US Politics, March 2018: Why do people leave the White House for good?

Navarro's views also appeal to his schoolyard-level zero-sum understanding of the world, which would also lead him to dismiss whatever exposure he may have had to standard trade theory

Nobody wants to buy American cars, they're hopelessly fuel inefficient...

"his schoolyard-level zero-sum understanding of the world"

A perspective we've come to learn has substantial electoral salience, especially among an an ideological-flexible but largely racially homogenous cohort of fellow members of the "poorly-educated"

Oh my god shut up

Wasn't it mentioned in this thread (for sure I read it somewhere) that since his first weeks in the White House people have been trying to explain trade to him, but it's just not taking.

Nobody wants to buy American cars, they're hopelessly fuel inefficient...

Actually, they've gotten much better, in part thanks to (yes) Obama.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-emissions/u-s-vehicle-fuel-economy-rises-to-record-24-7-mpg-epa-idUSKBN1F02BX

Some better-educated too

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/87dt3pDAgu4/hqdefault.jpg?sqp=-oaymwEWCKgBEF5IWvKriqkDCQgBFQAAiEIYAQ==&rs=AOn4CLDSQexNmxbMADNCm6td6I5D6zumzw
Moo

Surprised it took so long for Trump to start with the trade war stuff. Surprised he’s doing it in the post-Bannon era.

Loomis is rarely nuanced. Because he’s bad at it!

The most confusing lib post of the year. I'd had my morning coffee, exercised, and couldn't square it with the guy who posts This Day in Labor History shit.

wonder who's pushing him in this direction. a donor or someone in the admin?

kinda seems like the sort of thing a president shouldn't be able to do unilaterally

Actually, they've gotten much better, in part thanks to (yes) Obama.

Nobody wants to buy them anyway.

donor(s)

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-carl-icahn-trump-tariffs-20180302-story.html

xpost

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/25/navarro-trump-trade-tariffs-423462
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/25/us/politics/peter-navarro-trade.html

the sort of thing a president shouldn't be able to do unilaterally

If tariffs on particular commodities were taken back to the sole discretion of Congress, it wouldn't be much, if any, better. Just ruminate a moment on how Congress works and this becomes more apparent. Once you've handed the decision over to the executive branch, it is unavoidably handed directly to the POTUS, because of how the executive branch works. The current POTUS is just an outlier when it comes to his tiny-handed grasp of economic policy -- or any other government policy, for that matter.

Of course, Trump doesn’t get that European cars sold in the states mainly built in Chattanooga (VW), Spartanburg (BMW)and Birmingham (Mercedes).

fuck VW for moving out of new stanton

And Sony and me for that matter. It started as a Chrysler plant but hey never even got as far as pouring concrete for the floors.

maybe they're sick of paying for their employees' health insurance in backassward USA

people don't buy american cars outside the US because, outside the amazon reviews for household gadgets written by people who are worried about "toxins", "made in the USA" is not a synonym for quality and hasn't been for 50+ years.

you guys actually bother to ever look stuff up?

This statistic illustrates the number of cars sold by Ford in the United Kingdom (UK) between January 2014 and December 2017. With more than 333 thousand units sold, Ford was the biggest car seller in the UK in 2015.In 2016, the sales numbers dropped from the previous year but Ford continued to perform as one of the strongest car manufacturer in the UK, selling more than 318 thousand cars in 2016. The much higher sales in March and September, as well as the lower sales in February and August, can be accounted for by the new registration plates which are issued in the former pair of months.
In 2017, Ford kicked of the year with a strong sales performance in January 2017, selling more than 22,700 cars in the UK. In March, they sold the most cars during the period in question, 71,837 cars.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/475637/vehicle-sales-of-ford-in-leading-countries/

Ford during the 2017 fiscal year, broken down by leading countries. In that year, China sold over 1.2 million Ford cars and trucks; it is the carmaker's second-largest market in terms of sales.

Interestingly Ford (like Heinz) is one of those American brands that has painted itself as British for generations. (Not that Ford has made any cars in the UK for years).

Is that American Ford though? Xp

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_of_Britain

iirc when I was there I remember seeing the Ford Fusion before it was in The US and some other UK specific models I'd never seen

Ford of Britain (officially Ford Motor Company Limited)[note 1] is a British wholly owned subsidiary of Blue Oval Holdings, itself a subsidiary of Ford International Capital LLC, which is a subsidiary of Ford Motor Company[2].

Yeah, but if I were to go out and buy a ford tomorrow, it wouldn't come from the US

And if I went out and bought a Toyota, it wouldn't come from Japan.

these last few posts of discussion are more than trump has thought about this

It’s almost like he automotive industry is a complex global structure that can only exist because of a complex international trade in goods and services.

🤯

Fucking globalist auto industry.

🤔 https://t.co/0GMU59wNau

— Renato Mariotti (@renato_mariotti) March 3, 2018

That linked article is epic.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/politics/pure-madness-dark-days-inside-the-white-house-as-trump-shocks-and-rages/2018/03/03/9849867c-1e72-11e8-9de1-147dd2df3829_story.html

"‘Pure madness’: Dark days inside the White House as Trump shocks and rages"

fwiw Fords are like the only American cars i see in London ever. i see a lot of them though.

fwiw ford of britain makes completely different vehicles to those ford makes in the US, and ford's UK marketing goes to lengths to disassociate it with the parent company, to the extent that it wouldn't occur to most british people that it's a company with a US connection unless you reminded them of "henry ford". same goes for vauxhall/opel, which was owned by GM until last year, but you wouldn't have known it from the cars they made or how they marketed them.

very very occasionally you'd see a PT cruiser in the UK but i think they gave up selling them.

I've read 18 Trump in Turmoil stories since April 2017. I don't give a shit until and if the Dems take over. I assume Mueller's smart enough to delay serious charges until then cuz nothing will happen so long as Ryan is speaker.

(re the photo of him waving off the boom mikes, from that WaPo article linked in the link in the tweet JiC posted)

One hopes that his historically horrible and broadly despised tenure might finally put several of the necessary and long-overdue nails in the coffin of that particularly ugly, conformist, obsolete & just plain fucking sad approach to "professional" menswear that his shitty daily choices exemplify

Are the Ford Fiesta, the Focus, the Mondeo and the Kuga American cars though? On the proviso that I know nothing about cars, Ford in the UK and Europe used to design and manufacture cars that were totally different from the gas guzzling phalluses they designed and manufactured for the US market - is that still the case?

FWIW, key crazy takeaway:

Trump has been asking people close to him whether they think Kushner or his company has done anything wrong, according to a senior administration official. Two advisers said the president repeatedly tells aides that the Russia investigation will not ensnare him — even as it ensnares others around him — and that he thinks the American people are finally starting to conclude that the Democrats, as opposed to his campaign, colluded with the Russians.

(Oops, caek has covered this already) (xp)

i owned a ford focus for ~10yrs

i'm american btw

fwiw ford of britain makes completely different vehicles to those ford makes in the US

this is a pretty stupid discussion to be having on a board where almost nobody gives a shit about cars, BUT ACTUALLY Ford started pushing the same bodies and vehicle types in all of their markets worldwide several years ago which is why you can find the Transit and Fusion on at least three continents now, and they do well pretty much everywhere. A cursory fucking google and wikipedia browsing session reveals this.

The reason I care if the president is having problems is that he is still the president, and just as he started trade wars (with allies!) against the wishes of his advisers and without anyone knowing he was going to do it until he did it, he could do other shit, too. Remember, 100 years ago, when he began a tweet with some somber "My fellow Americans, I have decided ..." tone, and then there was a long break, and then he announced, apropos of nothing that he wanted to ban transgender troops? Against the wishes of his military and with no one knowing that was coming? And that, for those few minutes in between tweets, some people thought maybe we were about to go to war? There are 8 fucking months until November.

Interestingly Ford (like Heinz) is one of those American brands that has painted itself as British for generations. (Not that Ford has made any cars in the UK for years).

― American Fear of Pranksterism (Ed)

mostly because of douglas adams

Three days late, but excellent thread title.

at what point can they outsource "chaos in the whitehouse" stories to chuck tingle? because it's just mad libs (uh, no pun intended) at this point, no?