markets look more to Lee Kuan Yew and Singapore (#1 on the "Index of Economic Freedom").
One of the virtues of proper free markets is the markets largely figure which companies win in a relatively non corrupt way, rather than politicians leaning on the scales.
The Singaporean government's hand in it's own economy is larger than a lot of self-professed communist states - Temasek Holdings, Mediacorp, DBS Bank, Singapore Airlines etc etc.
Trump is in no way a free market ideologue and has made that very clear. Or are you talking about Elon?
The wider Trump administration, and Musk in particular for his DOGE work which has included firing regulatory enforcers.
The wider Trump administration is extremely anti-free-market. They're very explicit about it. The Republican party is nothing like it used to be.
Trump has literally been prattling about his love of tariffs for decades and was explicit about his plans to heavily leverage tariffs during his campaign..
I think you might just want an excuse to believe what you already believe
I just think a lot of democrats really haven't paid attention to how Trump has morphed the Republican party and the realignment that has been going on. They still think of a Republican as George w. Bush / John McCain / Mitt Romney even though they have all been effectively excommunicated from the party. I think part of it was hope was Trump was a momentary blip but that's obviously no longer the case.
Everyday people have been clamoring for some sort of change for a long time. 00s at least. It reached a boiling point in the late 2010s and you had a nearly parallel rise of Trump and Bernie. The difference is that the republicans couldn't keep a lid on Trump and his backers like the democrats did to Bernie. So Trump got in and then politicians "built in his image" started getting elected all over the place. So now the republicans have a party that more accurately reflects what people want. And they'll use that to mop the floor with the democrats until the democrats turn their own party over to reflect what voters want.
Change.
Nation-wide Chesterton's Fence happening right now, with people learning a hard lesson soon enough. Let's just hope it won't be too late to repair their broken systems.
It's never too late to fix. The problem is the time frame.
The changes made thus far present at least a decade of rebuilding to fix, and we're only 100 days in.
For life to be worse for the people they don't like. They just didn't expect it to be worse for them too
A rational theory of spite suggests that even if they know that it will be worse for them too, if the level of their spite is great enough, they are still better off because the joy of the suffering of others is greater than their own induced suffering.
I don't think most Republicans want the destruction of our country so no I don't think he's an accurate reflection
And yet he dominates the party. How could that be without popular support from the party base?
It’s easy to dominate the party as long as you have 51% of the primary voters, which in 2024 was about 20% of registered Republicans.
Essentially if you have the very strong support of 10-15% of the party voters, you’re untouchable.
Because Fox, and Newsmax work overtime to convince people that Trump wouldn't do the things he said, and he'll actually do the good things people want. And that if anything bad happens, it's the aftershock of previous administrations (of which, Trump's is exempt, of course).
You don't have to be tapped in to see that whatever is said on Fox becomes Republican dogma very quickly. That's why half the country is more concerned that Zelenskyy is, somehow, a dictator, and less concerned that we ushered Russian state media into our white house. It's an embarrassing state we're in.
Trump was never actually a "free market" idealogue. And the GOP officially dropped any mentions of it from their party platform a few years ago.
If anything, they are doing exactly what they promised. They were against globalism and elites and international agreements and governance and they are being true to their words.
If I was forced to say one good thing about the guy, it's that he is quickly and faithfully delivering on his campaign promises, moreso than any other president that ever served in my lifetime. He's blasting right through the Project 2025 checklist and doing exactly what he said he'd do. Those campaign promises are destructive, thoughtless, cruel, and self-serving, but he said he'd do them, was elected, and then subsequently did them. So, I'll give him that.
> on his campaign promises (...) the Project 2025
He never backed that officially though, right? It's just that everyone rational knew what's happening anyway, but otherwise - even the not knowing about it was a lie, not an explicit promise.
Except brokering peace in Ukraine. He also promised an economic boom.
We got an economic "boom" alright......
Doesn’t have to have a 100% hit rate to be “getting things done”.
I don't remember hearing about any peace. I did heard about ending the war, which might mean peace for both sides, or just one.
>> One of Trump’s most audacious promises was that he could end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office — or even before.
“That is a war that’s dying to be settled. I will get it settled before I even become president,”
While I agree with the sentiment that he is not backing down from a lot of his batshit promises, let's not forget that he made a lot of promises. The Russian invasion didn't end on day 1 or day 100 and he decided to only strongarm one side - iirc he said he would threaten Ukraine with withdrawing support and threaten Russia with giving obscene amounts of support to Ukraine.
His predictions about what other people/countries would do were, of course, wrong, but his promises about what he (and his admin) would do or try to do themselves are for the most part being delivered.
It's not for the most part. He's delivering far lower percentage of his promises than most presidents.
He made a shit ton of promises and many were nonsensical and contradictory. But that doesn't change that he hasn't delivered on them. The problem is people see him doing the most ridiculous stuff people thought he would drop and assume that means he kept most of his promises
He lied and said he had no idea about Project 2025 - when people say "he's doing what he said" no - he's lied about everything and double backed a half dozen times.
> He's blasting right through the Project 2025 checklist
You are confusing that with Agenda 47. While Project 2025 was all those things you describe, that Trump endorsed any of it or is implementing any of those destructive things simply isn't true.
He's faithfully implementing Agenda 47, just like the majority of people in this country elected him to do. And all of those people expected the storm before the calm.
Have you read Project 2025? It’s being executed. Here’s a handy tracker someone made: https://www.project2025.observer/
> Those campaign promises are destructive, thoughtless, cruel, and self-serving
You seem to have missed, "highly illegal".
But sure "the trains are running on time"
Like launching a private $500k membership club for elites:
https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/donald-trump-jr-m...
True to their word!
That's the wrong Trump.
Against elites but appoints billionaire cronies. Make it make sense.
When I read "elites" it always makes me wonder what kind of elites are meant. Surely not elites in intelligence or wisdom and knowledge. Does it mean just having tons of money? What does it mean to be an elite university in contrast to being an elite person?
The “libertarians” who are in bed with Trump however…
The behavior I’ve seen from so many libertarians from 2017 onward, especially during the pandemic, January 6th, and Trump’s reelection, has revealed so much to me and has made me rethink my libertarianism. So many libertarians, when pressed, would gladly align themselves with the far-right for their own benefit, whether to accelerate the destruction of the state they hate so much, or whether because, deep down inside, they agree with the far-right on social views, and libertarianism was simply a cover for them to promote abhorrent social views.
I’ve read a lot of Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell back in the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s. I also voted for Ron Paul in the 2008 and 2012 primary and regular elections. I used to consider myself a Rothbardian-style libertarian. While I still view the Austrian School of Economics with high regard, my biggest problem with Rothbardianism is Rothbard’s 1990s turn to the right before his passing around 1995, and its deleterious effect on libertarianism. Rothbard supported “right-wing populism” as a way for the libertarian movement to advance. Rothbard supported Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential run (though Rothbard would fall out with Buchanan over the latter’s support for protectionism), and Rothbard even went as far as to support the notorious David Duke’s gubernatorial campaign in Louisiana. This right-wing populism strategy led to the paleolibertarian movement, which is limited-to-no government fused with a culturally conservative outlook. However, it’s this cultural conservative mindset that has led so many libertarians to be so enamored with Trump. Trump, after all, is a much more bombastic version of Buchanan, who has a similar ideology. It seems protectionism can be overlooked when people view “wokeness,” and not a breakdown of rule of law, is the biggest problem in American society…
Ironically, it was Rothbard himself who complained earlier in his career about right-wingers who “hated the left more than they hated the state,” yet so many libertarians today are willing to embrace the far-right because they view the left as enemy #1. If I had a dollar for every time I saw a post or article sympathetic to Pinochet, I’d probably have enough for a nice MacBook Pro.
I realized over the years that while I’m still very skeptical of government power, I don’t hate the state, and I prefer good government over chaos. I value liberal institutions and feel they should be defended.
Thanks for the thoughtful post with the rich historical references. For what it’s worth, I experienced a drift which is the mirror image of yours, starting left, developing my appreciation for the necessity of economic competition, and then coming to grips with the limitations of government intervention.
Are you me?
Although I'm more Georgist these days.
Perhaps it‘s the “no true Scotsman” fallacy, but I find it hard to consider anyone enamored with Trump to be legitimately libertarian. The guy basically regards himself as a dictator and his edicts are mega-authoritarian.
To me it is logically impossible to reconcile the two positions. You simply can’t be a pro-authoritarian libertarian.
You can’t really espouse libertarian values while being what is coded as “culturally conservative”, because that worldview demands conformity and the mechanisms to enforce same, which are inherently anti-liberty.
A good rule of thumb is that anyone who had any issue whatsoever with other people wearing masks during the pandemic are pretty obviously not pro-individual-liberty and just factional culture brawlers.
There seems to be a lot of definiton drift in the term “libertarian”, and that seems wrong to me. (The same thing happened to my other primary identifying social group, “techno”. I spend a lot of time yelling at clouds now.)
In the US, "libertarian" has come to mean "maximum liberty for me, which means you are on your own".
The rich, like the poor, are free to live under bridges and starve.
One of the biggest challenges with the libertarian movement is that it attracts people who like libertarianism not because of the non-aggression principle, but because it enables them to legally engage in certain activities.
An example would be how Barry Goldwater, a proto-libertarian, was able to win some solidly Democratic Deep South states in 1964, the first to do so since Reconstruction. It wasn’t because those Southerners had a libertarian moment. No, it was because Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although Goldwater supported civil rights and voted for previous civil rights legislation, he felt that the 1964 act was an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of private businesses. However, there were many voters in the South who were swayed to vote for Goldwater not because they were libertarians, but because they supported discrimination, and despite their support for Democrats from Reconstruction through the New Deal, anti-discrimination laws were enough for them to break nearly a century of party loyalty.
During the pandemic, I was dismayed by anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers who used libertarian rhetoric to engage in reckless behavior that harmed not only themselves, but others, especially the immunocompromised. It’s one thing to be saddened and taken aback by the extraordinary powers governments at various levels took during the pandemic. Unfortunately, any type of principled opposition to government overreach during the pandemic was overwhelmed by all sorts of selfish, reckless acts. I was completely dismayed by the behavior I’ve witnessed, disappointed not only with various levels of government, but also with some conservatives and libertarians who managed to make COVID a “culture war” matter.
It turned out many of the libertarians I’ve looked up to were just very articulate right wingers. When push comes to shove, they’d excuse people like Trump, Le Pen, Putin, and the like, justifying them under the guise that we’d be worse off under a standard-issue Democrat or a social democrat like Sanders or AOC. I’m not a Democrat by any means, but the past decade has shown the damage that MAGA-style right-wing populism could do to a country. I’m not a Bernie Sanders supporter, but Bernie or even AOC would be less destructive to society than Trump and his allies.
I am completely saddened by the culture wars and how we are unable to solve structural economic and political problems in America because we are mired in the culture wars. This is tearing our country apart and may make the world worse off as other nations fight to fill in a power void made available by a descending United States.
Same. This era has exposed them as the shameless hypocrites they are.
It was always about power accumulation.
Integrity, honesty, and principles is literally what they mean by the word "woke" when they harass people for being it.
> Integrity, honesty, and principles is literally what they mean by the word "woke"
No it isn't, and saying things like this just adds noise. What they mean by the word "woke" is a worldview that delegitimises the things they aspire to or worked hard for (status based on power based on individual agency), and prioritises other forms of social currency (victimisation by external forces) in a way they find performative.
There is not and has never been any trace of free speech or free market "ideology" from Trump. Perhaps as a talking point but never in any policy or action. Trump is the anti-libertarian, severely authoritarian and moving things toward a centrally planned economy!
I don't know if it's the same people but many of the comments here seem the opposite of the comments on EUs rules where people say they're targeting specific companies and comments say "no, the rules are such than all companies over a certain size are covered".
If the rule is 85% domestic than any company can do it.
I'm not saying the tariffs are good. Only that their point is to get things made domesticly
It's not just the idea in isolation though. I don't think anyone would complain much if the rule was "in N mths the threshold is X". Everyone could do the necessary adjustments and play by the same rules. But if the rule applies immediately, favours the guy who gave you millions, and impacts the competition financially where they need to make me investments to comply with the rules... yeah, that stinks even if it looks like a generic rule.
And absolutely no guarantees those rules stay in place long enough for anyone else to ever benefit.
Ideally that's the long term goal though, right? You want good local production, but not impair the trade forever. The best tariff would be a future one that achieves the shift by threat, then gets cancelled because the goal is complete and there's no point is impacting trade otherwise.
If companies believe today that in 4 years the tariffs will be dropped and that their investment in a manufacturing facility with 25% higher costs than the foreign competition will become effectively worthless, they will be reluctant to invest all that much.
> no guarantees those rules stay in place long enough for anyone else to ever benefit
Not only that, Trump is actively lying about negotiating them down [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/chinas-foreign-ministry-says-x...
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Just a coincidence that the only company that currently fits the criteria is Tesla then.
Everyone else can start rearranging their supply chains and building new factories to comply. Easy peasy right? Be up and running in a few weeks, at most, right?
With the assumption of course that tariffs won't change before new factories even have come online in a less optimal place. I'd be hard pressed to invest huge amounts of money like that when we are on tariff policy change 80-something in 100 days while I also hearing about imminent "trade deals".
I think Honda already has like 75% American parts in the cars they produce in Indiana. It was actually listed on the Acura ILX I bought from them awhile back.
That's great, I'm all for seeing that number increase. That doesn't take away the fact that this number just explicitly targets Tesla and nobody else.
> where people say they're targeting specific companies and comments say "no, the rules are such than all companies over a certain size are covered".
The rules are written with full knowledge of the current market situation and the understanding that companies can't re-engineer their supply chains overnight.
The rule-writers had full knowledge about which companies would and would not immediately benefit from this rule. They wrote it accordingly.
This doesn't compare to the EU rulemaking discussion for that reason. If the EU rules were written so that only a single company was hit by the rule, people would be saying the same thing.
It's different when I like the rules.
Washington state is going in the other direction: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/wa-legisl...
I'm sure the targeted aspect of that one is applauded by the same side that is unhappy about this tariff.
At least in the tariff case, it's an objective numerical target and probably even achievable by other manufacturers. Ford is only 5% away from the target for some of its models.
I would go as far as saying, that almost no one outside the US knows about state specific rules. People watch or read some news, but they are usually not that much into the US inner political theater, that they additionally make an effort to learn what state has what other rules.
I am not even sure how impactful it is, that Washington state does something different. Like ... Are things built or sold there by a large amount? What makes Washington state special? And what are their intentions? And can their lower level rules actually override what is decided at the country level by Trump's gang?
It is bad enough, that people have to deal with hearing about all the crazy stuff the orange clown or his henchmen do on a daily basis. There is a limit to how much people want to deal even more with political stuff from the US, you know?
The key is the “…over a certain size” solely benefiting the richest man in the world, who just so happens to be heavily involved (despite no election) in the very government setting the policy and determining the size.
When you say EU rules, I guess it's the GDPR part on having the user data stay in the EU?
Otherwise I don't see any other rule that would ask the foreign company to move most of it's workforce and production capacity.
>If the rule is 85% domestic than any company can do it.
To be making this claim, you must be an vehicle supply chain expert, so can you tell the rest of us which parts can be domestically sourced in the US and which can't?
Also, why is the Model S is stuck at 80%?
You can tweak the rules infinitely to get the outcome you want. It's suspiciously convenient how the only company that's exempt from those tariffs is owned by the guy that gave Trump $200+ millions during his campaign.
You can't argue in good faith about "well, that's the rule" when the rule was very obviously constructed that way to achieve this specific purpose.
The question is why 85% and not 80%.
Remember when Oklahoma‘s requirements for a new school bible coincidently where only met by the Trump bible?
Why 85% and not 80%? It’s an arbitrary cutoff that happens to benefit Elon.
Ford will quickly get to 85%, but you can’t deny this is yet again a move that is touted as “pro-America” yet somehow mainly benefits Musk (or Trump or someone in their orbit).
Three Tesla models meet the 85% threshold and three do not.
If Tesla was writing these rules, surely they'd have chosen the 80% threshold instead.
I doubt they see the Ford Mustang as being in their same target market, and wouldn't be a reason to increase the standard.
I’d note the ones that meet the threshold are by far the vast majority of Tesla sales and profit. This puts them at a structural advantage. Those three models account for 95% of deliveries in 2024. The rules as stand only impact their highest margin vehicles, which account for 4.8% of their total deliveries.
The fact that Elon Musk is personally involved in the decision making and cabinet level discussions and personally benefits immensely- and exclusively- from this special carve out looks like rank corruption on the surface and at face value. Any other administration in history would be investigated until the cows come home if something comparable had ever happened. Even if it somehow eluded the rule makers that they exempted 95% of one companies sales to the exclusion of all other companies and that companies CEO had curried extensive favor with the administration and this was a mistake, the appearance of gross impropriety and conflicts of interest should cause a rapid reset and roll back. I suspect, however, it will not be rolled back, and that they were entirely aware of what they were doing. This is what kleptocracy looks like.
They search space for criteria is practically limitless. They have and would absolutely fish for precisely the criteria benefiting Musk. This playbook has been applied well by the crony capitalist class in the 3rd world, and is always a moving target. Most players know that and will not chase the moving target, knowing that another set of rules will emerge that will create new hurdles protecting the crony capitalist. A few will, and get burned.
There are two reasons to believe this is applicable here: 1. Trump has a track record of quid pro quos (Adelson being a salient example). Musk is definitely seeking his pound of flesh 2. Lutnick urged people to buy Tesla (shocking and explicit favoritism) The view that this is just incentivizing local production is naive.
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Source, you?
> I'm not saying the tariffs are good. Only that their point is to get things made domesticly
...or to create massive stock market front-running opportunities with plausible deniability.
"But, but, Hanlon's razor!". Sorry, but at this level of responsibility, incompetence equals malice.
We fscking all have to live with the consequences. That includes those of us who could not vote for an alternative.
I wonder how much their lack of union plays into this. The auto factories fled Flint/Detroit due to the UAW basically an attempt to limit the scope of strikes and violence from the UAW. Tesla doesn't have to worry about unions (at least yet), and so they have very centralized factories where an enormous amount of work is done. Probably makes it easier to do everything in the US if you can do it all in one building
In the long run, unions can be blamed for this whole Trump Presidency.
Biden was pressured by unions to snub Tesla at the EV summit. This personally offended Elon, who then went to support Trump with all sorts of tactics including buying Twitter to amplify his voice.
Is Citizen's United the only thing that allowed one person to donate $150 million? This is the obvious flaw. We would need a RICO type framework to identify the basket of vectors that one person/organization can use to funnel money to a candidate. This is a bipartisan issue but I don't know how we can surface the narrative so more people can talk about it.
I think you are confusing Citizens United v FEC (2010) with Buckley v. Valeo (1976). (CU is largely “corporations are people applies in the application of Buckley”.)
Though, also, neither decision impacts limitations on donations to candidates, both address limitations on expenditures (in Buckley’s case by non-candidate persons independent of campaigns, by candidates from personal funds, and by candidates in aggregate; CU mostly deals with the first of those where the legal person is a corporation and not a natural person.)
I agree that allowing elections to be influenced by spending money was a mistake. Campaign spending is way out of control and it reduces our leaders and politicians into desperately begging for donations.
Citizens United has no impact on what an individual can do with his money. It’s purely about corporate spending by entities like IBM, the Sierra Club, or the New York Times Company.
It does because a rich individual can just start a proxy corp and do whatever.
> In the long run, unions can be blamed for this whole Trump Presidency.
Yeah, how dare they do the things that make reactionaries be... reactionary.
The democrats also tried to pass legislation in 2021 that excludes Tesla from an EV credit due to it being not built by unions, even though Tesla has by far the largest share of electric vehicles and is the most productive and innovative company in this sector.
Yeah we wouldn't want the people making the product having representation and getting a larger share of the take on the sale of said product.
From the 2025 Part 583 for this year:
- Tesla model 3 - 70-75% US/Canada content
- Tesla model Y - 70% US/Canada content
- Tesla Cybertruck - 65% US/Canada content
- Tesla model S - 65% US/Canada content
Perhaps it is calculated differently since no one hits 85%.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2025-04/MY2025-A...
Sure it's 85% now, but what about tomorrow? Next week? Next month?
This administration's policy decisions aren't particularly stable.
I would be surprised if Ford does anything drastic with their supply chain. Probably just wait this out. POTUS is going to be stripped of this ridiculous tariff "power" one way or another.
* Bogus emergency is up for review
* Congress discussing stripping power
* Constitutionality in question
* Public going to to bury them in the midterms if this keeps up
I've been thinking that reason must prevail for nigh on a decade and while there have been moments where it seems to, overall I can't say that I'm particularly optimistic at the moment. I have been told that "degrowth" (for the purpose of slowing climate change) is the most unpopular policy imaginable, but it seems like we are taking a stab at it for different reasons. Perhaps that unpopularity will have some effect; it does seem (both anecdotally for me and in some data that I've seen) that swing voters are already regretting their decision.
So how does this encourage a shift to domestic manufacturing? It's basically a reward for those who have already done what you want rather than incentivizing those who's behavior you'd like to change. It's a carrot for sure, but the carrot is out of reach since now you're putting financial stress on those you're hoping to bear the cost of moving onshore by giving an advantage to their competitors.
It's similar to giving special status to Apple by not penalizing their China-based manufacturing, then hoping that OTHER not-too-big-to-fail companies will be able to do what Apple couldn't (manufacture at a competitively cheap price onshore) while additionally facing this unfair competition.
It seems it'd be more effective to have incremental (based on % domestic manufacture & labor) rewards/penalties for those making changes rather than carve-outs for those too-big-to-fail and making competition even harder for those you are trying to incentivize.
Also, never mind manufacturing - how about addressing IT offhsoring, which is something far easier for US companies to change if incentivized/penalized appropriately. Is it really domestic clothing sweatshops that we want to encourage, not domestic high-tech industry with well paying jobs, paying high taxes, and helping retain onshore talent in an area of importance to national security?
> how does this encourage a shift to domestic manufacturing?
It doesn’t. Trump is clearly trying to negotiate these tariffs away. So they don’t incentivise moving production. Just taxing everyone but Musk.
That was yesterday's narrative, keep up! Now tariffs were a plan to pressure our allies to renegotiate their trade deals with us in our favor, and that worked great! (According to the white house (Also forget that not a single deal was made)).
Oops! Scratch that, now that China won't back down on their retaliatory tariffs, they were always a tool to make China "fall back in line" or something. Yeah, destroying our own economy ought to teach them a lesson.
This shit is so transparent, I'm amazed as to how 30% of the country can still endorse this clown and his circus. My mental image of the average republican voter is now that of a toddler trying to fit a square into a circle hole while drooling on themselves.
I am kind of surprised that the collection of people at the tops of all the big companies commanding so many billions, don't have some sort of behind the scenes levers they can pull to make him squeal like a pig, elected office or no.
I can only assume they're all actually largely ok with it.
I would not have imagined that they just never thought about things like that in general and now have actually no idea what to do now that this kind of situation has happened. I have no previously considered reactions or plans for most things and life just smacks me in the face like I've been walking with my eyes closed, but I'm a hapless midwit.
>now have actually no idea what to do now that this kind of situation has happened
They know what they would do, if this were under any other president: make phone calls, write editorials in major newspapers, start donating to future political rivals.
But this is Trump. He's surrounded by equally corrupt lackeys, and immediately fires anyone showing a shred of morality. The entire federal government does his bidding. He sues news media until they settle with him for millions, signs executive orders banning specific law firms from working with the federal government until they offer him millions in legal services, cuts off money from states that dare defy his will, and demands universities let the federal government investigate all staff in Middle East studies. Any business leader who stands up to him will be crushed. The best way to keep making money is to get on his good side, like Elon.
This is literally tyranny. Thank goodness there are plenty of judges willing to stand against the obviously illegal acts.
Most people feel like hapless midwits, and we know that most of us actually are. Yet we have this tendency to assume, for some weird reason, that people in important positions have their shit together more than we do. Only in emergencies and times of crisis do we see that no one has their shit together. When we see that, we want to blame it on conspiracy or some sort of 5-dimensional chess being played, because it goes against the safe notion that someone, somewhere, is steering the boat (even if we don't like where they're taking us). But the safer bet is that no one is steering, and no one actually can steer, and that it's incompetence all the way to to the top.
I don't mean to imply that I believe they are excellent people who will take care of us all, nor that there is any illuminati cabal like that other ludicrous comment.
I only mean to imply they are people who know how to get what they want, and are willing to do more or less anything.
There is a new story that Amazon is going to overtly display the tarrif on every price. That is like 1% of the kind of thing I'm thinking of.
You've missed the tail end of that story - Trump made an angry call to Bezos, presumably full of threats, after which Bezos announced that they weren't going to do that and totally never planned to.
It's still an example of a lever.
He didn't pull it but that's a seperate issue and actually exactly my point, why not? Or for that matter, maybe he did pull it, maybe he caused the story to even appear in the first place, or maybe they will do it regardless what he just said. Maybe he has something less obvious he's working on, or maybe he's somehow fine with the tarriff.
Yes, accidental, hapless stumbling onto major windfall on multiple occasions clearly is an indication of nothing more than pure, unadulterated, McDuck level of luck and not, I repeat, not indication of anything but simple return of a favor.
Why aren't you assuming the opposite -- that these mythical levers don't actually exist?
> I am kind of surprised that the collection of people at the tops of all the big companies commanding so many billions, don't have some sort of behind the scenes levers they can pull to make him squeal like a pig, elected office or no.
The "US is an oligarchy, the corporations are in control" was always a false narrative.
Huh? If anything, it now should be clearer than ever that it has been for a long time. The only difference is that the oligarch that happens to be benefiting from it is in the public spotlight, associated with and part of the current administration, and at the same time main guy for several publicly owned companies.
If the other oligarchs seem to be doing nothing, it is not because they have no power to wield.
Good grief. There are times when I read some posts and it is like reading youtube comments under madtv skit 'apple i-rack' asking what it means... how do you not know what it means?
> If the other oligarchs seem to be doing nothing, it is not because they have no power to wield.
Good grief, this is just an axiomatic belief, then. No evidence will sway you one way or another.
What part of oligarch is hard to translate into sufficient amount of evidence that does not require me to prove that 1000 million dollars might result in an ability to wield influence that a a simple individual like meself would consider mildly outsized? At this point it is like gravity. You don't have to believe it. It is just is.
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You're so wedded to your overly simplistic and conspiratorial worldview that everything is a secret plan by "the elites", that now you've had to invent a new conspiracy about how they all had a secret plan to lose themselves billions of dollars.
Sometimes a stupid guy gets elected by low-information voters, and enacts stupid policies that crash the economy. There isn't any secret illuminati meeting where they can tell him to stop.
I think you shouldn't try to use the word stupid given this example of your acuity.
Dude, Trump and Elon are literally the Elite. Take your blinders off.
There seems to be a (largely American) misconception that people in positions of power are there because they earned such a position through being capable and competent.
Most people in power lack critical thinking skills, having earned their position primarily due to the circumstances of their birth and the people they know.
It is incredibly rare for someone who is competent enough to weild such levers of power to be granted access to them.
Lutnick is a man of his word:
https://fortune.com/2025/03/20/howard-lutnick-pumps-tesla-st...
Tesla is now above that price from March again. Orangehorseshoe loves Tesla!
Let me make sure I understand this: the president is addressing the fentanyl state of emergency by tariffing imported vehicle parts from wherever?
How is the unit for domestic component content defined? Is a screw a component in the same way a windshield is? Is it by weight? By cost?
It appears that the American Automobile Labeling Act measures domestic content on a value basis (that is, the amount the manufacturer pays the supplier for it):
https://www.nhtsa.gov/part-583-american-automobile-labeling-...
Yes.
Can a manufacturer game this by separating domestic components into sub-assemblies?
I dont understand what this article means. Tesla's aren't imported so why would there be tariffs on them. The source link leads nowhere.
The tariffs cover parts as well as whole vehicles. The thing announced here is that they'll have a rebate program if the car is 85% manufactured in the US, and the rebate will be in effect for 2 years. So you still pay the tariff on parts, but you get some or all the money back if you meet that threshold. The idea being that it gives the company two years to move their parts manufacturing or sources. But the threshold is so high that only Tesla gets to enjoy the rebate, not any other company.
But even Tesla only maxes out at 75 - how are they eligible? Also wouldn’t surprise me if this carve out is special purpose to give Tesla and only Tesla this rebate.
It seems to be about a tariff rebate on imported parts.
Right but presumably 85% of the parts aren't imported? So while it is a benefit, it is a slightly bizarre one?
Would be nice to see a technical definition for how the % imported is worked out.
> Right but presumably 85% of the parts aren't imported?
85% of parts != 85% of cost
The rules for calculating what percentage of a vehicle is domestic or foreign made are obscure. It's not clear what rules they're going to be using for this tariff exemption yet.
It could be possible that the 15% foreign content of a car could make up 30% of the cost of goods sold, for example. If the parts come from China they could have a 125% or higher tariff applied, pushing the share of BOM cost even higher.
The article is really bad. Even the original source is just an off-hand comment from Lutnick, not the final regulation.
The idea is that automakers will get special exemptions from the tariffs for what they do import.
Handing out tariff exemptions was one of the red flags people were raising during this process. It becomes a lever the administration can pull to grant favor to specific companies. Everyone else suffers.
Fact sheet: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/addr...
"Final" regulation: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/addr...
"US automakers will receive credit up to 15% of the value of vehicles to offset cost of imported parts" https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-sec-lutnick-cars-85-percent-...
The vast majority of their battery cells are made in China and Japan so im not sure how they even qualify. Oh yeah, corruption.
Used cars are ALSO exempt.
And, all used goods bought at secondhand stores are tariff-exempt as well. And so is FB marketplace, Craigslist, and others.
My protest is meager, but effective for us - we just will buy used and use 'Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle' where we can. EnEnough of us doing that will slow and hamper the economy (read: rich peoples' money).
That suggests an ecosystem may appear around making new goods "used" enough to meet some legal definition.
I think the meaning was not "You can import used cars without tariffs", but "If you buy used cars already in the country, you don't pay the new tariff, so just don't buy new cars."
If you're importing it it doesn't matter it's condition other than it's worth less so the tariff would be less. What they mean is if you buy goods that are already here there's no tariff, but they will also go up in price too as the new item goes up.
The parent comment was a confusing statement. They were saying that buying a used car or goods from a second-hand store does not go through the tariff process because the produce is already here.
There was a loophole in the past where you could take delivery of a car in a foreign country, drive it for a while, and then go through the process of importing it as if you were moving back to the United States. I don't know if the new tariffs honor that loophole or not.
Isn't that actually what they've been doing in Cuba since the revolution? I'm sure those old cars should have been retired by now and replaced with cheap Chinese imports, but for a few decades, they were refurbishing American-made cars continuously.
Used cars respond to market forces too.
If new cars become much more expensive, used cars will become much more expensive. This isn't even a theoretical idea. The exact thing happend in 2020-2021 when you couldn't buy a new car.
This is what many don't understand about tariffs in general: you put tariffs on foreign goods and anything exempt will simply raise their prices to match.
Are you saying if I import a used car, I don't have to pay tariffs? Factory delivery programs would become a lot more popular.
Or are you just saying that if I buy a car that's already in the US and has already had any import tariffs due at time of import paid, I won't have to pay them again? That's a lot less interesting.
Yes. Volvo has had a program for decades where they fly you to Sweden where drive a vehicle around long enough for it to be "used", buy it then they ship it over to the US to avoid US new car import tariffs.
Very surprised to learn that this is real https://www.volvocars.com/us/l/osd-tourist/
Pretty cool. Lots more info on reddit threads.
Audi, BMW and Mercedes did this as well until a few years ago.
https://www.capitalone.com/cars/learn/finding-the-right-car/...
looks like you have to pay VAT?
Yes - my question exactly.
I was strongly considering importing a 25-year-old kei truck from Japan before the tariffs were announced.
Seems to me that it's probably worth the incremental cost to buy one that's already here and registered in your state; there's a lot of unknowns in customs and vehicle licensing, and I'd rather not deal with it. But I spent my weird car slot on a 1981 Vanagon instead of a kei truck/van.
Based on what I’ve seen from states that are attempting to implement new rules, Kei trucks and cars aren’t grandfathered in, sadly.
Even buying one locally that is already registered doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be able to continue registering it.
It’s pretty coincidental. I can’t help but wonder if the number was picked for this outcome
What I personally find more interesting is that they consciously did not choose a more conciliatory number ( like 80 ), which would capture more cars and have the benefit of being able to deflect attacks. Almost like it was intended to cause uproar.
Otoh, I listened to conservative ratio the other day and the general tone was "good, he is making them mad and he doesn't care."
that's what gets them excited.. "owning the libs"
Apparently you get a credit of 15% of the car price to use against imported parts so presumably something like a Mustang with 20% imported parts would pay tariffs on a quarter of the value of the parts.
I wonder if Slate (https://www.slate.auto/) will be exempt as well since they tout "Made in USA"
It’s funny cybertruck doesn’t make the cut, unfortunately nobody buys those so it’s irrelevant.
I see them quite frequently where I live, usually covered in a vinyl wrap advertising some local business or other.
In St Louis, I see them everywhere, too. Not as advertising but just driving around town.
There's a mall that closed and, for a while, there were hundreds parked in that lot waiting to be sold (and they were).
There appears to be someone in my local city that is using their cybertruck as a billboard. They drive around during rush hours and every week or so they switch the wrap to a different company. I wonder if it's being widely done elsewhere.
I haven't seen anything like that where I live. I see the same businesses over and over, and often see them parked at or near the business in question.
I saw a plain white one that could represent a drywall business.
My wife says the wrapped ones of any color look better than stock. She thinks the stock ones look like toasters, and that Tesla should have painted two red/orange stripes along the tonneau cover to complete the stock look.
I mean, they do. Wraps also ruin the stainless steel finish, so you are committed to wrapping for the rest of the car's life. Wraps aren't meant to last more than 5 years or so.
Curious about Rivian…
Japan’s trade barriers on foreign autos have been legendary.
https://www.americanautomakers.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/...
This was predictable and frequently predicted when musk got involved. Of course there would be new rules that would be written specifically so hurt his competitors and not him. That's why tesla stock rose sharply when trump won.
The CEO of Ford is very critical of Trump.
But Ford can probably get the USA content for gas-powered Mustangs up from 80% to 85%. The electric version is made in Mexico, but once Ford's Blue Oval City plant in Tennessee comes up in 2027, that will move to the US.
Of course, who knows where Trump will be by then.
How long do you think that 5% will take them?
Won't safe his Chinese sales though
Tesla builds Model 3s and Ys in their Shanghai factory using almost entirely domestically sourced components, and even exports a fair number from there. But perhaps the trade war will reduce demand.
BYD is eating their lunch.
Most positive take:
Someone asked what is the car model with the most American parts right now? We will make everyone meet that benchmark or better.
Now they need a special insurance subsidy to offset the extra costs for losses.
Unfortunately companies have a bigger voice than people. Until that isn't the case there will always be doubts about the 'neutrality' of a particular law/policy/etc. The bigger thing here is that this particular administration rarely, if ever, does things in a 'neutral' manor. It is always 100% transactional with Trump. There is absolutely no doubt that the 85% is designed to give Tesla, and more specifically Musk, a huge win. It is foolish or outright disingenuous to even pretend that this isn't the case.
I was thinking about buying an EV in the next several years, but I'll never buy a Tesla, until I see Elon Musk in prison. And I don't think I'm alone.
Major effect of Trump's trade war is yet to be felt. I think Americans' perception of Trump will get much worse soon, and Tesla's brand image will follow suit. A tariff exemption is cute but I don't think that's enough to save Tesla.
The plan all along?
This is crony capitalism.
It is but it always has been. I would also appreciate if the big 3 American car companies had 85% American content.
> would also appreciate if the big 3 American car companies had 85% American content
Versus 80%? Those five percentage points are worth a double-digit tariff.
5 percentage points should be easy enough for them to change then by moving a few supply chains.
So make it 90% and don’t give Tesla the special treatment.
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> Then the exact same discussion will come up with a different number
No?
The point is there is no reason for the number 85 other than benefiting Tesla. The metacognitive question should be how one should estimate that variable in a way which balances disruption with incentivising the desired outcome.
Explain how the number 90 would be different than the number 85?
Provide source for any claims you make.
> Explain how the number 90 would be different than the number 85?
Qualitatively? Tesla wouldn’t qualify.
Practically? It isn’t. The same way there isn’t a difference between 85 and 80 other than keeping out Ford.
There is no methodology presented for how 85 was estimated. There probably wasn’t one, given the track record with the tariff rates.
You got it!
Your answer to the question “Is the 5% between 80 and 85% worth a double-digit tariff?” here is “Yes. A double digit tariff on a car that is 80% made in America makes sense.”
Right?
and then there is the other side of the 14.9% coin, which will be fought over by Canada(read ontario), Mexico, China, and the rest when it comes parts and cars made in Canada and Mexico, that is going to be tricky, as both countrys have historicaly bought a lot of US cars and other stuff, but will now be in no possition to also play along with the anti china stance in the US and tarrifs, and all the other issues at the borders.......geoplotical has more meaning now.
It blatantly is, and the responses to you pointing that out are insane.
Deflection, whataboutism, sealioning with a side of demanding sources for what is essentially the use of a greater than sign.
What should we call it when the other side does things in the opposite direction? https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/wa-legisl...
Punitive legislation? Lawfare? Crony capitalism but for the other companies?
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There is no way this is a coincidence.
Right so let’s give credit to the fine people who work at Tesla, not the wealthy child who swooped in at the end and claimed all the work as his.
In other words: literally anyone except Elon Musk.
The end?
Musk became CEO of Tesla when their only car was an electric converted Lotus...
Yeah, I think we should try to separate his business acumen from his nut-case personality. He can be a successful businessman AND a fucking prick.
Who made his initial fortune as an illegal immigrant.
Inherited wealth means nothing eh?
And yet DOGE (Elon Musk) is actively pursuing cutting resources at the Loan Programs Office which helps American companies like Tesla attempt to innovate.
What a surprise.
If it walks like a coup and quacks like a coup ...
Nonsense. Does anyone seriously think the military is going to defy SCOTUS at the end of the four years? Does anyone seriously think Jan 6th, bad as it was, was going to end the republic[0]? Such hyperbole is dangerous at best when people take it seriously.
[0] Especially because what it tells our enemies. Iran, take out just this one specific building, and America is done for!
> Such hyperbole is dangerous at best when people take it seriously.
The same is true about the sitting president and some of his staunch supporters repeatedly "joking" about, and alluding to a third term[1][2][3][4] - including merch[5].
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-third-te...
[2] https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5104133-rep-andy-ogles-pr...
[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-jokes-ru...
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9-ft4BvHTE
[5] https://citizen-times.com/story/news/local/2025/04/29/trump-...
It's bait. They want you sounding hysterical and spending your time talking about things not on their agenda.
What did the military do on Jan 6? They stood back and did nothing.
That wasn’t an actual coup because some Capitol Police had the balls to do their job and Vice President Pence is a patriot.
I’m sure the next time around anyone “untrustworthy” in the police force will have been removed, and the national Guard in surrounding states will have routine training in Alaska.
> They stood back and did nothing
There's no reason to have a full allergic reaction to a mosquito bite.
The mob was literally minutes away from congressional people. They further kept those same congresspeople surrounded and locked up for hours until Trump called them off.
Ashley Babbitt died because she broken through the last barrier between the mob and congress. Had this mob been armed (and there were plans of being armed that were ultimately scuttled), it could have been a blood bath. There was only a handful of LEO between the mob and congress.
This wasn't a "mosquito bite".
Now, what would have changed if the mob had their way with congress or the supreme court? Who knows. For the SC, it'd have given trump the ability to put in more yes men to rubber stamp his election loss narrative.
For congress, the plan was literally to have congressional collaborators challenge the validity of the election (which still happened) to take power. If many democrat reps lost their life, then yes, congress could have rubberstamped a trump victory. Very few republicans stood up to trump or his plans.
"What could they have done", the answer is kill a bunch of congress people in the opposing party to empower their party.
This was a big deal.
I very much doubt even had they managed to kill some congressman that it would have helped them in any way. In fact im more likely to believe that had they actually gotten to a congressman we would have seen far more meaningful response and push back against them, Republicans, and Trump.
I don't think the point was to kill a bunch of Democrats. I think the point was to either kill or pressure Vice President Pence, so that he (or his successor) would accept the "alternate" (false) electors as legitimate. I think the shouts of "hang Mike Pence" were aimed that direction.
You're exaggerating to try to make a point, but I'm not convinced.
You're saying that it could have been much worse if the mob had gotten into Congress, followed by if the mob had offed Democrats, followed by if the Republicans then rubber stamped it and didn't have their own objections, followed by if the Supreme Court was also killed or if the Supreme Court chose to take no action and if the states involved like California also decided to go along with everything and if the military leadership also had no objections assuming of course that no republicans or Trump himself died at any point through the process.
That's so implausible to chain it all together, I might as well make a similar case for a group of guys with bombs in their cars.
All the mob had to do was steal the ballots, and we would have had a constitutional crisis.
And during a constitutional crisis, the people with their hands already on the levers of power have a huge advantage,
I will say this, because I worry that some may have missed the memo. If you keep repeating constitutional crisis like it is some sort of magic word, each time you say it without some level of substantiation, it will continue to lose its power. It is mildly annoying to me that, some, democrat party adherents do not seem to understand this. I can give few more examples if necessary, but my subtle point is:
If everything is a constitutional crisis, nothing is.
Something to think about.
> You're exaggerating to try to make a point
What am I exaggerating?
> if the mob had gotten into Congress,
Correct, which we have documents, conversations and even zipties which show that was the plan.
> if the mob had offed Democrats
Again, multiple conversations and recordings of mob members specifically saying this was the plan.
> if the Republicans then rubber stamped it and didn't have their own objections
There are literally court documents which ended up getting Eastman disbarred because, you guessed it, this was literally the plan. We even know who the collaborators were because we have recordings between them and Trump/Rudy about executing the plan.
> if the Supreme Court was also killed or if the Supreme Court chose to take no action
The supreme court is literally right around the corner from congress. But I admit, they weren't a part of any documented plan that I'm aware of. However, as we are seeing with the current Trump term that doesn't really matter now does it. If the executive and congress doesn't care about the SC then they are toothless.
> if the states involved like California also decided to go along with everything
It was an attempted coup. Who knows what Cali would do, they'd certainly object. But now you have a crisis where congress has declared trump the winner and the military has to choose whether or not they follow Cali or the Executive which they are bound to. How that would have played out is anyone's guess.
> That's so implausible to chain it all together, I might as well make a similar case for a group of guys with bombs in their cars.
You are now extrapolating past what I did. What would have happened in the aftermath of the coup isn't something that anyone could know. There's no way to know if it'd be successful. But that's entirely not the point. The point is the coup was attempted and it was damn near the point of having multiple congress people killed.
My point, which you are trying to get away from, is that this was more than a mosquito bite. This very well could have caused a huge amount of turmoil and that turmoil was planned and documented. And, of course, those that planned this turmoil were all pardoned by Trump.
What you are doing is downplaying how serious J6 was. You want to act like just because it wasn't successful, it wasn't serious. Or that just because it might never have been completely successful, it wasn't serious. That is ridiculous.
One nit: The military is not bound to follow the executive. They are bound to follow the Constitution.
I still retain enough naive optimism to hope that, had it come to that, that distinction would have mattered.
J6 made me wonder how many Michael Flynns would it take to get some part of the military to take part in a coup.
No, you’re stuck with trying to overplay how significant J6 was. Even if it was considered by the participants to be a coup, it’s irrelevant because it simply did not have the manpower, or any chance at taking out all of the branches of government to a significant degree. Even if all of Congress and SCOTUS was killed, there is a line of succession (created in case of nuclear war) which states would then follow.
The claim that J6 was a serious threat, by stringing one improbable event into what could have happened if a dozen additional improbable events also occurred, is the Democratic Party’s favorite conspiracy theory. Both sides have them.
Killing multiple members of Congress wasn't improbable outcome of J6. Do you agree or disagree.
Let's set aside everything else. Do you at least conceed that politicians lives were on the line.
I don't think anyone would deny that. But the question is really, would it have mattered even if some got killed? Congress sure as fuck isn't standing in the way of executive overreach right now. I don't see why we should be so overly worried about politicians getting killed, most of them are less than useless, especially considering how many citizens are killed per day already thanks to garbage political legislation that makes it legal.
No, the evidence does not support that concession.
Since you're convinced it couldn't be a coup, would you mind helping see your point of view? How many people would be needed and/or what outcomes would we observe for you to believe it was a coup?
It's not one event that destroys a republic, but a series of little ones that slowly erode the norms, until all of sudden there's someone willing to cross the Rubicon. You've got 44 months of erosion to go.
Oh I thought the military takes orders from the Command-in-Chief. Silly me. Maybe Alito and Thomas can tell the Joint Chiefs to provide protection to the Proud Boys to storm the Capitol in 2028.
> takes orders from the Command-in-Chief
They do, but Congress and the Supreme Court selected by Congress together define who this figure is. There is no sign that the military was prepared to defy either.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JN1oBfg0fwI
The danger is here. Due process is being denied, inch by inch.
> Does anyone seriously think the military is going to defy SCOTUS at the end of the four years?
You know, probably not? It's not particularly comforting to know that democracy will probably survive in 2028.
> Does anyone seriously think Jan 6th, bad as it was, was going to end the republic[0]?
Did Yoon Suk Yeol seriously think that temporarily obstructing a National Assembly vote would make it impossible for them to end his coup? Yes, and so did the National Assembly - they worked hard to get into the legislative chamber, and once they got in they refused to leave until they were sure the coup was defeated. If the January 6 mob had made it onto the floor while it was in session, and "convinced" even a subset of Congress that they need to say Trump won the election, he would not have agreed to leave office on January 20th.
The irony here is that Democrats, for more than a decade, did anything and everything, by bankrolling taxpayers money into incentives and subsidies, to protect Tesla, help it compete and even flourish and scale, in the auto market where margins are razor thin and true innovations are hard to come by, even less so from smaller players. Nobody, except Republicans, batted an eye because climate change, science and environment comes first supposedly.
Climate change, science, and the environment are indeed valid reasons (as was plainly stated at the time) for subsidies to electric cars (amongst hundreds of billions of dollars of other environmental subsidies Democrats passed). The CEO spending hundreds of millions of dollars to curry favor with the ruling party, which is almost certainly the reason this specific number was chosen, is not.
Tesla's success/threat pushed traditional automakers to actually build EVs at scale. It convinced consumers that EVs are viable and kickstarted charging infrastructure. The left accomplished its goal even if it probably would have preferred Elon not go all Kanye on us.
I don't know if I can actually believe that. EVs were already coming. Yeah the rollout was a bit slower than the demand for them in established companies, but not by much. People had already been driving hybrid vehicles for quite awhile, and some electric cars already existed even if most were lower mileage/smaller battery models.
To me it is like claiming without iphones we wouldn't have gotten smartphones or touchscreens until a decade later. Except PDAs and touch screens already existed, apple just got a few years jump start on a big brand model before many other companies did the math on how cheap mobile computing and touch screens were becoming.
> The left accomplished its goal
Yeah we allowed a deranged billionaire to transform auto industry, even if it cost us democracy and threats of fascism and authoritarianism for the foreseeable future.
Completely delusional.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc
A lot of people, including me, realized even as early as circa 2018 that he was a nutcase. Imo the point of post hoc ergo should've been when he said zero Covid case by April (2020).
cost you democracy?
Trump was democratically elected. "threats of fascism and authoritarianism" is just baseless fear mongering.
The fact that Trump was democratically elected changes nothing, Hitler (and Putin) were too.
Threats of fascism and authoritarianism aren’t baseless fear mongering, it’s all already happening. While fascism might be too strong of a word the amount of hate administration creating against particular group of people (immigrants, especially undocumented) is huge; just take a look at this wall https://www.borderreport.com/regions/washington-d-c/white-ho...
How you can consider following not to be signs of authoritarianism?:
– sending people into foreign prison without (criminal) due process
– attacking law firms which used to represent opposing parties to yours
– attacking universities representing views different from yours
– attacking media through FTC to exhibit control over their reporting
– attacking platform for donations for opposing party
– routinely abusing power by issuing lawless executive orders every day
– literally dismantling federal government and international position of the country
– turning the state into police state, with ICE being modern day gestapo
If you read constitution you know we’re land of the people and laws. President isn’t a king. President is a person elected for faithful execution of the laws, and it’s hard to underestimate how deep in the woods we’re towards authoritarianism. Calling it baseless fear mongering is nothing but being truly delusional.
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He is right you know. He managed to fleece dems and is now fleecing the other side. Neutral observer can only stay in awe of his talents.
Thanks, I am indeed talking as a neutral observer. It's been almost 7 years since I realized how much of a nutcase he is. Some democrats only realized it 8 months ago.