That is a very simplified take. Congress has been locking up for the past decades and is now unable to do useful regulation for the people. Much of it is due to how the funding of candidates works and the feedback loop effect it had on the political culture.

Trump is a symptom of this failure of political culture too.

Yes and no. Because you can always go one level higher and ask:

Why are the US people the cause?

And then we will talk about structural issues, to do with social mobility, education, a dysfunctional journalistic landscape, a tribalization of the political landscape and so on. But of course it doesn't stop there. You can go one up:

Why did these underlying causes came to be?

The simple answer is that a certain loose conglomerate of polticians, billionaires and CEOs thought it would profit them (it did). You can pick one of the issues mentioned above and go deep on why it is in the bad shape it is today and the answer will always boil down to lobbying and money in politics.

This are the much more insightful reasons and you get there just by asking "but why?" two times like a yound child. Totally recommended.

Foreign and Billionaire demonic interest have disenfranchised the people long ago. Luckily the people have a second-amendment constitutional duty to re-secure the free state. It's clear America is no longer a free state. One cannot be free in a panopticon.

Exactly, just see the gal of garbage spewed by for example Scott Bessent at the WEF yesterday. The arrogance is outright insulting.

Vance seems to be very different. For all we know his real views are still these https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/15/jd-vance-donald-tru...

Do you really think the threat that “JD Vance might by unhappy with you, and would direct the literally tens of people who like him to vote against you in primaries” would keep the Republicans in congress undef control? Trump’s whole thing is his weaponisation of a cult of personality. Vance doesn’t have a personality at all (and I’d assume he was chosen for that reason, Trump not wanting the competition.) He’d be dead in the water from day one.

I guess we find out how much of this is cult of personality and how much is just the propaganda system.

Vance doesn't have the cult of personality

We even know which billionaire planted the Greenland idea: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/15/ronald-laude...

But if you repeat the idea as your own so it becomes

(Yes the president can't tell Greenland from Iceland, but neither half of those "tech bros" who failed geography at school

Special farmer interests are about 25% of the entire EU budget (https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20211118STO...).

There are still farmer protests here in France every day against this deal. There will be a lot of pressure on French MEPs to vote against it when it goes to the EP for the final vote.

>I would expect it to get vetoed by special farmer interests

IDK man, I feel like supporting the local farming industry is a pretty important strategic move, even if it's a loss leader.

We already offshored manufacturing, energy supply and IT to our "allies" in the past and it's biting us in the ass right now.

Do we really want to repeat the same mistake again with food?

20 years and counting. The Mercosur deal still needs to pass the EU Parliament, and it’s not scheduled to come up for at least a few months. The EU’s Parliament is also nearly split down the middle on the deal which means there’s still about a 50/50 it fails, maybe 51/49 or 52/48 in its favor at the moment, but it is very close and still has about as much chance of passing as not passing at this juncture.

Tariffs are paid by importers, but the cost is usually shared between:

- Foreign producers

- Domestic consumers

- Domestic companies (via lower profits)

Who pays more depends on bargaining power and market structure.

I believe kindness hasn’t changed in the last 200 years - try it.

You are correct that importers pay tariffs on paper but that doesn’t always mean the tariffs are paid by the importers in real terms. Exporters may not want to change prices for competitiveness to local goods so in the end regardless of the actual invoice, the exporter is paying for those tariffs. You can find multiple exporters talking about absorbing those costs. I

Appreciate the reply. I see your argument, I'll have to reframe my statements better.

Laws are negotiable between sovereign states representing the business interests of their nations. The EU, not being a nation itself, may not get that part and may have been feeling a little too invincible as a bloc of nations, but they have still basically pissed off most of their larger trading partners and it doesn’t stop there. Qatar is threatening to stop selling LNG over some corporate sustainability directives the EU passed in 2024, since the potential fines amount to 5% of their state energy corporation’s global revenue[1].

Personally I like the way Qatari’s Energy Minister Saad al-Kaabi put it[2]:

> “If the case is that I lose 5% of my generated revenue by going to Europe, I will not go to Europe," Al-Kaabi reportedly said in reference to the associated penalties back in December 2024. "I’m not bluffing.”

Now you might be thinking, well who cares? It’s Qatar! Well Qatar also supplies about 12 to 14% of Europe’s LNG imports. Europe could get that gas from elsewhere, but elsewhere kinda includes either America or Russia.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/qatars-energy-minist...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2025/08/06/europe-is...

Russia is still an energy provider to Europe. Do we provide any security guarantees to Qatar or can protect the shipping lanes? We can not. It is controlled by the US, which is also a major supplier.

For every political squeeze EU can do, the US can squeeze 10x as hard.

ASML also has quite a lot of US suppliers. We are all tech dependent on each other, but China is working hard to fix that and the US also.

> One example: we get 10-12% of our LNG from Qatar.

Qatar is a pure American vassal state.

The US has power. Military, Financial, Cultural. The EU does not.

[flagged]

Actually the Green deal is an attempt at that. Masked as a way to save the planet, its goal is to get rid of deep dependencies like gas oil etc, which we in Europe don't have sufficiently.

The main issue is the way the transition is happening, because I see China doing exactly what we should be doing: build coal, nuclear, etc. while you build tons of solar panels or windfarms.

The self inflicting pain forced by radical ideas is what is killing Europe. We have lost the pragmatism that made Europe move at a crazy speed after WW2.

Compared to supreme leader trump who just strategically fucked up decades of diplomatic relationships, with allies, in a few years?

Or compared to Supreme leader putin and his very successful strategic 3 days military operation?

Trump or no Trump, the US's ability to be Europe's security shield had to come to an end one day or another. Trump is more a symptom than a cause: the US has weakened and others have strengthened. As many are eager to point out, the game is already up. Pretending like there is a future here is pointless. America had best leave internal European civil wars like Russia-Ukraine to the locals and retreat to whatever borders she can defend.

NATO died when Europe decided to outsource defense wholesale to the US so that she could fund her retiree class, proudly advertising how she redistributes as much as possible to the aged while relying on America to defend her borders. The US could not bear that weight and now Europe must carry it on her own. Doubtless the French will riot in the streets as the retirement age rises so that France may sustain herself rather than live on someone else's dime. But if Europe wishes to be defended, then she must defend herself.

God helps those who help themselves.

My guess would be that the OP subscribes to the MAGA worldview, because in their alternative reality, the US-Europe security arrangement was not a mutually beneficial relationship between allies, but a parasitic relationship where the US pays, and Europe reaps the benefits.

Obviously, this worldview is strategically myopic, based on ignoring many things the US was getting out of this arrangement, like US military bases in Europe (also used for power projection to the Middle East), Europeans buying US weapons (big part of why those weapons are so advanced), doing America's bidding in the UN, supporting US military adventures (however misguided) in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc.

It could be argued that the US role of being the security provider to Europe and others was the main source of their wealth and power. The US had the proverbial goose laying golden eggs, but Trump got angry that they had to shelter that goose, so he kicked her out... no goose would abuse the US like that!

Here is one example: Trump saying that the EU was formed to screw the United States: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kq28VSlvUw