Trump's second term - how are we feeling?

[Druid]

@(you need an account to see links) the tariffs are absolutely obserd. I get we out counter tariffing where we can then you get a knee here response by trump saying he'll double le down and say stuff on what he will tariff. Which goes against NAFTA and the it's redacted a day later and some other response comes up. Now it seems everyone is jumping on the tariff train with the EU getting involved. With his ego I can't see him conceeding at all. So where does that leave us? A global trade cold war? Implosion of everyone's economies? Freaky times.

I'm interested on how Carney is going to deal with Trump. Heck we could even end up in a federal election sooner than later!

It's not sustainable enough to last in practice, so I think watching everything get bad for a minute will sway him into dropping it. (you need an account to see links). I also don't think it's spiralling into an everyone problem - the US is picking fights with everyone, but if anything that'll make the rest of us trade more with each other instead. The whole issue is centred on the US and their economy is already crashing, they can't withstand it longterm.

& we're getting an election this year regardless! It has to happen by October so at this point there's not much room for it to move up.

[Ridley]

Interesting that nobody who was vocally supporting Trump here has had any input on this thread in ages. Coincidence? Happy to be proven wrong

I'm envisioning a The Far Side comic where a hunter yells at the underbrush through a megaphone, telling the deer to just come out already.

I don't get the feeling clraik (as pleasant as this forum usually is) would tolerate any kind of apology for the current president, or appeal to reason that something he's trying to do might possibly work. Even pointing this out is probably painting a big red target on my back as if I voted for the guy or agree with anything he does. This just isn't the forum for debating any of that, it seems to be more about pointing and castigating to fit in. Apologies if this is a harsh opinion but... come on, read the last several pages.

[HC Jack]

this goverment is a freak show, i don't respect literally any of these people

[Erik.]

I'm envisioning a The Far Side comic where a hunter yells at the underbrush through a megaphone, telling the deer to just come out already.

I don't get the feeling clraik (as pleasant as this forum usually is) would tolerate any kind of apology for the current president, or appeal to reason that something he's trying to do might possibly work. Even pointing this out is probably painting a big red target on my back as if I voted for the guy or agree with anything he does. This just isn't the forum for debating any of that, it seems to be more about pointing and castigating to fit in. Apologies if this is a harsh opinion but... come on, read the last several pages.

They were pretty vocal before, it's not Trump's first term. And I'm sure everyone is allowed to voice their opinions in this thread, there have been other polarizing subjects and I've never seen someone attacked for it as it's against CK's rules.

I suspect the real reason is that it's too difficult to admit you might have been wrong. Trump voters have been digging a trench for a while now and blindfolding themselves. As long as their direct families aren't affected by Trump's politics.

[Druid]

I'm envisioning a The Far Side comic where a hunter yells at the underbrush through a megaphone, telling the deer to just come out already.

I don't get the feeling clraik (as pleasant as this forum usually is) would tolerate any kind of apology for the current president, or appeal to reason that something he's trying to do might possibly work. Even pointing this out is probably painting a big red target on my back as if I voted for the guy or agree with anything he does. This just isn't the forum for debating any of that, it seems to be more about pointing and castigating to fit in. Apologies if this is a harsh opinion but... come on, read the last several pages.

The community is actually pretty mixed politically, the election thread was a lot more balanced with perspectives from both sides. It’s definitely true that these topics can get kind of heated, but it’s generally on a counterpoint level rather than a personal attack one. I think Erik’s right, and the things going wrong are disproving a lot of the optimism that was happening in that thread. No one in there was saying “fuck yeah down with trans rights!”, they were saying “that isn’t a major issue, he’s not going to do that.” Even the broader debate threads about merits vs extremes of “the trans movement” and DEI have a lot of people giving more conservative takes.

[Ridley]

They were pretty vocal before, it's not Trump's first term. And I'm sure everyone is allowed to voice their opinions in this thread, there have been other polarizing subjects and I've never seen someone attacked for it as it's against CK's rules.

I suspect the real reason is that it's too difficult to admit you might have been wrong. Trump voters have been digging a trench for a while now and blindfolding themselves. As long as their direct families aren't affected by Trump's politics.

I'll use the recent trend of egg prices to explain my point. For a while (and in many parts of the country still) egg prices at the grocery store skyrocketed. People blamed Donald Trump for that. I'm not entirely sure why, as I don't believe egg prices are speculative nor are they related to tariffs (eggs aren't an import item); it's entirely possible something he did somehow affected the price, but the "How" is something nobody has been able to provide a purely logical explanation for. We'd be lucky to get one in a few years. But for whatever reason egg prices did increase when he was elected, then very recently they've returned to pre-election prices. They're still too expensive and we still haven't figured out what the hell happened, but people were eager to blame the president regardless.

The same thing happened with Joe Biden and gas prices, despite gas also not being a speculative commodity (the price is set pretty arbitrarily by the companies providing it) and not something he has any real control over. People were slapping stickers on gas pumps blaming him for the issue. Two things that affect everyday individuals, eggs and gas, weighed more heavily on their weekly expenses and so those same people were eager to place blame rather than try to figure out what's going on. For all we know, various egg companies and gas companies decided to price-gouge solely because they knew common people would just blame the president for it. I believe this recurring, vague accusation of "Don't you feel stupid now, X voters?" whenever anything negative happens is the same phenomenon. Frankly it's reductive, and not conducive to discussion of what's really happening.

I will give this thread some credit in the sense a lot of posters have tried to look at the current administration and what's going on objectively, but I also am not convinced clraik would see someone going "Actually I think the tariffs might work. We really should just annex Greenland" and not find that person mysteriously banned in like a week.

[I_royalty_I]

I think it's still too early to have a fully formed opinion yet. Do I agree with everything Trump has done so far - nope. Do I think some of it has been good - yep. Am I waiting to see how the rest of this year/term shakes out - absolutely! My opinions aren't too strong right now as I find myself with considerably less time to read the news/stay on top of things over the past month or two.

I'll use the recent trend of egg prices to explain my point. For a while (and in many parts of the country still) egg prices at the grocery store skyrocketed. People blamed Donald Trump for that. I'm not entirely sure why, as I don't believe egg prices are speculative nor are they related to tariffs (eggs aren't an import item); it's entirely possible something he did somehow affected the price, but the "How" is something nobody has been able to provide a purely logical explanation for. We'd be lucky to get one in a few years. But for whatever reason egg prices did increase when he was elected, then very recently they've returned to pre-election prices. They're still too expensive and we still haven't figured out what the hell happened, but people were eager to blame the president regardless.

The same thing happened with Joe Biden and gas prices, despite gas also not being a speculative commodity (the price is set pretty arbitrarily by the companies providing it) and not something he has any real control over. People were slapping stickers on gas pumps blaming him for the issue. Two things that affect everyday individuals, eggs and gas, weighed more heavily on their weekly expenses and so those same people were eager to place blame rather than try to figure out what's going on. For all we know, various egg companies and gas companies decided to price-gouge solely because they knew common people would just blame the president for it. I believe this recurring, vague accusation of "Don't you feel stupid now, X voters?" whenever anything negative happens is the same phenomenon. Frankly it's reductive, and not conducive to discussion of what's really happening.

I will give this thread some credit in the sense a lot of posters have tried to look at the current administration and what's going on objectively, but I also am not convinced clraik would see someone going "Actually I think the tariffs might work. We really should just annex Greenland" and not find that person mysteriously banned in like a week.

I'm sure the bird flu outbreak had just a tiny bit of something to do with the egg prices going up.

[Druid]

I'll use the recent trend of egg prices to explain my point. For a while (and in many parts of the country still) egg prices at the grocery store skyrocketed. People blamed Donald Trump for that. I'm not entirely sure why, as I don't believe egg prices are speculative nor are they related to tariffs (eggs aren't an import item); it's entirely possible something he did somehow affected the price, but the "How" is something nobody has been able to provide a purely logical explanation for. We'd be lucky to get one in a few years. But for whatever reason egg prices did increase when he was elected, then very recently they've returned to pre-election prices. They're still too expensive and we still haven't figured out what the hell happened, but people were eager to blame the president regardless.

The same thing happened with Joe Biden and gas prices, despite gas also not being a speculative commodity (the price is set pretty arbitrarily by the companies providing it) and not something he has any real control over. People were slapping stickers on gas pumps blaming him for the issue. Two things that affect everyday individuals, eggs and gas, weighed more heavily on their weekly expenses and so those same people were eager to place blame rather than try to figure out what's going on. For all we know, various egg companies and gas companies decided to price-gouge solely because they knew common people would just blame the president for it. I believe this recurring, vague accusation of "Don't you feel stupid now, X voters?" whenever anything negative happens is the same phenomenon. Frankly it's reductive, and not conducive to discussion of what's really happening.

I will give this thread some credit in the sense a lot of posters have tried to look at the current administration and what's going on objectively, but I also am not convinced clraik would see someone going "Actually I think the tariffs might work. We really should just annex Greenland" and not find that person mysteriously banned in like a week.

I mean, "we really should annex Greenland" is a pretty extreme take. Taking over land from allies hasn't been part of good-faith political conversations in a long time, Trump mentioning it at all is already a drastic shift. That isn't the kind of opinion anyone has expressed in other political threads I've seen on ck, or that I would expect them to come in and express now. I'm also not sure what makes you think anyone would be mysteriously banned - again, there are a lot of conservatives who regularly express conservative opinions here.

And yeah as royalty mentioned, the egg thing isn't a huge mystery, it's the result of a bird flu outbreak. I absolutely agree that in general, the ~public at large~ is very quick to blame every problem in a given country on the leader of that country at the time it occurs (not just America - Trudeau just resigned over the extreme change in public opinion about him following the COVID-based global recession), but that isn't the conversation we're having here. No one has mentioned eggs - this is about the specific policies the administration is directly enacting and promoting.


Edit to add:
For what it's worth, re: why blaming Trump for the egg prices was such a prominent talking point, I think it's less the genuine belief that his actions caused the prices and more just poetic irony of the timing of the price increase after his campaign focused on bringing down grocery prices/things happening "on day one". It's coincidental, but it's an easy headline. But yeah that isn't really what anyone who is and has been concerned about this presidency is focused on.

[Miri]

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[Zapdos]

I'll use the recent trend of egg prices to explain my point. For a while (and in many parts of the country still) egg prices at the grocery store skyrocketed. People blamed Donald Trump for that. I'm not entirely sure why, as I don't believe egg prices are speculative nor are they related to tariffs (eggs aren't an import item); it's entirely possible something he did somehow affected the price, but the "How" is something nobody has been able to provide a purely logical explanation for. We'd be lucky to get one in a few years. But for whatever reason egg prices did increase when he was elected, then very recently they've returned to pre-election prices. They're still too expensive and we still haven't figured out what the hell happened, but people were eager to blame the president regardless.

The same thing happened with Joe Biden and gas prices, despite gas also not being a speculative commodity (the price is set pretty arbitrarily by the companies providing it) and not something he has any real control over. People were slapping stickers on gas pumps blaming him for the issue. Two things that affect everyday individuals, eggs and gas, weighed more heavily on their weekly expenses and so those same people were eager to place blame rather than try to figure out what's going on. For all we know, various egg companies and gas companies decided to price-gouge solely because they knew common people would just blame the president for it. I believe this recurring, vague accusation of "Don't you feel stupid now, X voters?" whenever anything negative happens is the same phenomenon. Frankly it's reductive, and not conducive to discussion of what's really happening.

I will give this thread some credit in the sense a lot of posters have tried to look at the current administration and what's going on objectively, but I also am not convinced clraik would see someone going "Actually I think the tariffs might work. We really should just annex Greenland" and not find that person mysteriously banned in like a week.

Nobody would get banned for their opinion here, cK has never been about censorship and we have a diverse community with a myriad of beliefs. Just wanted to clear that up.