The novelty (in a bad way) of Trump
In response to this video:
Here are some things that are new under Trump:
- A government shutdown to stop a president from attacking a US city
- A president of the United States who is likely one of the ring leaders of a pedophile gang
- A president of the United States elected after leading an insurrection
- Permanent use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose broad, unilateral tariffs (Nixon’s temporary use of the Trading with the Enemy Act for 4 months is closest)
- Trump has the age record for sworn in at 78 years and 220 days old. He surpassed the previous record held by Joe Biden, who was 78 years and 61 days old at his 2021 inauguration. Note that Biden in no way normalizes gerontocracy since fears of his age affecting his presidency were realized.
- A president of the United States accepting bribes and conducting grift in a very public way and for such large amounts.
- A president of the United States allowing an oligarch to make decisions that overwrite congress’s constitutional power of the purse on funding.
Okay but let’s assume Yanis is focused on American foreign policy effects under Trump compared to other presidents. Even here Yanis misses the main point which is:
America has one of the largest military it has ever had, but with the least certainty of how that military will be used.
Would America defend Taiwan? — we don’t know. Will America continue to stand up to a belligerent Putin? — we don’t know. Will America build a “Golden Dome” — we don’t know.
Perhaps we can grant Yanis’s claim that the empire was always this ugly as shock and awe war tactics and knowing support for genocide are pretty ugly. However uncertainty over Trump’s foreign policy is certainly at a new and historically novel level.
America’s historically overtly greedy world intentions are still preferable to chaos because greed can at least be predicted and mitigated. Yanis though claims that America is still being predictably greedy when you consider this a reaction to Chinese technological advances.
But of course that’s nonsense. America never had the technological market cornered the way Yanis imagines and China is hardly the first or only competitor in technology. Germany, Japan, South Korea, and many others have been contenders without American joining team chaos.
And how technologically advanced is China anyway? When COVID came they were unable to produce a vaccine on par with the west. Also according to China Daily medical tourism is a thing:
Though there is no data indicating how many Chinese go overseas for medical treatment, various sources estimate that more than 3,000 Chinese patients came to the US last year for medical care, and about three quarters of them sought treatment for cancer — the most common ones including lung, breast, liver and stomach.
Yanis talks about how China has AI experts but this is a misconception about AI — we don’t want AI for AI’s sake. The real promise of AI is in new medicine; not simply replacing humans in jobs that humans are already capable of doing.
Every other major technological advance has been about some new capability for humans and the promise of AI is no exception:
In a remarkable leap for medical science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Researchers have developed a generative AI tool that can design entirely new antibiotics against drug-resistant superbugs — an approach that has already yielded two promising candidates. Although years of refinement and clinical trials lie ahead, the development could signal a “second golden age” in antibiotic discovery
In normal American greed world, America would be investing heavily in AI driven biological research. In crazy Trump world he’s trying to reduce NIH funding because NIH funding might have caused COVID and COVID might have cost him the election with Biden. (Just to be clear the crazy part is playing tit for tat with an entire field of research, not that NIH funding might have caused COVID — scientific consensus is that is possible as explained in my previous blog.)
This is not to downplay that, as Yanis says, very bad things happened under the predictable American regime. However an unpredictable, extremely powerful America is a greater threat. America has the world’s sea lanes, the world’s largest military, and a nuclear arsenal in the hands of a poorly aging, mentally unbalanced narcissist.