[intended]

There are several things at play.

1) Trump is playing a storyline. The Market place of ideas in America has one side which is under a monopoly. It sets its own prices, decides what information enters and exits, decides what the market SHOULD look like. It manages half the voting population.

This is why “Trump does what he says” resonated. Previous lawmakers played the role on TV, but in back room deals, acted as if reality mattered.

Trump does not. He will continue to not do so, and the ideas sold in the market place that supports him, will continue to sell ideas to support it. Even if they don’t make logical sense.

It’s like science fiction, reality doesn’t matter.

Without addressing the information asymmetry, no democracy can function. No decisions can be made.

This is the nicest way I can put it to people, without being blunt. This has been the work of decades, reaching all the way back to watergate.

2) Jobs are being lost to automation faster than they are lost to outsourcing. China is the last country that will raise its standard of living through manufacturing. India has to pivot to services, to have a hope of doing anything. All of this is human capital intensive.

3) Wealth inequality is the problem - and frankly, if you have money to spare you are simply going to buy assets. This will be bought from people who are increasingly affected by cost of living issues, and have to sell their assets. This means taxes

4) If Americans want a snowballs chance in hell, there need to be special elections around the country in 2025, to take control of congress. Republican senators and congressfolk are threatened by the voting base if they break with Trump, which they wont anyway. The checks and balances are broken, see point 1.

You cannot win in a broken market place. You cannot fix a marketplace of ideas with government power, because that breaks the principle of Free speech. If you are a government who IS in power because of market place monopolies, these rules do not apply to you.

Trump is serious about devaluing the dollar. The only reason he may not, is because the viewers/storyline suggest he shouldn’t.

I will regret making this post, because of the comments it will generate. It is general enough for a million holes to be poked in it. Sure. This is an outline, that covers most of the pieces that are on the board.

[joegibbs]

I think Trump is kind of like a semi-fictional character: there’s the real guy and then there’s the character he played on shows The Apprentice which are all a bit scripted, in interviews etc as the larger-than-life successful businessman. People voted for the character. But when you play a character like that for your whole life then it becomes who you are, which is why he’d play the storyline.

[codingbot3000]

One hole to poke into it ;-) There is the growing class of the working poor in the US, and that is something the better off seem to have been ignoring for a while. What I try to say is, that even the status quo ante Trump politics were already quite disconnected from most people's reality. Now Trump's new politics are different in that they negatively impact rich people's reality.

[ethbr1]

Globalists failed to take into account the anger that employment dislocation would generate.

'The labor market will reallocate to productive jobs' doesn't take into account the experience of having ones income security disappear as an industry is shipped overseas, then having to retrain into a new field.

And the US largely didn't fund that, at least in a meaningful, at scale, don't-piss-people-off way.

Those at the top reaped the benefits of free trade; those at the bottom suffered the pain.

Trump (the character) was voted in on the basis of that anger, something the Democrats never seemed to understand.

It'll be curious what the reaction is to serious economic pain in the midterms.

[intended]

People are rightfully angry. LORD has it taken a long time for people to start talking about how everyone can’t become a coder. However, this seems like common knowledge today, but it was unpopular to think about this back when people were still struggling to deal with the issues that were cropping up.

Trump the character plays the storyline, which is hopefully useful to help people predict what’s happening.

What bugs me is that, the deeper shifts aren’t part of the counter narrative. Automation is eating jobs faster than trade ever did. Lights-out factories exist.

Also - it sucks to get taxed, sure. However it sucks more to not have a working global market. Your wealth is better if you have more people able to buy and make things.

[AnimalMuppet]

> If Americans want a snowballs chance in hell, there need to be special elections around the country in 2025, to take control of congress.

Perhaps, though I don't see how you're going to get them without changing or violating the Constitution. And changing the Constitution would mean acceptance by those you're trying to get rid of.

Bluntly, the only way this could happen is a civil war - a real, shooting civil war, with bullets and dead bodies. I'm not yet at the point of cheering for that, much as I dislike the current status quo.

> Republican senators and congressfolk are threatened by the voting base if they break with Trump, which they wont anyway.

Then I don't see how a special election in 2025 would help. You say we need a special election to get rid of these folks, but you also say that these folks would be threatened by the voting base if they break with Trump - which to me means that they won't be threatened by the voting base if they stick with Trump.

So I don't think your point 4 offers any hope at all.

[bilbo0s]

Glad someone said it.

A special election is a dumb idea.