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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/29381241
Donald Trump has threatened to place a 100 percent tariff on Barbie maker Mattel, after the company’s CEO said it would continue to manufacture outside the U.S. but would be reducing its reliance on Chinese imports.
“I’ve heard [Mattel] said: ‘Well we’re going to go counter, we’re going to try going someplace else,’” Trump said in the Oval Office on Thursday. “That’s OK, let him go, and we’ll put a 100 percent tariff on his toys, and he won’t sell one toy in the United States, and that’s their biggest market.”
In an interview with CNBC on Tuesday, Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz was asked whether it would be cheaper to relocate some manufacturing to the U.S. due to the tariffs, but responded: “We don’t see that happening.”
Once again, Donny-Dumbfuck doesn’t understand how the business world works. Expecting someone to spend tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars to move their manufacturing to the US…just so that they can lose money on their product…is insane.
He knows how this works.
However, some of his audience in the US does not, and he’s exploiting that ignorance.
What he’s doing is just creating this fictional narrative where he’s always being seen as fighting against some enemy that’s keeping the US from being exactly the way his target audience wants it to be. It’s not Trump’s fault. He’s pushing as hard as possible to make everything perfect. It’s <some other figure>.
A couple of years back, when Venezuela didn’t pay some Portuguese company for ham, they stopped shipping ham until they got paid. Maduro went out and accused Portugal of attacking Venezuela.
https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/28/americas/venezuela-portugal-christmas-sabotage/index.html
Every problem is someone else’s fault, not Maduro’s, who is fighting his very hardest for the public. Maybe it’s the CIA. Maybe it’s reactionaries. But it most certainly is someone else. Every problem just requires a new story about how someone is countering the Supreme Leader’s effort, else everything would be perfect.
We just aren’t used to seeing this kind of stuff from a US President. Trump, however, is doing the same sort of nonsense.
Consider some of the following recent Trump stuff:
Trump is considering suspending habeas corpus. The Trump administration is intentionally exploiting confusion over the metaphorical word “invasion” and the legal term. So then he’s going to probably go declare suspension of habeas corpus, which he can’t do short of someone invading, and then a judge is going to shoot it down, and the Trump will go tell his base that the judges are chaining him down, even though he had every right to do this, and if it weren’t for radical leftist judges, there would be no illegal immigrants.
Trump warns U.S. carmakers not to take advantage of tariffs by hiking prices on consumers. Trump knows perfectly well that companies hit by tariffs are going to pass that on into price increases for consumers. But some people in the US don’t, so by publicly standing up and demanding this, he can exploit that ignorance, show himself as standing up for consumers and random companies being the bad guy.
The political strategy is to always pass the buck off to someone else, and try to get as many people as possible to burn their own credibility supporting his false claims so that he doesn’t run out of credibility.