Comment by cwal37

And as a fellow Greek man said, "Just because you do not take an interest in politics, it does not mean politics won't take an interest in you".

Well wasnt that a good thing?

After the extermination of Melos they could credibly say they were less responsible for the actions of the polis.

And had a higher chance of deflecting the inevitable revenge on to the non idiotes Athenians.

Trump in 1987 in a full page ad in the New York Times: "It's time for us to end our vast deficits by making Japan, and others who can afford it, pay. Our world protection is worth hundreds of billions of dollars to these countries, and their stake in their protection is far greater than ours. ... Tax these wealthy nations, not America. End our huge deficits, reduce our taxes, and let America's economy grow unencumbered by the cost of defending those who can easily afford to pay us for the defense of their freedom. Let's not let our great country be laughed at anymore."

Trump in 1989 talking to Diane Sawyer: "he would impose a 15% to 20% tariff on Japanese imports".

Trump in 2011 in his book "Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again": "I want foreign countries to finally start forking over cash in order to have access to our markets. So here’s the deal: any foreign country shipping goods into the United States pays a 20 percent tax. If they want a piece of the American market, they’re going to pay for it. No more free admission into the biggest show in town — and that especially includes China."

Trump at a rally in Vegas in 2011, referring to China: "Listen, you motherfuckers, we’re going to tax you 25%!"

Trump in 2018: If the Europeans are "not going to treat us fairly... then we're going to tax all those beautiful Mercedes-Benzes that are coming in."

Anyone who didn't think tariffs were coming is a fucking moron.

Did you buy options to trade on it?

Exactly. How many times have we seen politics adapt to the new realities of the day? Everything is really downstream of technology.

A few examples:

- The Printing Press

- The Steam Engine

- Factories

- The Internal Combustion Engine

- The Internet

- "Smart" Phones

- Social Networks

- Bitcoin (the orange site loves this one)

The Trump administration has made it very clear on multiple occasions that any company that does that will find that every law that affects them and has some amount of administrative discretion will suddenly be interpreted maximally against them.

https://www.morningbrew.com/stories/2025/04/30/amazon-wont-b...

There are two different kind of “prediction” mixed up here.

The thing which was easy to predict is that Trump is going to continue his trade war against China. It is also easy to predict that in a trade war companies who manufacture some product in China and sell it in the USA will suffer.

That prediction is enough for one to stay out of that kind of business. But it is not enough to do trades and profit from it.

If you could predict that Trump is going to announce x tarrifs on y tomorrow at z time that is much more likely to lead to succesfull trades. That is hard to predict.

It would have been very hard to find a counterparty that didn’t think Donald Trump was going to raise tariffs prior to his inauguration. He was very transparent about this (though the exact amount has fluctuated pretty wildly). Hard to make money when nobody else is taking the other side of the bet.

Plenty of things are predictable in the sense that one can bucket them. Tariffs were very predictable because we know the pedo has that unilateral lever and talks about wielding it. But who would have predicted that out of all the stupid tariff things that might happen, it would be things like tariffing allies, tariffing uninhabited islands, TACO tariffs, or a giant board with “reciprocal tariffs”? It requires not only predicting specific stupidity, but taking an aggressive position.

Whoever was holding aggressive poly market positions on “POTUS poops pants at presser” is a millionaire now. We all know he wears diapers and has massive flatulence, but who would have predicted that specific thing?

I did wonder how many less issues would have popped up if the lamp wasn’t manufactured in China. Was a little surprised it wasn’t addressed.

Last Trump term, a small business making PC cases locally in california went out of business because of steel tariffs. I'm not sure that local manufacturing in small batches is much safer given there's aluminum and other material tariffs this time too?

“Nobody saw it coming” is a blanket people wrap themselves in that socializes their failure to see it coming.

> Nobody saw this coming.

That simply isn't true. Here's a PDF from December 2024 (before Trump was elected) by the US Senate Joint Economic Committee:

https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/5c392e02-9eb0...

Throughout 2024, Donald Trump has proposed a series of tariffs on all goods coming from outside the U.S. or on goods from specific countries. His recent proposals include:

• An across-the-board 10 percent tariff on all products imported from other countries.

• An across-the-board 20 percent tariff on all products imported from other countries.

• A 60 percent tariff—“or higher”—on all goods imported from China.

• An additional 10% above any additional tariffs on imports from China.

• A 25% tariff on products imported to the United States from Mexico and Canada.

Yes, everbody who was paying any attention at all saw this coming.

First term Trump didn't quite have as many toadies willing to follow him no matter where he takes them. They also weren't quite so willing to blatantly violate the law and dare someone to do anything about it.

Second term plans were all written down for anyone to read but still far too many didn't believe it.

Polymarket isn’t a source for this, lol. Maybe google trends, since there’s no reason to manipulate it. There were also reasons to anticipate the amount of the tariffs, and the absolute stupidity of the tariffs (still reeling from the Heard and McDonald islands tariffs lmao).

This isn't about timing the market by being clairvoyant about the timing of a madman's tariffs.

This is about taking reasonable risk calculations as a small business with extremely high tariff exposure, when a president who did a bunch of high tariffs last time wins and election and says he'll do it again.

Sure multi-trillion-dollar financial institutions didn't run for the hills because they get paid when it goes up and paid when it goes down.

It was extremely easy to see them coming, because he talked about the repeatedly.

The markets priced in him backing down repeatedly, which he has.

He literally said he was gonna:

"Trump vows massive new tariffs if elected, risking global economic war"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/22/trump-tra...

(https://archive.is/20231125045858/https://www.washingtonpost...)

EDIT - Found this after my post, a MUCH better "he said it":

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/agenda47-president-tru...

They were very much priced in, you had retailers purchasing a lot of imports in Q1 to prepare for them. What wasn’t priced in was the scale, which is what resulted in the initial sell off in April until the administration walked back the steepest rates

let me guess... you don't follow politics either...