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He's just running a kleptocracy, and doing so reasonably well.
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People still happily buy his tokens though, and then blame China for getting scammed.
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Not China’s fault but Biden’s :)
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indeed. i'm sure he's surrounded by some lumber moguls stateside that are going to get very rich from this. very russia coded.

i don't doubt deregulation on clearcutting as well as removing land ownership and no logging in national forests & protected lands.... are around the corner with this admin. feel like they attempted that during his last term with attempting to disgrace park rangers over wildfires and saying they didn't rake the leaves on the ground or whatever.

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They already started by shrinking national monuments.

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/14/nx-s1-5893397/trump-again-shr...

EDIT: Adding a TL:DR, this article explains how the Trump admin reduced the size of two national monuments by 90% and 91% respectively. This is just one example, there are more and most of them are out west in lands untouched for nearly a century. Saved for posterity because once they're gone, they're gone.

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This is extremely partisan language, it shouldn't be on Hacker News
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My friend, sometimes the truth is partisan. And in those cases it absolutely belongs on HN.
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The issue is that it only goes in one direction of partisanship.
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That is hardly the Truth's fault.
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I think the clamoring of the aesthetic of impartiality is destroying interesting discussion. The president is currently lining his pockets with tax payer dollars and being an overall bumbling buffoon. It is not partisan when the would view the US as weaker, less intelligent, and less reliable. Its consequences of inaction and bad policy of the current administration
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Oh no! Not the implosion of democracy in real time!
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You should try programming language X vs language Y, cloud vs on-prem, Framework A vs Framework B, OOP vs Composition etc., etc. HN is as partisan as it gets.
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He's already got more money than he can spend. As dementia sets in, he's been shifting more and more to pure emotion-based decision making.
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> “motivated entirely … to stuff his pockets”

Someone's pockets, must be gnomes:

• PHASE 1: COLLECT UNDERPANTS. (tariff "foreign" goods desired by Americans, collect upon import from companies, clarify spiked prices experienced by consumers ‘entirely’ due to prior admin policies)

• PHASE 2: … (let simmer)

• PHASE 3: PROFIT. ("return" tariff costs to companies)

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April 2: Trump "liberates" Americans from low-cost goods by placing tariffs at 46% on Vietname

May 16: Vietnam approves $1.5B Trump hotel project (https://apnews.com/article/vietnam-trump-golf-estate-investm...)

July 2: US lowers tariffs on Vietnam to 20% (https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/DCPD-202500738/pdf/DCPD-...)

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The underpants gnomes. Well played!
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don’t forget his weak ego
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It's worse than that. He is so completely off that he thinks this means US builders will chose to buy US lumber instead and that will work out positively for everyone in the US.
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Simultaneously believes that flooding the market with foreign beef to lower beef prices will benefit American cattlemen.
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The "make more money" rationale is way too logical vs how this guy's brain operates. It's better understood as being like Pro Wrestling. Except the "ring" is the world economy.
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He wakes up and flips a coin. He doesn’t care anyway and there’s no consequences.
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If it was a coin flip, there'd be a 50% chance he did good things every day and we'd have a significantly better outcome than we do now. Its many times worse than a coin clip.
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The coin is to decide which terrible person he is going to listen to. And his weirdo followers love him for it.
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and votes
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[flagged]
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There was significant talk about market manipulation - he knows what he's going to tariff and how that'll affect the stock market, so he can buy low and sell high without any risk, because he is effectively the dominant market force right now
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> Which one is this? Can you explain? Do his family members own Vietnamese lumber farms or something?

Love the see-how-ignorant-I-am type of comments.

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Maybe US lumber producers lined his pockets. Probably not.
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I don't cutting down our forests either but the stated goal of the whole exercise is to improve the US's businesses and self reliance on local industry...
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"The stated goal" is stupid as fuck, especially when it comes to our literal immediate neighbor who has been a steadfast ally for the last 100+ years.
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Why would anyone, even one of his supporters, care about the stated goal? The man has decades of pursuing goals other than his stated goals. You'd have to be profoundly naive.
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> Why would anyone, even one of hoods supporters, care about the stated goal?

Because regardless of the execution, this is a forcing function around a broader topic about prosperity in a nation. Tangentially it's also about potential future conflict with China (I hope not!). Both of which I think are much more interesting of a discussion than base partisan mud-slinging.

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And the stated goal of DOGE was to save money...

Watch what they do, not what they say. They say a lot of things, and where they can they take all positions.

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And the unstated goal is to satisfy a senile crook stuck in the 70s (maybe the 1870s)...
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How it seems to work from his past attempts is that the business pays a bribe to try to lift it
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It's true, not everything he does is to stuff his pockets, a lot of it is just to fluff his ego or avenge perceived slights.
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Indeed. Donald Trump is only the visible tip of an iceberg. Below the waterline it's a massive and all encompassing corruption, comprised of an organized multi-national cabal that touches every part of the globe and which has its roots in the world starting well before WWI. The goal of which appears has always been to enrich the people on the inside while sewing chaos. To these figures, war and peril have always been more profitable than making peace.

https://annas-archive.gl/md5/2275fbf2d96f518e54c2b72edf163f8...

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