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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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I can understand that some say nothing against Trump because of loyalty. But allowing tariffs destroying economy? That is borderline to treason against the USA. Most likely they are not competent and don't even understand that.

My hypothesis is Trump did not think the stock market would react as negatively as it did, so he has since backtracked.

It is quite an indictment of the Trump administration's competence for them to not know the stock market would respond like that. We'll see if we get anywhere on retreat. April 9 changed the flavor, but not the severity, of the damage. The small shift toward sanity on car parts is good news, but we still have the Section 232s looming over a lot of things, Trump getting played by China, and the 10% tariffs that seemingly are not going to go away.

Trump had made it abundantly clear during campaign and after winning that there would be tariffs, and even when he floated some tariffs in January 2025 and Feb against Mexico and Canada , the stock market brushed it off, only to crash a month ago. The market seemed to have no problem with tariffs until only a month ago.

The market didn't believe it would actually happen until a month ago!

Imagine you knew in advance that covid restrictions would get introduced all around the world in 2020. Would you predict that the stock market goes down? Of course, you would.

I happen to believe that these restrictions were mostly unnecessary and due to overreaction. But at least covid was real to elderly and risk groups. Increased mortality among them was real due to covid (but also from misapplied restrictions).

Even if covid wasn't real and it was all Chinese hoax the same restrictions would have caused stock market to drop.

Tariffs are exactly like that. If you knew in advance that such tariffs would get implemented, you could bet safely that the stock market is going to react very negatively. That they are introduced to imaginary problem, doesn't change their effects.

Eventually people will have enough and will remove Trump from office and it will recover. I predict that Elon Musk will come out as a winner despite all his mistakes because he seems to be the one disagreeing with Trump (by openly stating that he wishes for zero tariffs between Europe). His loyalty to free market will be rewarded in long term even if we don't see how it could happen now.