It feels like every pick of this administration is just someone who has a motivation for corruption.
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The examples are all just so disgustingly blatant now, like Eric Adams in NYC, or the founder of Nikola paying millions in bribes (err, sorry, "campaign donations") to get a pardon.
Our republic may survive the current administration (not sure, probably give it less than a 50% chance these days), but the facade of our righteousness is gone forever. Trump won the election fair and square, and both the electoral college and the popular vote. People knew exactly what they were getting, and they wanted this.
The Fed chairman is going to make a speech in 10 min, and the US President is currently live on his social platform accusing him of playing Politics. You will then achieve the same level of governance as Türkiye.
My read is the election was a rejection of globalist neoliberal capitalism and Trump was the closest choice to that. If the democrats had run someone who was even willing to lie about making changes for regular people they would have won easily.
once the world was willing to forgive, but twice is a pattern that can't be ignored
the 97% of the rest of the world now needs to de-risk itself from the US and its businesses
longer term, the self-inflicted loss of economic, military and cultural domination will hopefully result in the US electorate realising that "US exceptionalism" was only ever a set of lucky circumstances, which are unlikely to be repeated
at which point the forced humility should result in a return to long-term stability
the worse outcome is the US attempts to hang onto its dying empire with warfare, and it appears we're seeing the groundwork being laid for this already (canada, greenland, panama, ...)
I think most will not have the will once they steel the cost. I know this forum loves to prognosticate but the right thing is what one must do to survive.
if you're a government it's quite easy to "encourage" it to occur
example: "US cloud provider revenue levy", starting at 0%, increasing 1% each month until 40%
the aim being to add a large risk premium to all purchases of US cloud services, encouraging companies to switch to domestic suppliers
the EU is already publicly talking about retaliating in this manner
They have an agenda that is based on errors, ignorance, and being manipulated by parties that are adversaries to America and democracy. Soon this will be irrecoverable within this generation, at least.
People have the mistaken belief that things are bad right now. They can get drastically worse.
I think the rest of the world is just dealing with the reality that the US is now an unreliable partner and cannot be trusted. In the face of that, yes, I agree that most of them won't dump the US immediately with big fanfare, but they will start to decouple in the background where it matters - making trade deals that exclude the US, building real incentives for the intelligentsia to stay away from the US (though the US is already doing a fairly decent job of that themselves), taking more responsibility for their own defense, etc.
I mean, look what happened to Vietnam and Israel. They capitulated in the face of the tariff threat and removed their tariffs on US imports, and they still got hit with some of the highest (or, it Vietnam's case, the highest) tariff rates. Europe has already realized (and this is a good thing and a long time coming IMO) that they need to rebuild their defense capacity because they can't depend on the US.
So no, I don't believe it will happen immediately, but I also believe that over the longer term (5-10-15 years) that decoupling from the US is inevitable solely because not doing that will be more difficult for other countries.
> "Everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the Indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions," he said.
> His decision to drop the case permanently, Judge Ho said, ensured that the administration could not use the indictment as "leverage" over Adams or the city of New York.
[1] "...The relevant legislation holds that a member of the Federal Reserve board may be “removed for cause by the president”. But in this context, courts have interpreted “for cause” to refer to misconduct or impropriety. The president cannot remove the members of the board purely for policy or political reasons.
However, Trump could attempt to demote Powell from chair to an ordinary member of the Federal Reserve, and put another candidate in charge. Here, there is less of a legal precedent. Previous presidents have always assumed they did not have the power to do this..."
[1] https://theconversation.com/trump-has-threatened-to-fire-the...
Trump will try to replace Powell extra-constitutionally and at this point, I suspect he may succeed. It will be close to the lights going out at that point.
I live in NYC, and I have triple-checked to make sure that I will be able to vote in the primary to try and avoid him getting the democrat nomination, and this is the first time in my life that I've genuinely considered voting Republican if he does manage to get the nomination.