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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   31926 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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Broadly I have concluded that the main problem the US faces is racism towards the Chinese; the ill-earned sense of centrality and irreplaceability.

My thesis is that in picking this fight, Americans don't understand that they're actually not that big of a deal. Unfortunately, their delusions are globally shared and become reality in their own right. But perhaps not enough to offset the gross physical one.

People do keep pointing out that Trump has had this fixation with tariffs and the US being screwed by the world for so long that Japan was his original target.

I have wondered if he simply slid China into that same niche and never updated anything else.

This whole thing is demented but if you imagine Trump is still in the 80s or 90s in his head fighting the trade war he never got to fight then, it makes a bit more sense.

This would actually make more sense yes. Allegedly, Trump’s Love for Tariffs Began in Japan’s ’80s Boom:

WASHINGTON — Donald J. Trump lost an auction in 1988 for a 58-key piano used in the classic film “Casablanca” to a Japanese trading company representing a collector. While he brushed off being outbid, it was a firsthand reminder of Japan’s growing wealth, and the following year, Mr. Trump went on television to call for a 15 percent to 20 percent tax on imports from Japan.

“I believe very strongly in tariffs,” Mr. Trump, at the time a Manhattan real estate developer with fledgling political instincts, told the journalist Diane Sawyer, before criticizing Japan, West Germany, Saudi Arabia and South Korea for their trade practices. “America is being ripped off,” he said. “We’re a debtor nation, and we have to tax, we have to tariff, we have to protect this country.”

Thirty years later, few issues have defined Mr. Trump’s presidency more than his love for tariffs — and on few issues has he been more unswerving. Allies and historians say that love is rooted in Mr. Trump’s experience as a businessman in the 1980s with the people and money of Japan, then perceived as a mortal threat to America’s economic pre-eminence.

That's from 2019. If China is just a stand-in for Japan (which he also tariffed anyway), it is no wonder that he acts so brazenly. You can bully Japan with no repercussions. He can finally get back at them for that piano humiliation.

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