Summary
U.S. CEOs and business executives are alarmed as Donald Trump remains firm on imposing high tariffs on U.S. allies, despite warnings from economists about potential economic harm.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump’s late-night social media announcements have blindsided both his advisers and business leaders, leaving them scrambling to react.
While Trump consults some advisers, like Marco Rubio and Treasury pick Scott Bessent, his unilateral approach limits their influence.
The uncertainty has left business leaders struggling to find ways to alter his stance on trade policies.
How the actual fuck are people “blindsided” by this?
You ever talk to c-level execs? Many of them simply aren’t smart. They’re just very aggressive and confident which gives the appearance of intelligence.
A lot of times attractiveness plays a big role too. In modern corporate america being attractive will get you further than being smart.
A-Students work for B-Students in companies owned by C-Students, which are financed by D-Students, while the hedge funds owned by the sociopathic F-Students short sell the whole thing to make sure they have enough spare cash to buy a new library wing at Harvard, so their F-Student-kids get in.
CEOs aren’t the brightest.
Because folks do their 5 minute research by reading conservative mainstream news outlets and safe space enclaves that Tariffs are good.
Talking points to the contrary are not allowed, so they get to find out the hard way.
To be fair. The message they’re receiving is that tariffs will hurt the people that deserve it. And they’re absolutely right. But while they’re suffering, so will the rest of America.
Remember that Trump lies about everything, often in both directions. Everyone knows this, including his supporters. That gives his supporters the mental freedom to make up whateverthefuck policy positions they like and find proof that they are Trump’s real plan.
Donald Trump is the human version of a Bible. If you’re a Believer, god says he will implement your Desire. If you’re a Heretic, god says he will destroy the world. All with the same words.
Because they thought it would only happen to others and they’d be fine. Guess the leopard with a rooster hat is coming to roar and eat faces.
But… But… Genderless bathrooms! /s
They thought they’d vote anti-tax first, then pushover trump on the tariffs when they had the time. Looks like they were wrong.
More faces being eaten.
If this was his first go-around I could see some rationale to that idea. But holy shit, has there been a case of collective amnesia among business ‘leaders’?!!
They knew exactly what they were getting. Because we’ve seen all this before. Usually this is the definition of madness. But in this case it should be the definition of stupidity.
This same surprised Pikachu shit is going to happen over and over and over again over the next 4+ years. Even right now, the media keep assuming what he says is what he will do. And I have no idea why. He demonstrated in his first term that at least half of what he promises he either backtracks on he doesn’t follow through on. Why they think things will be different this time is beyond me.
The one singular upside of Cheeto 2.0 is that I’ll get to enjoy some guilty schadenfreude as the face eating leopard starts eating the faces of the party-for-face-eating-leopards.
Might be a bit of a contrarian take, but at this point I think Trump needs to have a gigantic fuck up to drive people to the streets in anger, South Korea style. One of those ‘we need our medicine before we can get better’ moments.
For some reason tens of millions of people buy his “'I’m the greatest - only I can save you - they’re evil and stupid” rhetoric.
So it’s going to take a truly epic fuck up that he can’t bullshit his way out of - and that the media can’t ignore - for people to finally see that him and his cronies are all gigantic pieces of shit.
January 6th has entered the chat…and quietly left unnoticed.
I don’t think that’s possible, unfortunately. I’m pretty sure he knows he can get away with anything, and his stupid fans will still gladly follow him. He will put the blame on someone else, every time, and they will believe him, every time.
His entire first administration was a series of such fuckups. I am not hopeful that consequences (for him) are ever coming.
South Korea wasn’t in a cult for that leader AND what he asked for was essentially what… Something that equated to the build up to January 6th, without even a January 6th style failed coup attempt to show for it.
No, they did what we should have. We failed.
South Korea values education. The Republican party has been destroying the public education system for decades.
So south Korea does not have as many braindead people as we have here
This is the whole issue. Republicans, a cult, can only exist in pretend political party form because they have convinced their base that literally–literally–anything that has a big ol REPUBLICAN label slapped on it is the highest moral good.
They see children getting murdered in cold blood in schools and take the side of the guns. I should probably repeat that four or five times with varying emphasis.
Trump could bomb an orphanage, brag about it, and within a week Fox Lies & Propaganda would be running stories about how the orphanage made a mistake on its taxes that was falsely flagged as fraud, and how orphans might become criminals.
It won’t undo the current disaster, but the real path back is probably more like talking to one person who’s trumpy but still somehow you kind of like anyway, with a tone of…come on now. Are we serious with this? You see this for what it is, right? You gotta put a stop to this, it can’t go on. Or just plain old Lakoff advice about getting your racist grandpa to tell you a story at thanksgiving of a time he helped somebody. This is one step in restoring his brain to its unpoisoned-by-conservatism state.
You gotta attack the foundation of fascism and conservatism, which science seems to think you do with empathy.
If this could have happened it would have happened during covid
Trump accelerationism, lesgo
Didn’t he literally campaign on these tariffs?
Where were these titans of industry in October?
Yup. This is not a new thing. If these guys had lined up to say this at a microphone during the campaign it could have had an impact. But no, they thought they could just control him after the fact. After having seen how uncontrollable he was during his first term. This is what happens when you equate wealth with intelligence. You get dumbasses who think they’re playing 5d chess.
They thought they could control the guy who stared at the sun during an eclipse after he was told if he did, he might go blind.
You can’t control Caligula.
I hope he ruins all of them. Every last one.
You had four whole years of Trump to realize he never jokes around, he doesn’t bluff, and he’s never going to pivot, change directions, or admit he made a mistake. He means what he says and there is no nuance or subtext.
He means what he says and there is no nuance or subtext.
Well, there is a sort of nuance here.
In that he’s also terrible at doing literally anything, and fails constantly at achieving promises.
He also has so many plots and schemes cooking at any given moment with so many other people and organizations that you absolutely cannot trust or predict any outcome. This is the real thing that nobody learned about Trump is that he is completely unpredictable because he can’t be honest about the color of the sky if asked.
There were also guardrails to stop his half baked schemes from being implemented, or people with integrity in career positions that had the hard option of saying no.
I’m just worried this time he will tell his head of the EPA to make the sky that color.
And the head of the EPA will.
In some regards, I hope so too. The old Fuck Around and Find Out bit. The fucking MAGAts will look like deer in headlights when the economic freight train derails and crashes.
Looks like Americans are about to go through their version of brexit. Good luck, it’s going to be rough.
That would be glorious! But I’m seriously scared for Ukraine and Europe while Amexit happens…!
Did you only now notice that he only cares about himself?
And he’s mind-bogglingly stupid on top of that.
Americas leader and figurehead.
Truly a man of the people.
All part of Putin’s plan. He probably gave him the advice on tariffs.
I wonder if in a Freudian slip the translator said “Self Sanctions” when discussing tariffs
The German corporate elite thought they could control the last guy as well…
You let the fox in the henhouse. Why would he listen? He’s not planning to win over hearts and minds
He has already shown them what he wants them to do.
Just donate $1 million to him and he will help your business
It was a billion.
Donate enough and you get a cabinet position.
Donate even more and he’ll create new fake departments for you.
After the great depression, tariffs were implemented and failed to do anything other than fuck over the American people.
The event that finally ended the Great Depression was the United States’ entry into World War II, which significantly boosted the economy through increased demand for war materials and created millions of jobs in defense industries. While President Roosevelt’s “New Deal” programs aimed to alleviate the Depression, they did not fully end it. The massive production needs of World War II essentially pulled the US out of the Depression. The government spending on war materials created a significant economic stimulus.
Well shit. I hoped it was just bluster, but if he’s serious it makes a lot of sense.
The 0.1% gain wealth whenever economies crash. He is obviously going to try to crash the world economy so fat cats can buy assets for pennies on the dollar, including entire developing nations. Then the fed prints a gazillion dollars and bails it all out.
Greedy pigs get fatter, the rest of us get leaner.
Nobody in the US is going to be making money when everyone else calls Trump’s bluff and slaps a 200 percent exit tariff on goods to the US.
So a 1,000 dollar item will be 3,000 dollars when it hits US Customs and jump to 6,000 there because of Trump’s import tariffs. They can support that all day long because they just hand the money straight back to their domestic company. As far as they’re concerned they made a 3,000 dollar sale.
You might think we could just do without and use domestic manufacturing. But not only have we fucked domestic manufacturing in so many ways, this will apply to our food imports as well. So it’s not like we can just refuse to pay.
As much as the farm subsidies have been criticized, literally starving isn’t something we should have to worry much about.
Food we can do domestically just fine, as long as you don’t care about coffee and tea. Even those I just expect we’re going to make existing grounds/leaves stretch a whole lot farther.
I don’t think it’ll be as bad as some of Russia’s hard times, but goddamn is that a long, long way to fall.
I’m more concerned about world politics. We’re going to cede a hell of a lot of control of the world to Russia and China. It’s likely that China claims an entire vertical slice of the Earth, standing in the way of a good chunk of world trade.
Nobody in the US is going to be making money when everyone else calls Trump’s bluff
Categorically false.
Manufacturers will not make money. Importers will not make money.
Owners WILL make money. Mark my words.
The owners of what? Everything in the US is going to skyrocket in price. If they’re a domestic company then their inputs are going to kill them.
The Peter Theils, the Blackrocks, various equity firms.
Just like wall street doesn’t mirror main street, crashing economies can be quite profitable if you’re in the right industry.
I see you’re talking about them buying everything they can. That’s going to be kind of hard when the stock market crashes though. While it can remain irrational, it cannot ignore companies collapsing.
John Pauson, Pauson & Co.
Made billions during '07-08
That’s cute that you think that was a crash. It could have been one but they stopped it. They were able to stop it because businesses were still viable under it all. These tariffs run the real risk of making the businesses non viable which takes the base of the stock market out. A true crash that wipes everything out.
Leopards, faces, etc.
Good, destroy eachother.
I’m just going to point out that the ultimate victims of this idiocy are the working class.
The wealthy will still be wealthy regardless
They get to buy the dip.
Good to see nothing has changed in 40 years.
