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The week's question
In March 2025, in the thread "Re: OT, out", Umm asked the members: "Do you think it is because America is made up of magical soil that makes businesses based in America magically profitable?" This week it is put to everyone again. The button below opens the small thread re-asking it - read what others have said so far, then give your own answer as an ordinary reply.
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Author: albaby1 ✶❂🐝 GOLD
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Number: of 86282 
Subject: Re: war with Denmark or Panama??
Date: 01/08/25 12:48 PM
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Actually, The Thing is people claiming T doesn't mean anything he says and then gloming on to any development they think is positive and that becomes one of his goals. He meant to do that. And anything negative that happens is attributed to the Dems.

This. Trump is unafraid of speaking extemporaneously on anything that comes to mind, and relatively unfiltered when he does. He loves throwing spaghetti against the wall, so to speak. And then he loves drawing circles around the bullet holes, to use another metaphor. If anything positive happens any time after he's muddled about on a topic, he can take credit for it; if anything negative happens, he'll ignore it or blame it on something else.

More generally, while most politicians (and most recent Democrats like Biden and Harris) are order muppets, Trump is a chaos muppet. He genuinely believes that stirring the pot and shaking things up and acting unexpectedly and "disorderly" (not meant as a disparagement, just a description) leads to positive outcomes. He doesn't seem to credit the conventional wisdom that reliability and predictability from the Executive (at least on foreign policy matters) is necessarily a good thing.

His supporters and his critics will (inevitably) view the results differently. Critics, like myself, view what Trump is doing as burning decades of accumulated American investments in building up bilateral alliances with foreign partners (like Canada or the EU) in exchange for some short term gains. We're much stronger than any of our allies, so there's always some near-term benefit to our being willing to flex our muscles and rattle our sabers against them, and not just our geopolitical adversaries (especially since they don't really have many sabers to speak of). But the downside to that is that those allies then stop regarding the U.S. as a dependable or reliable partner, they start treating us that way and building up their own sabers and muscles, and we find ourselves in a world with fewer reliable friends and fewer countries that really need us.
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This community has written 86,214 posts about US Policy. The article-length ones it recommended most:
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