Thank you Dan for your always insightful posts. I’ll offer that there is an additional factor that builds and leverages the power of coincidence you so eloquently frame out: The power of promise. I will posit that we have a political class more than ready to leverage the power of coincidence to their advantage - but when this is combined with the power of promise, then the electorate is more than ready to attribute absolute brilliance…or absolute failure to the “leaders” in power.
I close by sharing how I’ve described to others how the Power of Promise in recent political discourse has been framed:
Politicians promise fundamentally only two things - the promise to change things they fundamentally can’t change , and the promise to prevent change that can’t be prevented. Combine that with the power of coincidence … and you have the recipe for living in interesting times.
Thanks again Dan for your insightful reflections. Keep them coming.
With this analysis, you put your finger on the source of my deeply ambivalent view of our deeply distressing president and the complicated circumstances surrounding him. On one hand, I want my country (the USA) to succeed. On the other hand, the only way I foresee ridding ourselves of the terrible scourge of Trump is catastrophic failure and widespread human suffering, with no possibility whatsoever of the president’s diehard supporters blaming it on anyone other than the huckster in chief himself. Talk about a Hobbesian choice.
As the philosopher Woody Allen observed, "one path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."
I’d like to debunk the concept of dilemma. There is always another choice, or combination, or series of choices. Dilemma is simply a failure of imagination.
I wouldn’t call it coincidence, exactly (definition: a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection) because there is a cause. It sounds more like ignorance (a lack of knowledge) with a twist of coincidence. So maybe a new phrase: a remarkable concurrence of ignorance.
Except that Hippo Don is singular in his incompetence, unlike any - any! - of the examples you've mentioned.
There is no hiding stagflation and/or hyper inflation once Hippo Don has placed a sycophant at the head of the FED.
There simply isn't.
Also, there is not only incompetence in play, unlike the likes of Erdogan - Hippo Don never backtracks. Ever.
He'll try to fight chaos with incompetence.
We're dealing with a different beast in Hippo Don. He's a genuine, verifiable low IQ imbecile.
Allow me to explain why I'm utterly convinced of this.
At some point during Trump’s long drumbeat on immigration, he started spouting that: “Other countries are emptying their insane asylums into our country!”
I admit, I wondered why, specifically, he was talking about insane asylums, until it hit me - Trump heard the word ‘asylum seeker’, and he only knew the word ‘asylum’ in the context of ‘insane asylum’.
From there on, his distorted mind simply filled in the blanks, following simple albeit ludicrous logic.
If countries were emptying their insane asylums into our country, they must surely also be emptying their prisons into our country. And so, most if not all of the people crossing our Southern border must be crazy or criminal. And so, if the rest of the world is emptying their insane asylums and prisons into our country, crime must be going up in our country while going down in the rest of the world!
This fantastically absurd fabrication is the result of Trump conflating… seeking 'asylum' with insane 'asylum'.
Injecting bleach?
Trump is mentally incapable of storing basic information, both conceptual and connotational, which is why his vocabulary has always been below that of a fourth-grader. Trump cannot utter a sentence without using simple words like ‘big’, ‘great’, ‘good’, ‘very’ or ‘bad.’
This is the level of Hippo Don's thinking. People still think that Hippo Don can change his mind on the basis of anything resembling logical thought. That won't happen.
The danger is exactly - as opposed to all the examples you gave - that there isn't any deeper thought proces. Hippo Don is not simply 'unpredictable'. The unpredictably is the result of the total absence of any understanding and thinking.
And like I said, once the economic shit hits the fan, he's is the last man on Earth who can fix it. And there is no hiding that...
Not so sure. He is not intelligent academically. But he is a masterful manipulator who will decouple the North American economy from Asia, Europe and Africa to support the tri polar autocracies led by Putin, Xi Jinping and Trump. He will "let" Russia and China divide up Africa. Then we will have the day of shock and awe when China invades Taiwan, USA takes Greenland and Putin takes over the Ukraine with more powerful weapons. Can Canada survive a trillion dollar Defense budget and ICE - his para military. now funded at way beyond our own military?
I'm not saying you're wrong about dictators trying to carve up the world.
But Americans are not Turks, who blithely suffer 50% inflation, nor Chinese who suffer incredible social control , nor Russians who bow their head at half a million dead soldiers in Ukraine.
Swathes of independent voters were willing to throw away a 250 year old Democracy because of a few percentage points of inflation.
10% inflation? 20% inflation, which is a cautious projection? Gas prices beyond 5 bucks a gallon?
Aren’t you the guy who said that Trumps tariffs would crater our economy? I’m still waiting. Aren’t you the guy who said his plans to secure the border were unworkable and would be ineffective? Remember how trumps foreign policy would, according to you, result in WW3?
You’re thinking appears to be more muddled than the guy who currently has control of the presidency, the House, the Senate, Foreign policy, immigration, the economy, foreign trade, alt media and the Supreme Court. Tell me again how stupid he is.
On your first question: Yes, if he had implemented the policy he declared in April, it would have sunk global trade. He didn't. Instead, he punted and delayed, keeping the world immersed in uncertainty. Also, you know it takes time for the full effects of policies to unfold, yes?
On your second question: No, I didn't say anything about that as far as I can remember.
On the third question: I said he was taking us back to the era prior to the international order of post-1945, an order that produces two world wars. Do you know how long it took that order to produce those dire effects? In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, people like me warned the international order could produce a global war. That went on for ... decades. And guess what? All that time, people like you were scoffing and saying that warning was nonsense because, hey, where's that global war, huh?! Now here you are saying that because the world hasn't been incinerated a couple of months into the Trump administration, the critics are silly. Does that make the slightest sense to you?
On your last point: History holds plenty of examples of ignorant, incompetent, unfit people (who typically have other talents, to be fair, as does Trump) who managed to capitalize on destabilization or institutional breakdown or other infirmities and bring themselves to power. Judging entirely on the basis of an outcome is such a classic mistake, it even has its own label in decision theory -- "outcome bias." So that's not the rebuttal you think it is.
What's really scary is how many American elections are determined by the price of gasolune which Presidents have almost no control over. Most electorate are just along for the.ride which is why I always get the government someon else deserves - and he's not bright. I think he's wrapped in a straightjacket behind two locked doors until election time when he gets a free pass for the day. PeePee was just edged out by probably the most qualified man to ever run for the office leading a party that delivered MAID, legal pot, dental care, pharma care, a 32 billiin dollar pipeline to tidewater for the long-suffering Alberta. Had Trudeau not generously stepped aside - nothing you'll ever see of the peeman - we'd be all sticky with MMAGA and singing a quite different tune. Rule still applies: No One Ever Lost Money Underestimating The American Public. Double-double for Canada.
The Democrats (my former party, I’m now an independent) lost in 2024 and will continue to lose in the future because of one reason. They have lost the support of the American working class.
The historic Democratic icons FDR, and JFK would laugh at what passes for policy in their beloved party. Although they were upper class they understood that victory for their party depended on appealing to working class voters. Current party leaders distain the “deplorable” and “racist” members of the working class.
Working class Americans hate the following three policies foisted on them by Democrats
Working class people have had their wages depressed by illegal immigrants who will work for next to nothing just to be here. Their rents rise because we don’t have enough housing for our own citizens let alone millions of interlopers. The Democrats opened our borders to all with no vetting and now complain when the worst among those who entered illegally are sent home. The age of mass migration is over. Thank god and yes, Trump.
Democrats believe that a man can become a woman (he can’t) and should be allowed to play women’s sports and enter women’s private spaces including, unbelievably, those where they are naked and vulnerable, and that children, many of whom would grow up to be gay, should be mutilated in pursuit of the impossible. The vast majority of Americans and especially working class men want to protect women and children.
Democrats continue to discriminate on the basis of race and sex today because in the past there was discrimination on the basis of race and sex. That’s unconstitutional and the working class knows it.
Democrats believe that working class Americans are too stupid to understand what they are doing. They aren’t.
Dan, your post reminded me of Fluke, by Brian Klaas. We want to believe simple cause and effect stories, even though we actually have so little control and so much is just a result of many random coincidences. As a result, someone like Trump gets the benefit of the false narratives we create.
One question is how can you debate the injustice of a regime when the result is an improvement in the economy. In 1979, my husband tried to explain to his German uncle - once a young soldier in WWII, why Hitler was evil. "But for Germany," his uncle replied "He made us Great! We had work. We had food. Hitler was good for our country." It would take years of educating his uncle about the atrocities under Nazi rule for him to admit that Hitler was bad. But I believe that his uncle always believed that the economy improved because of Hitler.
The Nazis on achieving power through a democratic election quickly moved to destroy democracy. The media was controlled, as were universities. Political opponents were bullied or imprisoned. An enemy, in this case Jews, were blamed for a variety of economic faults and were portrayed as a group that could never be “German”. The Nazis gave a sense of national purpose to their friends and targeted those seen as enemies. Unfortunately many Germans saw the alternative as Communism, an international conspiracy worse than Hitler’s brand of fascism. In a democracy opponents are fought not destroyed, a distinction Trump fails to appreciate.
Had the economy gone south in 1936 FDR still would have won handily. I looked at the election results in 1938, when the economy did go south and Democrats lost 72 seats in the House and 8 seats in the Senate. First of all, Democrats won the total popular vote in that election.
To estimate an electoral vote outcome, I totaled up the electoral votes won by each party in the Senate races. For the rest I looked at the House elections. In most cases the results were lopsided in terms of seats won and I assigned electoral votes to one or the other party on that basis. In a few cases the seats were pretty evenly split. For these I calculated the average popular vote share for the districts won bay each party and assigned the state to the party with the higher average.
The result was 338 for the Dems and 193 for the Republicans. Conclusion, FDR would have won handily.
As for Republicans in 2028, they will lose if Trump is unpopular, by Rule 1. In fact, Trump would have lost in 2020 even if the pandemic had not happened, also by Rule 1. In fact, Trump won in 2024 by Rule 1 though in 2016 he won by Rule 3. Avoiding disasters like Bush II and Trump is why it is so important to have the dispensation.
I love the general line of your argument. And I must chase up Larry Bartels. But your big 'if' offers comfort. I just don't see AI massively improving productivity without massive unemployment. Much more likely to be another way of screwing Trump supporters. So your piece hasn't made me any more pessimistic regarded Trump's future prospects. The opposite in fact. So thanks for the piece.
Happy that you’re happy. But… it was just an illustration of something outside his control that can redound to his benefit. There are lots more. Look at 2017 to the beginning of 2020 — nothing dramatic but a solid economy got better for reasons that had nothing to do with him. And it was a big reason why many people voted for him in 2024.
Trump is so tightly aligned with a belief system that's going to be shown up in just 5 years or so, though - soon enough for memory to persist. In 5 years, renewable power generation and electric transportation are going to be much more clearly the future direction. Trump will be associated with "old" even more than Biden is by the time he leaves.
And if the dementia becomes much more clear, there's no way that won't stick to him, too; there's only so much can be done with "sanewashing".
Trust me, AI is not magical. I really don’t see how it could be so transformational in such a short time (the next 2-3 years) that it creates a booming economy that’s enough to overcome the self-inflicted headwinds that will be created by Trump’s incompetence.
Don't worry. The American economy is unlikely to improve under Trump. Farm workers are afraid to harvest crops, other nations are boycotting U.S. produce, tourists refuse to visit, airports are closed for safety, tariffs have made import prices skyrocket, half of China - which produced many of those imports - is underwater, and people are discovering how many Chinese products are made of "tofu-dreg" (low-quality fake material that soon falls apart). The whole world is riled up at the USA and no longer trusts any promises made by its government, let alone the value of the dollar as international currency. "Soft power" of international aid was abruptly discontinued, allowing measles and AIDS to begin spreading again. Canada is increasing its military budget to nip that "51st state" notion in the bud.
MAGA-heads may not notice this, but other nations do. The global economy was once a rising tide that lifted all boats, largely thanks to technology. But today's technology eliminates more jobs than it creates, and American universities are being defunded. All nations will be adversely affected to some extent, and mad about it. The global system could not have gone on forever in any case, simply for environmental reasons, but it was the USA that brought the crisis to a head so abruptly. Therefore, it will be systematically excluded from any cooperative solutions developed by other national alliances. It didn't have to be this way, but a Reality TV star formerly known only as a failed real estate developer was trotted out as a cult figure and surrounded by incompetent lackeys. One might expect the billionaires backing him to take more pride in managing their own spheres of influence, but apparently not. The sad thing is that he is also systematically deleting the history of how all this came to pass. Sic transit!
Dan I like the general thesis but then why did Trump get back after 4 years of very good economic conditions under Biden? There is more at play than just economic feel good.
Voters lost confidence in Biden because he froze during a debate. After he stepped down, there was not enough time for Kamala Harris to mobilize her campaign, and as a woman of colour, she began with two strikes against her.
Thank you Dan for your always insightful posts. I’ll offer that there is an additional factor that builds and leverages the power of coincidence you so eloquently frame out: The power of promise. I will posit that we have a political class more than ready to leverage the power of coincidence to their advantage - but when this is combined with the power of promise, then the electorate is more than ready to attribute absolute brilliance…or absolute failure to the “leaders” in power.
I close by sharing how I’ve described to others how the Power of Promise in recent political discourse has been framed:
Politicians promise fundamentally only two things - the promise to change things they fundamentally can’t change , and the promise to prevent change that can’t be prevented. Combine that with the power of coincidence … and you have the recipe for living in interesting times.
Thanks again Dan for your insightful reflections. Keep them coming.
Elbows up
Dan
With this analysis, you put your finger on the source of my deeply ambivalent view of our deeply distressing president and the complicated circumstances surrounding him. On one hand, I want my country (the USA) to succeed. On the other hand, the only way I foresee ridding ourselves of the terrible scourge of Trump is catastrophic failure and widespread human suffering, with no possibility whatsoever of the president’s diehard supporters blaming it on anyone other than the huckster in chief himself. Talk about a Hobbesian choice.
As the philosopher Woody Allen observed, "one path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."
I’d like to debunk the concept of dilemma. There is always another choice, or combination, or series of choices. Dilemma is simply a failure of imagination.
lol! 👌
I wouldn’t call it coincidence, exactly (definition: a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection) because there is a cause. It sounds more like ignorance (a lack of knowledge) with a twist of coincidence. So maybe a new phrase: a remarkable concurrence of ignorance.
Yes, I had the same thought. And, wondered about ‘synchronicity’ instead. I agree with your new phrase.
It's Miller's "Lattice of coincidence" speech from Repo Man...
I go along with this line of thinking a long way.
Except that Hippo Don is singular in his incompetence, unlike any - any! - of the examples you've mentioned.
There is no hiding stagflation and/or hyper inflation once Hippo Don has placed a sycophant at the head of the FED.
There simply isn't.
Also, there is not only incompetence in play, unlike the likes of Erdogan - Hippo Don never backtracks. Ever.
He'll try to fight chaos with incompetence.
We're dealing with a different beast in Hippo Don. He's a genuine, verifiable low IQ imbecile.
Allow me to explain why I'm utterly convinced of this.
At some point during Trump’s long drumbeat on immigration, he started spouting that: “Other countries are emptying their insane asylums into our country!”
I admit, I wondered why, specifically, he was talking about insane asylums, until it hit me - Trump heard the word ‘asylum seeker’, and he only knew the word ‘asylum’ in the context of ‘insane asylum’.
From there on, his distorted mind simply filled in the blanks, following simple albeit ludicrous logic.
If countries were emptying their insane asylums into our country, they must surely also be emptying their prisons into our country. And so, most if not all of the people crossing our Southern border must be crazy or criminal. And so, if the rest of the world is emptying their insane asylums and prisons into our country, crime must be going up in our country while going down in the rest of the world!
This fantastically absurd fabrication is the result of Trump conflating… seeking 'asylum' with insane 'asylum'.
Injecting bleach?
Trump is mentally incapable of storing basic information, both conceptual and connotational, which is why his vocabulary has always been below that of a fourth-grader. Trump cannot utter a sentence without using simple words like ‘big’, ‘great’, ‘good’, ‘very’ or ‘bad.’
This is the level of Hippo Don's thinking. People still think that Hippo Don can change his mind on the basis of anything resembling logical thought. That won't happen.
The danger is exactly - as opposed to all the examples you gave - that there isn't any deeper thought proces. Hippo Don is not simply 'unpredictable'. The unpredictably is the result of the total absence of any understanding and thinking.
And like I said, once the economic shit hits the fan, he's is the last man on Earth who can fix it. And there is no hiding that...
Not so sure. He is not intelligent academically. But he is a masterful manipulator who will decouple the North American economy from Asia, Europe and Africa to support the tri polar autocracies led by Putin, Xi Jinping and Trump. He will "let" Russia and China divide up Africa. Then we will have the day of shock and awe when China invades Taiwan, USA takes Greenland and Putin takes over the Ukraine with more powerful weapons. Can Canada survive a trillion dollar Defense budget and ICE - his para military. now funded at way beyond our own military?
I'm not saying you're wrong about dictators trying to carve up the world.
But Americans are not Turks, who blithely suffer 50% inflation, nor Chinese who suffer incredible social control , nor Russians who bow their head at half a million dead soldiers in Ukraine.
Swathes of independent voters were willing to throw away a 250 year old Democracy because of a few percentage points of inflation.
10% inflation? 20% inflation, which is a cautious projection? Gas prices beyond 5 bucks a gallon?
They will tear Hippo Don's head off. Literally...
Aren’t you the guy who said that Trumps tariffs would crater our economy? I’m still waiting. Aren’t you the guy who said his plans to secure the border were unworkable and would be ineffective? Remember how trumps foreign policy would, according to you, result in WW3?
You’re thinking appears to be more muddled than the guy who currently has control of the presidency, the House, the Senate, Foreign policy, immigration, the economy, foreign trade, alt media and the Supreme Court. Tell me again how stupid he is.
On your first question: Yes, if he had implemented the policy he declared in April, it would have sunk global trade. He didn't. Instead, he punted and delayed, keeping the world immersed in uncertainty. Also, you know it takes time for the full effects of policies to unfold, yes?
On your second question: No, I didn't say anything about that as far as I can remember.
On the third question: I said he was taking us back to the era prior to the international order of post-1945, an order that produces two world wars. Do you know how long it took that order to produce those dire effects? In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, people like me warned the international order could produce a global war. That went on for ... decades. And guess what? All that time, people like you were scoffing and saying that warning was nonsense because, hey, where's that global war, huh?! Now here you are saying that because the world hasn't been incinerated a couple of months into the Trump administration, the critics are silly. Does that make the slightest sense to you?
On your last point: History holds plenty of examples of ignorant, incompetent, unfit people (who typically have other talents, to be fair, as does Trump) who managed to capitalize on destabilization or institutional breakdown or other infirmities and bring themselves to power. Judging entirely on the basis of an outcome is such a classic mistake, it even has its own label in decision theory -- "outcome bias." So that's not the rebuttal you think it is.
I probably am that guy.
And patience, my friend, patience.
Give Hippo Don time, and it'll work out just like I promised...
What's really scary is how many American elections are determined by the price of gasolune which Presidents have almost no control over. Most electorate are just along for the.ride which is why I always get the government someon else deserves - and he's not bright. I think he's wrapped in a straightjacket behind two locked doors until election time when he gets a free pass for the day. PeePee was just edged out by probably the most qualified man to ever run for the office leading a party that delivered MAID, legal pot, dental care, pharma care, a 32 billiin dollar pipeline to tidewater for the long-suffering Alberta. Had Trudeau not generously stepped aside - nothing you'll ever see of the peeman - we'd be all sticky with MMAGA and singing a quite different tune. Rule still applies: No One Ever Lost Money Underestimating The American Public. Double-double for Canada.
The Democrats (my former party, I’m now an independent) lost in 2024 and will continue to lose in the future because of one reason. They have lost the support of the American working class.
The historic Democratic icons FDR, and JFK would laugh at what passes for policy in their beloved party. Although they were upper class they understood that victory for their party depended on appealing to working class voters. Current party leaders distain the “deplorable” and “racist” members of the working class.
Working class Americans hate the following three policies foisted on them by Democrats
Working class people have had their wages depressed by illegal immigrants who will work for next to nothing just to be here. Their rents rise because we don’t have enough housing for our own citizens let alone millions of interlopers. The Democrats opened our borders to all with no vetting and now complain when the worst among those who entered illegally are sent home. The age of mass migration is over. Thank god and yes, Trump.
Democrats believe that a man can become a woman (he can’t) and should be allowed to play women’s sports and enter women’s private spaces including, unbelievably, those where they are naked and vulnerable, and that children, many of whom would grow up to be gay, should be mutilated in pursuit of the impossible. The vast majority of Americans and especially working class men want to protect women and children.
Democrats continue to discriminate on the basis of race and sex today because in the past there was discrimination on the basis of race and sex. That’s unconstitutional and the working class knows it.
Democrats believe that working class Americans are too stupid to understand what they are doing. They aren’t.
Dan, your post reminded me of Fluke, by Brian Klaas. We want to believe simple cause and effect stories, even though we actually have so little control and so much is just a result of many random coincidences. As a result, someone like Trump gets the benefit of the false narratives we create.
One question is how can you debate the injustice of a regime when the result is an improvement in the economy. In 1979, my husband tried to explain to his German uncle - once a young soldier in WWII, why Hitler was evil. "But for Germany," his uncle replied "He made us Great! We had work. We had food. Hitler was good for our country." It would take years of educating his uncle about the atrocities under Nazi rule for him to admit that Hitler was bad. But I believe that his uncle always believed that the economy improved because of Hitler.
The Nazis on achieving power through a democratic election quickly moved to destroy democracy. The media was controlled, as were universities. Political opponents were bullied or imprisoned. An enemy, in this case Jews, were blamed for a variety of economic faults and were portrayed as a group that could never be “German”. The Nazis gave a sense of national purpose to their friends and targeted those seen as enemies. Unfortunately many Germans saw the alternative as Communism, an international conspiracy worse than Hitler’s brand of fascism. In a democracy opponents are fought not destroyed, a distinction Trump fails to appreciate.
Had the economy gone south in 1936 FDR still would have won handily. I looked at the election results in 1938, when the economy did go south and Democrats lost 72 seats in the House and 8 seats in the Senate. First of all, Democrats won the total popular vote in that election.
To estimate an electoral vote outcome, I totaled up the electoral votes won by each party in the Senate races. For the rest I looked at the House elections. In most cases the results were lopsided in terms of seats won and I assigned electoral votes to one or the other party on that basis. In a few cases the seats were pretty evenly split. For these I calculated the average popular vote share for the districts won bay each party and assigned the state to the party with the higher average.
The result was 338 for the Dems and 193 for the Republicans. Conclusion, FDR would have won handily.
As for Republicans in 2028, they will lose if Trump is unpopular, by Rule 1. In fact, Trump would have lost in 2020 even if the pandemic had not happened, also by Rule 1. In fact, Trump won in 2024 by Rule 1 though in 2016 he won by Rule 3. Avoiding disasters like Bush II and Trump is why it is so important to have the dispensation.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-my-analytical-approach-is-different-9b0#:~:text=Translation%20into%20Democratic%20politics
I love the general line of your argument. And I must chase up Larry Bartels. But your big 'if' offers comfort. I just don't see AI massively improving productivity without massive unemployment. Much more likely to be another way of screwing Trump supporters. So your piece hasn't made me any more pessimistic regarded Trump's future prospects. The opposite in fact. So thanks for the piece.
Steve Kendrick
Happy that you’re happy. But… it was just an illustration of something outside his control that can redound to his benefit. There are lots more. Look at 2017 to the beginning of 2020 — nothing dramatic but a solid economy got better for reasons that had nothing to do with him. And it was a big reason why many people voted for him in 2024.
This was awesome and showed me to carefully think things through a little differently. It IS frightening isn’t it?
The thought of DJT shaping the U.S. and the world for years to come makes me nauseous.
Trump is so tightly aligned with a belief system that's going to be shown up in just 5 years or so, though - soon enough for memory to persist. In 5 years, renewable power generation and electric transportation are going to be much more clearly the future direction. Trump will be associated with "old" even more than Biden is by the time he leaves.
And if the dementia becomes much more clear, there's no way that won't stick to him, too; there's only so much can be done with "sanewashing".
Trust me, AI is not magical. I really don’t see how it could be so transformational in such a short time (the next 2-3 years) that it creates a booming economy that’s enough to overcome the self-inflicted headwinds that will be created by Trump’s incompetence.
Don't worry. The American economy is unlikely to improve under Trump. Farm workers are afraid to harvest crops, other nations are boycotting U.S. produce, tourists refuse to visit, airports are closed for safety, tariffs have made import prices skyrocket, half of China - which produced many of those imports - is underwater, and people are discovering how many Chinese products are made of "tofu-dreg" (low-quality fake material that soon falls apart). The whole world is riled up at the USA and no longer trusts any promises made by its government, let alone the value of the dollar as international currency. "Soft power" of international aid was abruptly discontinued, allowing measles and AIDS to begin spreading again. Canada is increasing its military budget to nip that "51st state" notion in the bud.
MAGA-heads may not notice this, but other nations do. The global economy was once a rising tide that lifted all boats, largely thanks to technology. But today's technology eliminates more jobs than it creates, and American universities are being defunded. All nations will be adversely affected to some extent, and mad about it. The global system could not have gone on forever in any case, simply for environmental reasons, but it was the USA that brought the crisis to a head so abruptly. Therefore, it will be systematically excluded from any cooperative solutions developed by other national alliances. It didn't have to be this way, but a Reality TV star formerly known only as a failed real estate developer was trotted out as a cult figure and surrounded by incompetent lackeys. One might expect the billionaires backing him to take more pride in managing their own spheres of influence, but apparently not. The sad thing is that he is also systematically deleting the history of how all this came to pass. Sic transit!
Dan I like the general thesis but then why did Trump get back after 4 years of very good economic conditions under Biden? There is more at play than just economic feel good.
Voters lost confidence in Biden because he froze during a debate. After he stepped down, there was not enough time for Kamala Harris to mobilize her campaign, and as a woman of colour, she began with two strikes against her.
Exactly. Not just economics. I rest my case