It blows my mind. I know several otherwise intelligent people who consume Fox News and think anything negative said about this guy is proof of media bias. It’s a weird feedback loop where any criticism results in people trusting him more.

Yet he’s a president. For the second time!

It is that but it's also the opposite of that at the same time — he wants big businesses to own things but he thinks the government should have a cut. It's the state as protection racket.

He's argued for it for a long time, now he's actually doing it through state thuggishness, but his enthusiasm for it makes him vulnerable to lobbying from Sam Altman and OpenAI, who would actually benefit, and appear to have softened him up on the idea that the USA should have a 5% share of OpenAI.

(OpenAI's 5% gambit, I think, is because they'd prefer he asks for 10%, and reckon he'll try to get one over on them by pushing for that)

Sometimes things look clearer from the distance.

let’s see during next elections

Trump may be untouchable (and he is decaying too fast to really experience what consequences could reach him) but I think someone may go to prison for that scheme. It's just astonishing.

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One fascinating small indication is the relatively underreported machinations in the last couple of weeks where the USA has been selling billions of its Euro holding, without any co-ordination with the ECB, to buy Yen, so that the Japanese don't sell US bonds to get out of a hole, which would be bad for the USA.

Also the brinkmanship in the way Bessent "announced" that, without announcing it formally, by writing down his plan to do so clearly on a notepad so a reporter would photograph it, which is something he has already said he's done before and, to my mind, comes across as beyond childish.

The EU apparently is furious and considers this reckless, and the strategy itself is incredibly time-limited because they will soon enough run out of Euros to sell. And then what? Japan liquidates its US treasury bonds anyway and the USA has burned another bridge with Europe.

Just a small, self-contained example of the USA acting without care or co-operation internationally. And yet Trump has repeatedly threatened consequences if the EU sells US treasury bonds in response to the tariffs.

Nothing about the USA speaks of the kind of trust you need in a country and its currency for it to be the de facto global reserve currency. Though whether the world actually makes any change there in my lifetime, who knows; there's an enormous amount of inertia to overcome.