If there are 12 people eating dinner and laughing with a racist there are 13 racists on the table.

Why is VAT so hard to understand for otherwise literate Americans?

China just needs to do what Trump wants and refuse to export things to the US for a week or two. That should be enough for the people bankrolling Trump to get rid of him.

How’s the leopard treating you, Bill?

The problem is that this is screwing the restaurants too, either through reputation damage or through empty tables if the scalpers don’t manage to sell the reservation on time.

So, what’s he going to do about it?

0% tariffs

Sounds reasonable, we just need to set some ground rules.

Free trade area with the United States of Chlorinated Chicken

Ha ha ha, fuck no.

First, do what experts were saying and say this is stupid. But since they seemed primed for bullshit, the most obvious would be to take the explicit tariffs on US products, use any of a number of ways to calculate the impact of non-tariff barriers that actually make sense, and sum both of them. And then set the formula on fire because tariff wars are stupid.

Because inflation applies to all products equally and there aren’t ever relative adjustments /s

Thousands of years you say? That sounds Mexican to the ICEstapo.

Nothing and everything. That’s the point.

One key part of having a sustainable dictatorship is applying rules arbitrarily, so most people aren’t affected until they are.

*illegal immigrants, according to the ICE

That’s the “trick” Trump regime is trying to go for. Claim only American citizens have right to due process, and then they will be able to remove anyone they want because no one will have the right to prove they are not immigrants.

The Trump administration got a human trafficker in Romanian custody free for some vacations in the US. That’s the only thing I have to say about the US and people in foreign custody.

The US interferes with foreign custody regularly, both through legal and illegal channels. The judge will only accept the excuse if he’s dumb.

Revolutions need organization. Organization needs third spaces were people can meet, discuss, and organize. Most of the US has basically no third spaces outside of churches, and this is very much by design.

The thing is that when he says Soros he doesn’t mean Soros, he means something that would make him sound even more like a Nazi.

You misunderstand how most dictatorships work. You either crown someone absolute king - and there’s less than a handful of them - or you pretend to work within a constitutional framework which is the most popular form of dictatorship by far and the only realistic option in the US, at least for now. The latter introduces limits to what a dictator can do without breaking the illusion that everything is working as it should.

I can’t overstate how much effort the garden variety dictatorship puts into making everything seem “business as usual”.

If Trump goes there he might as well try to formally replace the entire constitution.

I know this one! What’s the last sentence of 12th amendment?

Of course there will be elections. Very few dictatorship skip elections outright nowadays.

I suspect that in some countries supermarket cartels are using the American egg shortage being in the news to increase their margins.