No Stupid Questions

The people you need to hear from aren't using Lemmy.

If they were capable of thinking critically, they wouldn’t be Republicans in the first place.

You're never going to get a satisfying answer to this question, because there is no actual reason. If you want, you can go peek in on the conservative subreddits and watch their gold-medal winning mental gymnastics, but the reason Trump is doing this is Putin told him to. The U.S. is destroying themselves for no gain.

Good luck finding many of them around here. They find out pretty quickly that they aren't welcome.

They don't care about cooperation, everything is a deal to them. If some other country has something, we don't. The entire worldview of Republicans is just capitalism, if something can't be framed in terms of profit it's not worth pursuing.

They're fucking Ferengis

Edit: as others have correctly pointed out, at least Ferengis have standards. This might be a disservice to them.

Trump only ran to stay out of prison. Now he's ripping the copper out of the walls to get as much money as he can before it all collapses under his ineptitude.

Elon thinks he's gonna be a trillionaire at the top of a technofeudal oligarchy. (He wants to be Arasaka from Cyberpunk but he's gonna have a hard time doing that while all his businesses fail.)

fascism must always create more outsiders, must always create more enemies to keep control, to keep things directed.

remember, fascism appropriates genuine upset and the fact that to the privileged, equality feels like persecution. it steers itself by creating enemies to hate. remember: people's lives are genuinely fucking miserable. there is dystopian shit happening. and all of that is really complicated, and if people stopped to think about it for five minutes, they would pull a 1789.

so they just keep adding more enemies, and more derangements like what the qanons call 'baking' but hitler just said was the way everyone should read books, until they live in a totally unhinged fantasy world, and any method of social control must engage with the fantasy.

tl;dr: sacrificing external allies to fuel a persecution complex, keep control, entrench the madness, keep attention off the american elites that were at least rhetorically some of the initial targets.

The answer is: they do not give a shit.

They do not care about the US as a country.

They do not care about the Americans as a people.

They do not care about the economy.

They do not care about anything apart from their own personal interest. Lining their own pockets is all they care about. If someone helps them do that, they are friends with them. If they don't, they do not matter.

Congratulations, you now officially live in a cleptocracy where they shake you down, take all of your money and give it to the guys who already have billions. All the taxes they claim to save by obliterating social security, affordable care etc? They are not going back to you, they will stuff them in Musk's pockets through bullshit contracts and other schemes.

And at the same time, they are critically crippling the IRS to make sure the billionairs no longer even have to pretend to pay taxes.

To cripple the US so it is no longer a threat to Russia, and they can move in to "reclaim" all those Baltic nations and maybe even cop the EU.

Going to steel man this since theres obviously no one on here answering this question seriously. Not a republican and don't agree with all this, just imagining what my republican dad would say about this:

For ukraine and Europe, we have no interest in protecting them besides sentimental attachments. Ukraine is not our problem, it's Europe's and if they want to dump money into a lost cause by all means go ahead, but leave the u.s. out of it unless your going to compensate us for it. The u.s. isn't threatened by Russia, we have an ocean, the world's largest navy and nukes to protect us. The larger threat is China and we should be focusing on them, not russia which can barely invade it's neighbor, much less march across Europe and the atlantic. Europe can handle its own problems.

For Canada and Mexico and tarriffs in general. We need to bring manufacturing back to America and revitalize the rust belt. We can't do that if companies find it more profitable to go over seas and pay people pennies when they'd have to pay Americans much more. The only way to get them to come back is to make it too expensive to import things.

This is all about putting America first. For decades America has been spending billions to protect Europe and has been sending billions of dollars over seas to build factories owhile factory after factory closes here in the u.s. We need to stop all of that and spend our money in America for Americans.

Feel free to use this comment as a punching bag, I don't care, just trying to give OP an actual answer if this was a legitimate question and not some rhetorical question seeking affirmation on how dumb the Republicans are. They are, don't get me wrong, but just say so and don't dress it up in questions like this.

The answer is disappointingly simple: emotional satisfaction.

For decades, these people have been told that they are incredibly generous towards their allies, and that they get nothing in return. That their allies are abusing their relationships. Of course this is false, but they've been told so every day.

Now they get to abuse their "abusers" right back.

this question could be rephrased to:

dear idiots, why are you so stupid?

OR

dear sociopaths, why are you so selfish?

the motivations don't matter. they can;t be reasoned with.

conclusion: guns.

Project 2025. The goal is to remove all tariffs and other limitations against the US.

Canada for instance has laws on antibiotics for dairy, foreign ownership for banks and telcos, various things like that. India has tariffs on everything.

The document outlines crazy things like capital punishment and a border wall, its clearly Trumps handbook. It's all in there.

While I have no issue with Republicans being shunned for their unashamed fascism, it does mean threads like this are essentially pointless because almost none will actually participate and the ones who do will be downvoted into oblivion.

Isolating the US and breaking US hegemony. Trump is a Putin puppet, and what’s best for Russia is crippling the US economically and diplomatically. Alienating the EU cuts off the EU from the US who would otherwise help the Europeans against the Russians as they try to reclaim their former territories.

This also helps China who is trying to replace the US as the world superpower. BRICS is doing a good job of creating a competing economic alliance, and the US falling apart helps make it more attractive.

Not a conservative, by the way. Just someone who follows the news.

It's the most obvious powerplay in my memory. Isolate and remove America on the world stage from the inside. And it's being highly successful. You couldn't get a better Russian agent then trump.

Not a Republican but big US billionaires recently cashed out their stocks.

https://finbold.com/warren-buffetts-cash-pile-hits-334-billion-record-high-what-does-it-mean/

Trump imposing moronic tariffs will crash the market and the Billionaires can buy back cheap.

You won't get logical answers to this because there isn't one. Maybe they're just that dumb. Maybe they just want to tank the economy a bit so the rich and gobble up more during the dip. Maybe they just actually love Russia. Maybe they're being secretly black mailed by Russia.

they have brain damage.

Easy answer. The entire Government of Putin is working for shit Kremlin.

I was just watching a panel discussion about Trump and the tariffs and had a thought. He's started adding exemptions. He just added one for the automotive industry following discussions with the big three auto makers. What if the tariffs were a grift all along? What if he put the tariffs on to generate tax dollars that he can use to give billions of dollars to the wealthy but what if he's double dipping and selling exemptions? Like, what if when he talked to the big three auto makers he said, "I'll make an exemption to the tariffs for the auto industry if you give me $100 million"?

Juche.

I wish I was kidding.

They're doing a North Korea. Building a completely isolated war economy.

It pleases Putin.

The president is a Russian asset

I'm not a conservative but there's a logic to it beyond this, "because Putin!" circlejerk nonsense. Tariffs are a reaction against Neoliberalism and the economic intelligencia that has fucked everyone over. Many of them blame NAFTA and the offshoring of union jobs to other countries with cheaper labor and fewer protections, and they think they can bring them back through tariffs.

Many of these people understand well that they have been fucked, but can't really name capitalism directly because it's a sacred cow. Still they're going to react poorly to "the establishment" telling them they're dumb and wrong, and that includes libs screaming at them that they're "serving Putin" without even understanding what they're actually trying to do.

Tariffs aren't going to bring those jobs back, at least not without significant subsidies that the government will never do. Also, for the record, those jobs have raised the living conditions of the people they went to, and are one of the reasons China was able to lift 800 million people out of extreme poverty in the past 40 years, but the pitch of, "You might not be able to find a decent job, but hey, at least a poor Chinese rice farmer can afford a washing machine now," doesn't exactly go over well with the right. We should be focusing on the super-rich who have enough hoarded wealth to make everyone rich, regardless of national borders and whatnot, but they see that as communism, because it is communism.

Ultimately, tariffs are a way of rebelling against an economic orthodoxy that isn't working for a growing number of people and they fit into the nationalist narratives about why things are so bad (because of foreigners) without having to name capitalism itself as the problem.

This follows a long historical trend in America where people don't want the government to do anything ever but also need the government to do things to address crises and allow society to function so we have to come up with convoluted approaches that "don't count" as government interference, for whatever reason. For example, the New Deal was too restrained to actually end the Depression, but once WWII happened we could take the gloves off with government spending (on the military) which was economically necessary, and since then, military bases have served as an inefficient and corrupt way for the government to infuse cash into local communities by paying people to just walk around with guns in like Nebraska. This goes all the way back to people like Jefferson, who absolutely hated the idea of big government but also casually doubled the size of the country with the Louisiana Purchase. There's also the classic psychology of, "Keep your damn, government hands off my social security!" A big reason American politics are insane is because there is a battle in everyone's mind between ideology and material interests, and the way in which material interests are persued is roundabout, convoluted, and ineffective, because everyone's trying to avoid being/sounding like a communist.

You probably won't get too many of those to answer your question on Lemmy.

So that when the oligarchs assume full unchecked control of the US, no one will lift a finger to help the rest of us.

To own the libs