Maybe going forward there must be safeguards against power accumulation. The checks and balances obviously didn't work, so something more potent is needed.
In Europe it took Putin, Erdogan and the others 20 years to come the place where Trump reached in less than a years, so US needs it much more acutely obviously.
BTW this is not only about protecting the society from their existence but also protect the society from their sudden disappearance. With such concentration of power, the power of the nation often dies with those people. If they survive long enough to transition power peacefully, the best they can do is to leave it to their son and their sons often turns out to inherit the brutalities without the skills.
That said, it doesn't seem to me that reform has been meaningfully attempted yet. It isn't reasonable to blame the establishment for blocking a reform that never got organized to begin with.
Presumably if there were concrete proposals with broad popular support intended to fix lobbying, gerrymandering, first past the post, and the information environment in general then we should see them implemented at the state level here and there. But we don't.
The only ones that could cause change needed to reform their representation in the political system is the people. The incumbents have no incentive to do it.
Trump is a symptom of this failure of political culture too.
America will be judged by its own demonic standards. The standard by which they justified their participation in the Holocaust of Gaza ("they voted for it").
Why are the US people the cause?
And then we will talk about structural issues, to do with social mobility, education, a dysfunctional journalistic landscape, a tribalization of the political landscape and so on. But of course it doesn't stop there. You can go one up:
Why did these underlying causes came to be?
The simple answer is that a certain loose conglomerate of polticians, billionaires and CEOs thought it would profit them (it did). You can pick one of the issues mentioned above and go deep on why it is in the bad shape it is today and the answer will always boil down to lobbying and money in politics.
This are the much more insightful reasons and you get there just by asking "but why?" two times like a yound child. Totally recommended.
And here you take the easy way out. Just blame third parties. You should keep asking why to find the real cause.
My personal take, as someone who is European but has lived in the US, Texas metro areas specifically, is that first past the post elections sow division.
Choices are limited, political activity is neutered, and extremism builds until it finds an outlet through either of the two possible political choices. Taking over that side entirely.
Political systems needs vents for frustration, and the US system does not have that.
Which finally leads to the people.
The only ones that could cause change needed to reform their representation in the political system is the people.
Out of curiosity since you made this claim and said you're european, where are the EU vents of frustration that the US lacks?
Because I see it differently. Trump IS the frustration vent itself but people refuse to acknowledge this and look for something else to blame as if people shouldn't be allowed to use their vote for a crazy candidate as a vent of frustration, and the frustration vent should be a virtually inexistent token piece.
Proportional representation definitely helps here. You could look at the UK as a good counter-example, where the UKIP (a Brexit supporting party) got like 15% of the votes in the 2015 election, and no seats. Where people see that voting doesn't change anything, they'll look for some other way to effect change.
That being said, PR doesn't really appear to be working that well. I (personally) think that a lot of the issues relate to free flows of capital across the world, which leads businesses to be set up in areas of cheap labour, which makes people in developed countries angry and more likely to vote for anyone who'll promise to fix it (regardless of how insane their ideas are).
But it's complicated, monocausal explanations are typically deceptive.
With this logic doesn't the US have proportional representation as well? Didn't Trump win the popular vote and republicans the senate? The majority of voters won, end of story, and the ones who lost have another chance in 3 years to flip the board. Where exactly is the missing vent valve you were talking about?
>think that a lot of the issues relate to free flows of capital across the world, which leads businesses to be set up in areas of cheap labour, which makes people in developed countries angry and more likely to vote for anyone who'll promise to fix it
Well yeah that's the big issue, but nobody will win the elections by saying they are slaves of the capital class and doesn't matter who you vote for as they are powerless to change the crooked financial system that actually runs the world even if they win the elections since the finance systems globally connected and easily moves to the areas with most stability and tax benefits even if they are undemocratic.
Proportional representation has advantages but comes with its own complexities. However there are also other voting systems (such as ranked) that offer different tradeoffs independent of proportional representation. There are a lot of options out there and pretty much all of them would be more functional than what we use in the US.
About the only thing our system has going for it is that someone with an IQ well below 100 can still fully understand and even help audit it. (Or at least that used to be the case before electronic voting machines started appearing.)
We are also seeing for example France and the UK dealing with the same problem as the US due to its lackluster electoral system. Not allowing any vents.
The UK venting became Brexit, and then never went away and is today Reform.
The venting becomes a spectrum. One extreme is the US with large constituencies and first past the post voting. Where any vote made by the heart is discouraged.
A little bit less extreme is Australia. Still single member constituencies but you are encouraged to vote first with your heart, and then with your brain. Leading to representation heavily weighted towards the incumbents but some representation for the issues people truly care about.
Then you have proportional parliamentary systems. Here you decide what level of venting you need based on the percentage requirements to enter the parliament.
In Sweden it is 4% of national vote or 12% of a constituency. Single question parties generally need to broaden their spectrum but will get in if enough people care.
In the Netherlands it is 0.67% and you have a flourishing of parties but problems forming coalitions.
Personally I would say - do local constituencies so geographical areas are represented and pick a percentage which works for you.
Pick 10% and you focus on executive action. Pick 1% and you focus on the town hall of messages. But don't pick something where no vent is possible, like first past the post systems.
(1) I did not say one needs to stop where I stopped and (2) I did not talk about how blame is distributed between those layers. Any view that only the root cause layers can be blamed is too simplistic, since you can always go one layer higher. In reality blame is much more complex and the layers are not clearly separable either, as they can have cyclic dependencies feeding into each other.
So in your example there is a design issue of a political system leading to an outcome, that produces a certain culture which makes it hard to change above mentioned political system. People are a part of that and it is true that if all people just were to know this and stand up for it that would be easily fixable. But in the same moment the people broadly are the way they are because of the systems they grew up in and if that system was different you wouldn't have the problem either.
So who is to blame? Depends on what you're after personally and whst you think an effective strategy for getting there is. I think getting rid of incentives that lead to negative political outcomes is a good thing and effective way to change society. Much more effective than begging people to think a certain way.
The reason they don't is that they know that they will get primaried and lose their seat for someone more aligned with the people and Trump.
Primaries are kinda insane though. It basically means that a small minority of voters control who actually is allowed to stand for election under a party banner. Like, I understand how it ended up this way, but it's having really bad consequences.
That being said, if you could fix gerrymandering, a lot of the issues with primaries go away, as there would be more competition in the actual election which would dis-incentivise proposing extremist candidates in the primary.
So an ally is irrelevant.
People wonder why the EU is built the way it is, and behaves the way it does. It's precisely to avoid this. To bind Germany and France together and avoid the big powers treating smaller neighbors like this. I guess that's bad to some people.
This is not a trade dispute over something signed last summer. It's a lot bigger than that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_foreign_e...
The fact that the DoJ is not an independent institution unlike in almost every other western country makes it impossible to uphold the law if the white house doesn't want to. The only thing preventing a sitting president from going after his political enemies is a "gentleman's agreement" between administrations in the United States.
Stability it key and there isn't any as we can see clearly.
He will do whatever he is told to do by the likes of Peter Thiel & co.
Recent example is how they are using Erika Kirk (she appears to play along quite well) https://www.foxnews.com/politics/vance-trump-jrs-plans-bolst...
https://orf.at/stories/3417584/
I doubt Trump would have ever even thought of Greenland on his own. I think was told about it, and the narrative planted in his head deliberately.
This focus on "Trump" in Internet comments and media irks me to no end. Trump is not a failure and not the wrong person in the job - he is ideal for those behind him. The money does not like public attention.
(Yes the president can't tell Greenland from Iceland, but neither half of those "tech bros" who failed geography at school
New trade relationships are being forged surprisingly quickly in the midst of all this. Anyone have a list of what's been recently announced? I can think of Mercator, EU-India, Canada-??...
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... ("Glossary:Mercosur")
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerardus_Mercator ("Gerardus Mercator")
But yeah, there will be some urgency now. In times of need, people find out that all the "necessary" bureaucracy isn't really that necessary. War or threat of war is the only thing stronger than red tape.
(For an analogy, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Germany put most of its regulations aside to build some infrastructure for import of liquified gas in mere 6 weeks or so. The same infrastructure, under peace conditions, would take some 10 years to litigate against every NIMBY and eco-organization out there.)
There are still farmer protests here in France every day against this deal. There will be a lot of pressure on French MEPs to vote against it when it goes to the EP for the final vote.
IDK man, I feel like supporting the local farming industry is a pretty important strategic move, even if it's a loss leader.
We already offshored manufacturing, energy supply and IT to our "allies" in the past and it's biting us in the ass right now.
Do we really want to repeat the same mistake again with food?
And yes, I get that food is important. Maybe the answer would be to unburden them from European regulations, which are pretty onerous. The few people active in agriculture I know complain about insane paper wars with authorities all the time.
One farmer I know got a hefty fine for building an impromptu shed for extra kids that were born beyond the expected count. Why are we doing this to ourselves, to 'secure our food'?
Yes. The need to feed one's self and family is pretty historically important going back since we were primordial organisms to medieval times when if peasants didn't have food they'd riot and behead the king.
>European regulations, which are pretty onerous.
Onerous regulations that seek to prevent ... checks notes ... the use of slave labor and chemicals that damage human health and the environment. But sure, let's bypass all that and import food from countries that use slave labor and toxic pesticides while the EU virtue signals on Twatter how their mission is protecting humans from racism and exploitation and saving the environment, but apparently apart from those in countries where we import our food from, there they can do whatever exploitation they want as long as they give us cheap stuff. It's not hypocritical at all.
Definitely not gonna bite us in the ass in 10+ years time when the leader of one of those countries with a shaky track record on democracy and human rights, decides to weaponize our food dependence on them to gain some advantages or just mow down some more the Amazon for profit while killing the indigenous, and all the EU is gonna do is write a sternly worded X post about "carefully monitoring the situation" at best, or at worst turn a blind eye and pretend a genocide isn't happening, just like they did with Azerbaijan's bombing of Nagorno-Karabakh because they were now dependent on Azerbaijani gas after giving up on Russian gas in 2022.
Stupid EU regulations or not, giving up sovereignty on energy and food supply to third parties is bad idea all of the time, because it's guaranteed to be weaponized against you at some point.
>One farmer I know got a hefty fine for building an impromptu shed for extra kids that were born beyond the expected count.
Sounds like a local council, conty or national issue to me, not an EU issue.
So is, say, the need to defend yourself, but would you be happy about the military holding the same amount of de-facto power in the EU as the farmers do? Or would you consider it excessive?
"the use of slave labor and chemicals that damage human health and the environment."
So, there is no unnecessary regulation in your view? All of them are very virtuous and protect us all against horrible things? And as a consequence, the more, the better?
If so, how come that their level can vary from country A to country B and yet country B doesn't suffer an epidemic of grisly deaths?
Nope, not all regulations are necessary and not every one of them is virtuous and good. Some are just a byproduct of the office needing to show some activity and keeping their budget.
"Sounds like a local council issue to me, not an EU issue."
Because you are uninformed. She wasn't fined by the local council, which DGAF about an improvised shed with no fixed foundation. She was fined by authorities overseeing agricultural regulations, because that shed meant that she exceeded the allowed extent of her facilities for goats by half a square meter. (Five square feet for USians.)
Why are you making it sound like the issue is binary?
>Some are just a byproduct of the office needing to show some activity and keeping their budget.
Agree.
>She was fined by authorities overseeing agricultural regulations
Were those authorities doing the inspection from the EU or the local nation?
Because your declaration about the regulations seeking to protect us from big evil sounded quite absolutist in itself.
A bit of a motte-and-bailey. Some of them are undoubtedly good, some less so, and we shouldn't lobotomize ourselves by immediately dragging slavery out when starting discussions about the current regulatory level.
"Were those authorities doing the inspection from the EU or the local nation?"
EU law gets transposed into national laws of the constituent nations and local authorities then enforce it, but it is still EU law.
It is very different from the US where state authorities aren't tasked by enforcing federal regulations, because the Feds have their own enforcement infrastructure.
Compared to the US, EU-own enforcement infrastructure is tiny and mostly outsourced to local governments.
I didn't mean it to be absolutist. But then riddle me this, if the EU regulations are the problem holding us back, why not get rid of some of them to boosts domestic production, and instead kneecap our agriculture industry with regulations and make ourselves dependent on imports from potential adversaries who don't follow our regulations?
Because I don't see the logic behind this being an advantage for us. It makes the EU incompetent at best, or malicious at workst.
>EU law gets transposed into national laws of the constituent nations and local authorities then enforce it, but it is still EU law.
Yeah but enforcement is still local. A lot of countries choose to be very lax with enforcing some EU laws if the laws are stupid and nobody's getting hurt. So ultimately it's still the fault of the local nation for being overly pedantic with enforcement.
Blaming EU laws for local issues, is the ultimate cope the UK also tried, and once they left the EU, their problems persisted, because guess what, their issues were all domestically inflicted by local politics and not coming from the EU as they claimed.
What's the point of all this? Aren't they all supposed to be just elected officials, and with the help of admin, supposed to just do their jobs?
I know I sound naive, I know it's more than this. I know interpersonal relationships matter and that's what these "contacts" are. But if all this can be thrown away by the actions of the few, what's the point of all this effort? Just simplify the entire structure, slash all this admin to the bare bones and let the people at the top show their competency, instead of the admin covering for them.
You wouldn't replace the entire CIA with political appointees every 4-8 years would you?
The CDC will need people that remember COVID in 30 years, will it not?
Surely, the delegation to Tehran should have some people that speak Farsi and have known their counterparts for 15-20 years, right?
The people at the top can't possibly have institutional knowledge for all the institutions under their control. Even a statesman like George H. W. Bush only has institutional knowledge for one branch of the military and the CIA. Should we have shown his competency in the affairs of the state department, department of energy, education, FBI, etc.?
Don't break the law. It's simple.
Personally I like the way Qatari’s Energy Minister Saad al-Kaabi put it[2]:
> “If the case is that I lose 5% of my generated revenue by going to Europe, I will not go to Europe," Al-Kaabi reportedly said in reference to the associated penalties back in December 2024. "I’m not bluffing.”
Now you might be thinking, well who cares? It’s Qatar! Well Qatar also supplies about 12 to 14% of Europe’s LNG imports. Europe could get that gas from elsewhere, but elsewhere kinda includes either America or Russia.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/qatars-energy-minist...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2025/08/06/europe-is...
Well, that's exactly what we're doing.
The sooner EU gets away from fossil fuels we do not have (except NO I suppose), the better for everyone.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
No one power controls all tech or markets. There are American and Chinese tech companies who are dependent on European tech companies (ASML being one of the better known examples).
The whole point of globalization is that we're all interdependent on each other.
All that being said: Europe has a ton of work to do. The spirit of your comment isn't entirely off the mark.
For every political squeeze EU can do, the US can squeeze 10x as hard.
ASML also has quite a lot of US suppliers. We are all tech dependent on each other, but China is working hard to fix that and the US also.
Treaties aren't the only mechanism of security guarantees.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/assu...
Qatar is a pure American vassal state.
I have read that narrative before, in fact it was just a few days ago when Trump lied that he will be forced to take Greenland because Denmark and Norway is pissing him off by withholding the strategic location of Greenland from him.
Same same.
Maybe we need to be more confrontational to assert our own borders and independence and stop trying to please autocrats and wannabe autocrats?
Unless of course it is your world view that the perceived weaker side has to eat it all up and show gratitude afterwards. On a human scale that is like telling the bullied kid to shut up and accept the beatings, not widely considered an ethically sound position.
What's your point?
~100 years ago the British Empire was the largest empire on earth, now it's an isolated island nobody gives a shit about, they should keep these things in mind while they're sabotaging their own soft power... There is a bakery older than their country in my home town in France
I wouldn't say pissing off, but more like 'not in a position for negotiations'. As we speak, EU is constantly slowing down their own companies while being fully dependant on US technology software and AI, being fully dependant on China's sources, chemicals, car-parts and batteries and importing (AFAIK still) Russian gas (which does not prevent german green activists from protesting against Polish gas-port). So welcome mr Trump, mr Xinping and mr Putin, which parts of our 'sovereign' conglomerate do you want to take?
NATO died when Europe decided to outsource defense wholesale to the US so that she could fund her retiree class, proudly advertising how she redistributes as much as possible to the aged while relying on America to defend her borders. The US could not bear that weight and now Europe must carry it on her own. Doubtless the French will riot in the streets as the retirement age rises so that France may sustain herself rather than live on someone else's dime. But if Europe wishes to be defended, then she must defend herself.
God helps those who help themselves.
It was the US that wholeheartedly sold quadrillions worth of armaments to the EU, in order to support the cold war remnants of its military industrial complex.
The "funding the retiree class" comment is simply silly, I will not even get baited.
Within North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the US provides most of:
- Strategic airlift (moving large forces quickly)
- Aerial refueling
- Missile defense
- Intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR)
- Command, control, and battle management
- Nuclear deterrence (via the US nuclear umbrella)
Europe can field armies, navies, and air forces, but large-scale, high-intensity war is much harder without the US.
Or compared to Supreme leader putin and his very successful strategic 3 days military operation?
The main issue is the way the transition is happening, because I see China doing exactly what we should be doing: build coal, nuclear, etc. while you build tons of solar panels or windfarms.
The self inflicting pain forced by radical ideas is what is killing Europe. We have lost the pragmatism that made Europe move at a crazy speed after WW2.
Radical ideology has taken over, rather than pragmatic ideas. I don't know how that happened, but I know we are paying the price for it, although EU is rich enough to do exactly what China is doing. That alone would put us in a better position.
By enforcing basic consumer protections like making sure airlines can't just unilaterally cancel your flight with no compensation? By making sure your image cannot be used by megacorporations for sex ads without permission? By making sure companies who intentionally or unintentionally leak personal information suffer consequences? By making sure European industry is powered by renewable energy? By not treating refugees like cattle? By making sure inmates have a chance to reintegrate into society, unlike the US who treats criminals as a pest? By ensuring American corporations follow European regulations when offering services to European consumers?
Can't think of a single instance where EU "fucked over" US in a manner that US was unfairly taken advantage of, really.
Obviously, this worldview is strategically myopic, based on ignoring many things the US was getting out of this arrangement, like US military bases in Europe (also used for power projection to the Middle East), Europeans buying US weapons (big part of why those weapons are so advanced), doing America's bidding in the UN, supporting US military adventures (however misguided) in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc.
It could be argued that the US role of being the security provider to Europe and others was the main source of their wealth and power. The US had the proverbial goose laying golden eggs, but Trump got angry that they had to shelter that goose, so he kicked her out... no goose would abuse the US like that!
Here is one example: Trump saying that the EU was formed to screw the United States: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kq28VSlvUw
As a European myself, I will support politicians with an uncompromising approach, no matter the cost.
- Foreign producers
- Domestic consumers
- Domestic companies (via lower profits)
Who pays more depends on bargaining power and market structure.
You are correct that importers pay tariffs on paper but that doesn’t always mean the tariffs are paid by the importers in real terms. Exporters may not want to change prices for competitiveness to local goods so in the end regardless of the actual invoice, the exporter is paying for those tariffs. You can find multiple exporters talking about absorbing those costs. I