Laws and voters mean that’s not happening.
I love your optimism 
I’m not sure he really understands them, especially as he seems to have learned everything from Peter Navarro, who in turn learned everything from the famous “Ron Vara” (yes, that is an anagram of Navarro).
I don’t know how true it is, but there’s an interesting story of how all this tariff rubbish came about.
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Damn, I wanted to taste the famous “chlorinated chicken” that you hear so much about 
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Seriously, though. Any politician who tried to agree lowered food standards because of threats from a mostly hated Trump (among European populations) would be toast
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So the EU threatens to put tariffs on software imports, and China is blocking all sales of rare earths. All this churn meanwhile undermines what credibility the US has left for foreign investments.
If I didn’t know better, I’d think I’m reading some dystopian dark comedy sci-fi. Have you seen the movie Idiocracy? It seems positively tame compared to current news.
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I do not envy comedians in this day and age.
Rather than simply bullying, I think there is a strong element of attempted extortion. One has only to look at the threat to take over Greenland for its minerals, at the “deal” for Ukrainian minerals as payback for the money that the US has put into support for Ukraine.
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And btw the new US values are not just being pressured on that level
- members of CDU/CSU in germany are praising Heritage Foundation (yes the one from project 2025)
- same censorship that you see on topics in the US are coming over here
Librarians in UK increasingly asked to remove books, as influence of US pressure groups spreads | Libraries | The Guardian - dutch right wing government also just started defunding universities. I guess an educated public is too hard to govern.
(this is just examples. if you look around you will find plenty more)
so we also need to make sure to stand up against those things here if we want to avoid having that “new freedom of speech” sneak in here.
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Wrong emoticon, the one you want is this - 
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Yeah. I saw that guardian headline and didn’t find it credible so didn’t bother reading it. Just skimmed it now and it’s as I thought. Libraries get requests, they ignore them. There’s always going to be some activists for whatever cause. Meaningless, tbh.
This is U.K. public opinion. No politician is going to bow to this guy and not lose his/her scalp.
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The question is, what is the basis for their activism in this case, and who is funding them?
Sure. But I just don’t think you can buy voters like that, tbh. Look at Musk’s failure to buy an election for a judge recently. Complete flop.
I don’t care that much if people want to waste their money on hopeless political interventions.
The latest data is even funnier if we’re worried about (US) money influencing UK public opinion…
Don’t be too sure about the complete flop - as a potential flip-flop is in the workings.
They lost by some 700-800 votes, and a recent decision by the state supreme court has required that thousands of voters must identify themselves now after the election, with the risk of 65 000 votes being tossed.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/11/north-carolina-supreme-court-ballots-tossed-00008327
Fair enough. I haven’t followed it beyond the headlines. I think, though, that it still suggests that (a lot of!) money can’t buy you votes. I’m not saying that money is unimportant, just that there can be a somewhat naive assumption that there’s some kind of Pavlovian (or stupid) response to influence efforts. You see it a lot in popular political and media discourse, particularly among people who consider themselves rational. I don’t think what I’ve read of the political science backs that up at all. The opposite in many ways.
Also, without reading yet your link, is this not a problem of institutions rather than voting?
I wonder whether an important factor here may be to what extent one is aware that a particular actor is trying to buy votes.
Oh yes, definitely. Doing it explicitly is just dumb. People hate that. Well, unless vote buying is just an expected part of politics
I guess politicians and political parties try to gather together winning coalitions of voters. Those potential voters (us) are largely driven by some combination of innate or activated liberal-authoritarian traits (we all have a bit of both) and economic interest, mediated by institutional structures like whether it’s possible to have more than two opposing parties or whether it’s a winner takes all system and so on, and then how those and other factors in turn incentivise elites.
Something like that. It’s bottom up and top down at the same time. That’s what I understand of the stuff I’ve read.
Big slump in weekly container shipments to and from U.S., as well as globally, according to these reports.
Though wondering why these are the only reports I can see at the moment, given newsworthiness of this.
Somewhat related, we’re gearing up for an election in a couple of weeks here in Canada, and I really wish they would ban lawn signs. Not only are they are a terrible waste of materials and bad for the environment, do they even do anything at all other than say which team you cheer for? Is anyone ever swayed by someone else’s lawn sign? I can’t imagine anyone changing their vote because the neighbour down the street supports politician X.
I also think it just increases tribalism and serves to create divisions in the community. You can have a nuanced conversation about politics with your neighbour by actually talking to them. But a lawn sign, flag or whatever just says “This is my team. You’re either with me or you’re my rival”. There’s no nuance.
Besides, why would you want to make politics such a part of your identity? I vote based on my values and for whom I think will do the best job, but it doesn’t mean I support everything they do or think they are anything more than politicians.
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