Submitted 3 days ago by ricesoup@lemmy.ml to [deleted]
it’s like you believe you can tariff them expecting they won’t do the same. Why do you believe the rest of the world is not going to retaliate and why do you believe America can prosper without the rest of the world?
What’s the point of having a military alliance with countries you puts tariffs on? That’s unfriendly to say the least.
Trump only ran to stay out of prison. Now he’s ripping the copper out of the walls to get as much money as he can before it all collapses under his ineptitude.
Elon thinks he’s gonna be a trillionaire at the top of a technofeudal oligarchy. (He wants to be Arasaka from Cyberpunk but he’s gonna have a hard time doing that while all his businesses fail.)
PLEASE let them both end up in the poor house. That’d make me SO happy!
If they were capable of thinking critically, they wouldn’t be Republicans in the first place.
You’re never going to get a satisfying answer to this question, because there is no actual reason. If you want, you can go peek in on the conservative subreddits and watch their gold-medal winning mental gymnastics, but the reason Trump is doing this is Putin told him to. The U.S. is destroying themselves for no gain.
for no gain.
Nearly $3 billion USD flowed through the TRUMP cryptocoin rugpull, whoever owned initial coins made very, very large gains.
The $3 billion in quid buys a lot of anti-Ukraine pro quo
But, thanks to the Supreme Court, Trump could go on national TV and say he change US policy on Ukraine because he was bribed and he’d still be immune to any legal consequences (other than impeachment, but never anything criminal).
Nearly $3 billion USD flowed through the TRUMP cryptocoin
But wait, there’s more. Us taxpayer money will now be used to “invest” in these crypto scams.
There’s a lot of traitors in this country, but the conservatives on the Supreme Court may be at the top of the list.
Because they think it owns the libs, plain and simple!
The reality is that these people were/are unhappy in their lives due to stagnation in their finances/jobs, poor healthcare, and they don’t have a tight local community. Then these dumb, angry people are primed to accept someone who says they’ll fix their lives, and knows how to talk right to them. Everything else is just toppings, but that’s really the meat of it.
It’s like that scene in the Incredibles where Mr. Incredible gets inside the robot, and has it tear itself to pieces. Except an entire country. And ~88,000,000 people voted against self-destruction and are being dragged off a cliff.
fascism must always create more outsiders, must always create more enemies to keep control, to keep things directed.
remember, fascism appropriates genuine upset and the fact that to the privileged, equality feels like persecution. it steers itself by creating enemies to hate. remember: people’s lives are genuinely fucking miserable. there is dystopian shit happening. and all of that is really complicated, and if people stopped to think about it for five minutes, they would pull a 1789.
so they just keep adding more enemies, and more derangements like what the qanons call ‘baking’ but hitler just said was the way everyone should read books, until they live in a totally unhinged fantasy world, and any method of social control must engage with the fantasy.
tl;dr: sacrificing external allies to fuel a persecution complex, keep control, entrench the madness, keep attention off the american elites that were at least supposedly some of the initial targets.
You guys do know that facism tends to be left leaning right?
maybe we should, like, do something about that?
Good luck finding many of them around here. They find out pretty quickly that they aren’t welcome.
Not a Republican but big US billionaires recently cashed out their stocks.
finbold.com/warren-buffetts-cash-pile-hits-334-bi…
Trump imposing moronic tariffs will crash the market and the Billionaires can buy back cheap.
Buffet has a long history of stockpiling cash when the market becomes far too speculative. He’s also flat out said millionaires and billionaires aren’t taxed fairly compared to the working class.
I think Trump is trying to appeal to blue collar workers who have seen their jobs disappear. Tariffs are his ham fisted way of trying to appeal to them.
Trump is a fool though. It isn’t the 60s anymore and manufacturing won’t work in the US without inputs from Canada and Mexico.
The entire narrative that the US doesn't have a manufacturing industry or blue collar work is largely a myth anyway. The US has a $2.4T manufacturing sector, which is larger than the entire GDP of Canada. There are also plenty of blue collar jobs in the trades.
This "problem" never gets solved because there is no problem. But the media of course continues to help Republicans gaslight us about it.
Many billionaires have recently cashed out not only Buffet. Of course it could be them predicting Trump being bad. But collusion would be possible.
Project 2025. The goal is to remove all tariffs and other limitations against the US.
Canada for instance has laws on antibiotics for dairy, foreign ownership for banks and telcos, various things like that. India has tariffs on everything.
The document outlines crazy things like capital punishment and a border wall, its clearly Trumps handbook. It’s all in there.
They don’t care about cooperation, everything is a deal to them. If some other country has something, we don’t. The entire worldview of Republicans is just capitalism, if something can’t be framed in terms of profit it’s not worth pursuing.
They’re fucking Ferengis
Ferengis were meant to be a caricature of our current society, so yes, Ferengi fits.
You probably won’t get too many of those to answer your question on Lemmy.
Probably not here, probably none at all. They blindly follow Trump. And proud to be blinded too I might add: Before I left reddit I wanted to ask a similar question in the republican subreddit. However, they where so loud and proud they found liberals on the subreddit and banned them for life I never bothered to put out any questions there.
this question could be rephrased to:
dear idiots, why are you so stupid?
OR
dear sociopaths, why are you so selfish?
the motivations don’t matter. they can;t be reasoned with.
conclusion: guns.
This feels so much closer to the real truth than anything. It really can be this simple for the trump cult.
You could replace all the above by “trumpist”. There is no such thing as american conservatives anymore, the only thing remaining is trumpism, a soon to be modern form of nazism.
you could also waste your time splitting hairs about words.
there’s no republicans on lemmy lol
You won’t get logical answers to this because there isn’t one. Maybe they’re just that dumb. Maybe they just want to tank the economy a bit so the rich and gobble up more during the dip. Maybe they just actually live Russia. Maybe they’re being secretly black mailed by Russia.
I do think it’s a Russia thing. Putin getting America to alienate all of its closest allies, so that it’s only Russia left to aid.
I think y’all are overthinking it. For Trump it’s just narcissism and bullying. Everyone else is a grifter seeing their chance. Musk must have just read Ayn Rand
The answer is: they do not give a shit.
They do not care about the US as a country.
They do not care about the Americans as a people.
They do not care about the economy.
They do not care about anything apart from their own personal interest. Lining their own pockets is all they care about. If someone helps them do that, they are friends with them. If they don’t, they do not matter.
Congratulations, you now officially live in a cleptocracy where they shake you down, take all of your money and give it to the guys who already have billions. All the taxes they claim to save by obliterating social security, affordable care etc? They are not going back to you, they will stuff them in Musk’s pockets through bullshit contracts and other schemes.
And at the same time, they are critically crippling the IRS to make sure the billionairs no longer even have to pretend to pay taxes.
You’re describing the Republican politicians. The Republican voters are a different bag entirely.
Out of the ones I have discussed politics with, their underlying motivations for supporting Trump are emotionally driven but explained through rhetoric aligning with their emotional motivations. It tends to be grouped into one of a few different feelings:
Aside from the bigotry and exceptionalism, those emotions aren’t necessarily wrong. Cost of living increases, politicians owned by lobbyists, and profit-driven privatization of essential services are actual problems. The issue with conservatives is that they have scapegoats to blame those problems on instead of acknowledging the underlying causes. All it takes is some loudmouth, ignorant jackass offering an overly-simplified, emotionally-compelling solution to a complex problem, and others will latch on to it, oversimplify and exaggerate it even more, and disseminate it until the rest of them start believing it.
People can be hateful, narcissistic pieces of shit, and it goes without saying that this repugnant rhetoric is spread intentionally. But, it’s also a direct consequence of a public education system failing among a landscape of patriotic propaganda and media controlled by a powerful few who put profit and self-gain above the health of society.
When someone grows up being told America is a flawless nation, is never educated to think critically of the government and media, and is bombarded by a neverending stream of false information that validates their fears and lulls them into feel smarter than everyone else, they end up being indoctrinated into the right-wing cult we have today.
While I have no issue with Republicans being shunned for their unashamed fascism, it does mean threads like this are essentially pointless because almost none will actually participate and the ones who do will be downvoted into oblivion.
And dont forget, we are on Lemmy. Everything that’s somewhat conservative gets bullied out quite fast. C/conservative started as a legit community and got turned into a meme community. I think this speaks for itself.
My general dislike for modern conservatism to the side, it does reflect a wider issue with lemmy. There is no diversity of opinion on anything. There are no niche communities. Either you like the political and tech subs and the meme subs which are, at a mininum, 60% political, or there really is nothing for you here.
The manga and anime subs can be good for keeping up with new releases, but not there’s next to no actual discussion.
The answer is disappointingly simple: emotional satisfaction.
For decades, these people have been told that they are incredibly generous towards their allies, and that they get nothing in return. That their allies are abusing their relationships. Of course this is false, but they’ve been told so every day.
Now they get to abuse their “abusers” right back.
Victimhood is a requirement of conservatism. Like any cult or religion.
Stock market manipulation. Look at who moved in to make big trades after the market plunged. Follow the money.
Isolating the US and breaking US hegemony. Trump is a Putin puppet, and what’s best for Russia is crippling the US economically and diplomatically. Alienating the EU cuts off the EU from the US who would otherwise help the Europeans against the Russians as they try to reclaim their former territories.
This also helps China who is trying to replace the US as the world superpower. BRICS is doing a good job of creating a competing economic alliance, and the US falling apart helps make it more attractive.
Not a conservative, by the way. Just someone who follows the news.
Going to steel man this since theres obviously no one on here answering this question seriously. Not a republican and don’t agree with all this, just imagining what my republican dad would say about this:
For ukraine and Europe, we have no interest in protecting them besides sentimental attachments. Ukraine is not our problem, it’s Europe’s and if they want to dump money into a lost cause by all means go ahead, but leave the u.s. out of it unless your going to compensate us for it. The u.s. isn’t threatened by Russia, we have an ocean, the world’s largest navy and nukes to protect us. The larger threat is China and we should be focusing on them, not russia which can barely invade it’s neighbor, much less march across Europe and the atlantic. Europe can handle its own problems.
For Canada and Mexico and tarriffs in general. We need to bring manufacturing back to America and revitalize the rust belt. We can’t do that if companies find it more profitable to go over seas and pay people pennies when they’d have to pay Americans mich more. The only way to get them to come back is to make it too expensive to import things.
This is all about putting America first. For decades America has been spending billions to protect Europe and has been sending billions of dollars over seas to build factories overseas while factory after factory closes. We need to stop all of that and spend our money in America for Americans.
We need to bring manufacturing back to America and revitalize the rust belt. We can’t do that if companies find it more profitable to go over seas and pay people pennies when they’d have to pay Americans much more.
Canada has
One of those must be the issue. ;-)
When we spend money in other countries, we are spending it on Americans. When free people thrive, America wins. When people around the world have stable governments that at least try to look out for their own people, America wins. Even if 49% of it is wasted to fraud and abuse, we’re still coming out ahead: the only Americans who have lived through a draft are in their 60s, and a nuclear attack in their 80s.
This hedgemony has staved of world war three and nuclear war for 75 years, and kept the world a relatively stable and safe place for virtually everyone.
Even if you completely disagree with me, and feel like voting for conservatives is the better alternative, two facts completely undermine that decision. First, the times America has failed to live up to its ideals or faltered in its highest pursuits have been exclusively presided over by conservatives. Second, the number of times conservatives have cut spending and passed the savings on to the 99% is exactly zero, but their track record of increasing spending while only significantly cutting taxes for the 1%…is 100%. And, as a bonus fact, this the wealthiest nation ever to exist in the history of the world. The diea that we can’t afford to help Americans and keep up our global spending is meritless, for example, we could eat like three billionaires and end global hunger, provide healthcare and education to every American.
This is a good steel man response, very much like Facebook posts I have seen lately. It’s really sad how much the right has abandoned listening to experts and just assuming we can apply “common sense” answers to fix problems that are complicated.
Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it had occurred to me that the US disproportionately spends much, much more on military might than our allies do. Europe pulled a good one on us, ensuring they could lead more carefree lifestyles with first world social safety nets while we take on that heavy burden of being the sentry guard of the entire western world.
However, we made promises of security to Ukraine in return for their nuclear disarmament. It isn’t right that we turn our backs on them now.
Trump is a simpleton. He doesn’t truly understand the long-term butterfly effects of the decisions he’s making.
Europe pulled a good one on us […]
No, we did that to ourselves, by always cutting taxes instead of raising them to pay for things that are public goods, like single-payer health care, public transportation, public education, and so on. Our taxes are too low, and as a result we pay far, far more for the same things as private services rather than public. You can complain that the gov’t is inefficient, but there’s no profit; profit takes a far bigger bite than waste, inefficiency, and fraud does.
The thing is, it’s not total rubbish. The problems are real - rust belt decline, life is harder for Americans than it was in the past. America is more protected from Russian aggression than Europe. He doesn’t seem to realise or care that the reason for that is because we trusted that the US would have our back and its not like the us wasn’t getting anything in return.
It’s just that these truths are mixed in with lies - immigrants are the problem, tariffs will fix anything, that if america abandons it’s allies and its promises (over protecting Ukraine after they gave up their nukes), this will lead to a better long term outcome for America.
Trump is too dumb to understand subtlety and he’s being played by multiple bad actors, domestic and foreign.
its not like the us wasn’t getting anything in return
Thing is, what the USA was buying with its expensive umbrella over Europe was a disarmed Europe. At the time, the USA felt it was in their interest for EU to be weak.
For a variety of reasons, the rise of China perhaps being at the forefront, the USA no longer believes its in their interest to keep EU toothless.
Great post! And I can see the point of most of that take.
My riposte, which I bring up frequently, is that a smart capitalist isn’t going to invest in American factories, knowing damned well they’ll be left holding the bag on a multi-million dollar facility when the tariffs drop.
That’s not even mentioning the employment costs, which are far more than most on lemmy understand. tl;dr: If I’m paying you $15hr., it’s costing me $30hr.
they have brain damage.
Easy answer. The entire Government of Putin is working for shit Kremlin.
To cripple the US so it is no longer a threat to Russia, and they can move in to “reclaim” all those Baltic nations and maybe even cop the EU.
The point?
I see it like this.
Profit profit profit at the expensive of all Americans for 4 years.
The next 4 years let Democrats clean up the mess, Democrats are weak anyway.
Then milk the American people again for another 4 years. The cycle is nonstop.
This is malicious greed but everyone keeps thinking these people are idiots.
I was just watching a panel discussion about Trump and the tariffs and had a thought. He’s started adding exemptions. He just added one for the automotive industry following discussions with the big three auto makers. What if the tariffs were a grift all along? What if he put the tariffs on to generate tax dollars that he can use to give billions of dollars to the wealthy but what if he’s double dipping and selling exemptions? Like, what if when he talked to the big three auto makers he said, “I’ll make an exemption to the tariffs for the auto industry if you give me $100 million”?
I haven’t seen any republicans here so I’ll also offer my opinion as a sane person ….
Narcissism. There is only me, and other. There are no allies, it’s all about me. Right here. Right now.
Bullying. Trump styles himself as a great negotiator but from the outside it looks a lot more like bullying. And if you believe his commitments, you’re a sucker. He thinks this is “making deals” but is the only way he knows how to operate
“What’s the point?” The point is to seize power and get rich.
They will destroy whatever they want or need in order to become rich and powerful.
To own the libs
I’m not a conservative but there’s a logic to it beyond this, “because Putin!” nonsense. Tariffs are a reaction against Neoliberalism and the economic intelligencia that has fucked everyone over. Many of them blame NAFTA and the offshoring of union jobs to other countries with cheaper labor and fewer protections, and they think they can bring them back through tariffs.
Many of these people understand well that they have been fucked, but can’t really name capitalism directly because it’s a sacred cow. Still they’re going to react poorly to “the establishment” telling them they’re dumb and wrong, and that includes libs screaming at them that they’re “serving Putin” without even understanding what they’re actually trying to do.
Tariffs aren’t going to bring those jobs back, at least not without significant subsidies that the government will never do. Also, for the record, those jobs have raised the living conditions of the people they went through, and are one of the reasons China was able to lift 700 million people out of extreme poverty in the past 40 years, but the pitch of, “You might not be able to find a decent job, but hey, at least a poor Chinese rice farmer can afford a washing machine now,” doesn’t exactly go over well with the right. We should be focusing on the super-rich who have enough hoarded wealth to make everyone rich, regardless of national borders and whatnot, but they see that as communism, because it is communism.
Ultimately, tariffs are a way of rebelling against an economic orthodoxy that isn’t working for a growing number of people and they fit into the nationalist narratives about why things are so bad (because of foreigners) without having to name capitalism itself as the problem.
This follows a long historical trend in America where people don’t want the government to do anything ever but also need the government to do things to address crises and allow society to function so we have to come up with convoluted approaches that “don’t count” as government interference, for whatever reason. For example, the New Deal was too restrained to actually end the Depression, but once WWII happened we could take the gloves off with government spending (on the military) which was economically necessary, and since then, military bases have served as an inefficient and corrupt way for the government to infuse cash into local communities by paying people to just walk around with guns in like Nebraska. This goes all the way back to people like Jefferson, who absolutely hated the idea of big government but also casually doubled the size of the country with the Louisiana Purchase. There’s also the classic psychology of, “Keep your damn, government hands off my social security!” A big reason American politics are insane is because there is a battle in everyone’s mind between ideology and material interests, and the way in which material interests are persued is roundabout, convoluted, and ineffective, because everyone’s trying to avoid being/sounding like a communist.
Juche.
I wish I was kidding.
They’re doing a North Korea. Building a completely isolated war economy.
thier ally is PUTIN, thats all they need. ive seen them shill hard for putin, one asians youtubers acc, have been shilling for rich white people and russia see the common thing, before they went full maga.
TheImpressiveX@lemm.ee 3 days ago
The people you need to hear from aren’t using Lemmy.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
Try Truth Social, I hear it’s technically a Mastodon fork…
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Ew.
hddsx@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
It’s mastodon? I thought it was a different fediverse platform.
lars@lemmy.sdf.org 3 days ago
Whoa!!!
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
Can you imagine them federaring their content? What a stream of odd toots that would be!
PumpkinEscobar@lemmy.world 3 days ago
You’re not going to get an answer that’s interesting or helpful out of them even if you go to where they live and ask and don’t get immediately flamed for asking.
There’s no acceptable answer for it. I have plenty of conservative friends and I could make sense of voting for Trump the first time. Not for me, FUCK that, but not all Trump v1 supporters were racists and there were valid conservative reasons to vote for him. He was definitely an unknown, nobody could have told you with certainty how he would act once in office. I could have told you what I expected and it was about as horrible as I expected, but people often see things in politicians that they want to see, rather than seeing what’s really there.
But any of the “OK to vote for Trump v1” falls apart completely for Trump v2. We saw what his first term was like and especially how it ended. His campaign in 2024 was even more unhinged and less grounded in reality than in 2016. Voting for him in 2024 is really inexcusable.
The US will be unimaginably worse off by the time Trump leaves office this time, tariffs and tax cuts for the rich and inflation, it’s going to be bad for Americans on an individual level. On a global level, Trump will have shredded alliances and any goodwill we had built up over the past decades, while also validating and confirming the world’s worst concerns about us.
And when Trump does finally leave office, the people you want to hear from will largely feel like it was a phenomenal presidency. It is a cult and logic and reason don’t have anything to do with it.
folkrav@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
I’d love to believe this, but cynical me is thinking about those conservatives that look at Milei in Argentina and legitimately think it’s going great.
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Some of them are, you just have to scroll way way way down
Clinicallydepressedpoochie@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Conservative on sh.itjust.works appears to be conservatives.
remotelove@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
I have my doubts about that. Most of the mass posters are too “conservative” and lean extremely hard into stereotypes. They take racism and bigotry just a bit too far in many cases and it doesn’t quite align with actual conservative bigots and racists that I know.
It wouldn’t be surprising if most of the “conservative” communities are part of the same troll farm that lives primarily on other instances.
This is all speculation, of course. But, organized campaigns to spread discourse on social media are real and some of these trolls are really good at what they do.
LuckyPierre@lemm.ee 2 days ago
Sadly true. We actively searched for alternatives when we realised other channels were getting too manipulative and full of hate. Those who are left haven’t even realised it.