His entire trade war with Canada and Mexico started because he thought the current trade deal (The USMCA) was a horrible deal that should have never been signed.

He’s the one who signed it. The USMCA was his creation because he wanted NAFTA replaced.

I’ll just basically copy/paste my response to this from the other day.

I usually don’t like tooting my own horn, but I’m speaking as someone with 18 years of experience in the financial aspects of school food service. I was one of those middle-management bean counters working for large districts around the Northeast. It is the job of people like me to not only research possible grants and funding sources and ensure the district is getting the maximum benefit, but also to ensure that those benefits are used to their fullest potential to deliver meals to students. We are used to having to deal with fluctuations in what funding we receive and are expected to be able to plan accordingly. If we of all people are the ones saying there’s a problem, there’s a fucking problem. Like 9.5 on the Richter scale type of problem.

There’s a problem.

This will absolutely wreck school food service in many schools. Even before Trump ever set foot in the White House, school food service was often the red-headed stepchild of many school districts that operated on shoestring budgets and were almost always the first to get cuts whenever the school district needed to tighten its belt. These food aid programs in many districts were the only things keeping these programs anything resembling solvent in the first place. I cannot emphasize enough how reliant that our NSLP programs are on this funding.

At least right now, schools are still required to continue serving lunch under federal law. Of course, I’m sure that this will be rectified once Trump realizes that the NSLP exists and decides to cut that too because the program is using food grown in Canada to feed gay kids or something. What this is going to lead to is that NSLP programs are going to be cut to federally required minimums. And without these grants to pay for it, other school services will have to be cut. Teachers will have to be laid off. Other programs will have to be cut in order to pay for school food service. All of this and students will end up receiving less nutritious meals than they received before anyway. Again, that’s until Trump realizes the program even exists and just shuts it down entirely.

You know how we occasionally see those articles about students carrying huge lunch debts at school? Think that, except worse. And everywhere. The only option left for some of these districts is going to be to at least try to pass the costs on to students and their parents who are unlikely to be able to pay, leading to even more students with ridiculously high balances. These accounts are just going to default as these students either just leave the district or graduate, and most districts have no real method of enforcement outside of making demands to parents and just hoping parents don’t realize that those threats are toothless and unenforceable. And somebody has to pay for the food. Somebody has to pay the food service and custodial staff. Which means the district is going to be forced to pick up the tab. And you know how they’re going to do that? Laying off teachers. Cutting vital programs. Ending after-school programs. Continuing to use textbooks (and for that matter, a lot of other equipment and technology) that are years and decades out of date because the district can’t afford new ones.

Most people are going to think that it’s school lunch and no big deal. They’ll just serve a few less french fries or something. Nope. This is a much bigger deal than most people will realize and is going to cause a ripple/domino effect that is going to impact every level of service in the public school systems.

Think of it like a flat tire. If you hear someone got a flat, you think “No big deal”. Then you get a flat, and you realize…that problem that you thought was “no big deal” means that your entire car is not going anywhere until it’s fixed. Now imagine that problem occurring and you realize that they stopped selling tires.

Keep in mind that one of the purposes of these actions is to force these organizations to waste millions of dollars and months of time defending themselves. That’s money and time not being spent actually doing the job they’re supposed to be doing, and therefore giving a false impression that the entire organization is just a waste of taxpayer money since they’re not actually accomplishing anything and keep being subject to criminal investigations.

Basically, if the optics of shutting down an agency are too bad even for Trump’s standards, he’ll just drown them in litigation and render them ineffective instead. The end result is pretty much the same for all practical purposes.

Trump and Musk are going to respond to this effort by firing that person.

The best argument I’ve heard against Dems filibustering the CR is that a filibuster would mean that they would - in the eyes of the public - take responsibility for the shutdown, and that the public would blame them for EVERYTHING wrong with the country now, including all of the Trump/Musk messes.

This plays right into the GOP’s (and especially Johnson’s) hands, because that’s the exact narrative they’re trying to push. “Despite the fact that we control literally every branch of government and the Democrats have no leverage, it’s completely the Democrats’ fault if the government shuts down.”

They’re going to do it anyway, regardless of if you vote for or against the CR. Republicans don’t take responsibility. That’s a rule carried over from the McConnell era. Blame everything on Democrats. Push the narrative hard, and eventually the base will believe it.

Democrats would just need to respond with “This CR would enable DOGE to continue their illegal and unconstitutional gutting of social safety net programs and firings of federal employees en masse. The government employees that would be affected by a government shutdown are also the same employees that are most vulnerable to being fired on the whims of Donald Trump and/or Elon Musk anyway. Democrats cannot vote in favor of a continuing resolution without also validating the GOP’s continued illegal and unconstitutional purge of our government employees and social safety net programs. Republicans are in control of all branches of government. If they want to continue down this destructive path, they have the ability to do so without a single Democrat vote, and that is what they will have to do.”

The White House campaign to secure votes from wavering House GOP members includes promising conservatives that Trump can impound funds after Congress approves them.

What the fuck? I don’t even know where to begin here. Wouldn’t this mean that budgets no longer matter? Does it just mean that openly lying to the American people (Yes, I know, politics and all that. You know what I mean) is now an open and accepted norm to get your agenda through? Doesn’t this essentially mean that Congress’s “power of the purse” has been ceded to the Executive branch?

Democrats in Congress are in a tough spot.

No they are not. The GOP has control of literally every branch of government. Let them pass these bills without a single Democrat vote. If the GOP can’t get their own party behind their own bills, that’s their fault. Not Democrats.

But of course, we all know that the GOP literally believes Democrats exist for the sole purpose of saving them from themselves. They’ve openly stated this. And for some reason, Democrats continue to play the GOP’s game by their rules.

First, Democrats want a written guarantee within the appropriations bill that the president will commit to spending the funds precisely as Congress legislates.

There is exactly zero chance that Trump would ever honor such a guarantee. He’s currently in a trade war with Canada over a trade deal that he himself wrote and negotiated. The man considers stiffing contractors and forcing them to accept less pay for work already completed is a legitimate business tactic. He has long since proven his worth literally isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. Trump would use that as toilet paper before the ink from his sharpie even dried.

Second, Democrats are loath to cause a government shutdown. They identify as the party committed to making government work.

Have they been paying attention for the past 2 months? This is what they consider government "working’? All things considered, a government shutdown would probably be less damaging at this point. Anything they’re trying to keep open Trump would probably shut down anyway.

Senate Democrats face a choice. Hold out for a better funding bill at the cost of being blamed (at least in the short run) for shutting down the government?

Yes. They’re blaming Democrats for everything anyway. What’s the difference? The defense is very simple: “Trump has already caused immeasurable amounts of damage to the federal government and the services they provide, and have laid off tens of thousands of workers. We cannot in good conscience cast votes to pass a bill that not only gives validation to these tactics but will speed up the process.” The general public, on both sides of the aisle, is already against Musk and DOGE. This isn’t a hard argument to make.

Third, Democrats fear Trump could weaponize a government shutdown. He could ignore rules that designate certain federal workers as “essential personnel,” such as the public health and safety officials required to work without pay during a shutdown. Instead, Trump (or Elon Musk or Russell Vought) could decide who counts as “essential.” What’s more, the Trump administration could fire scores of additional federal workers under the fiction that if their jobs are not deemed “essential,” they are targets for letting go.

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT HE’S DOING NOW FOR THE LOVE OF FUCK

What’s he going to do with workers he’s already planning on firing anyway? Fire them harder?

It’s not clear this Senate minority is sufficiently united nor willing to shoulder that risk by voting down the spending plan.

Because Chuck Schumer is a fucking coward. He literally said that Jeffries needs to play nice with New York Republicans because there’s nothing he can do in the Senate. The man is literally rolling over and playing dead, and advising Jeffries to do the same thing. These two fucking cucks make Merrick Garland look like he should have been given a Presidential Award for Bravery by comparison.

Neither one of them should be offering up a single Democrat vote for anything without first (a) dissolving DOGE, (b) reversing all of DOGE’s actions, and © enacting this shit before they get a single Dem vote on anything.

Let the GOP pass a bill reversing and eliminating DOGE, and then passing it through Trump’s inevitable veto. Then actually make Trump get rid of Musk and shut that whole thing down. THEN negotiations can begin. But if they’re not willing to do that, let them pass their bills without Democrat support for even the most basic procedural votes. There is zero reason for Democrats to take the GOP’s word on anything, especially when Trump’s plan to get it through is to just lie to people until they get the votes and then just renege on the deal later.

Spoiler alert: Trump will blame Zelenskyy

I don’t disagree.

I just felt I had to say that because I’ve had the argument with numerous people numerous times over the years, and there’s a belief that the school food service companies that are out there are making money hand over fist off of school lunches. There’s plenty of problems with school food service, but I can tell you that that is absolutely not one of them.

We require everyone to be responsible for even the most basic of needs and in return we get to have crazy profit margins that disproportionately benefit the people that would still be embarrassingly rich if they paid for every kid to get a free school lunch.

I just want to clarify something for the record. Again, speaking as a person with 18 years of direct experience on this exact subject. It was literally my job to ensure that the districts I worked for received the maximum in grants and those grants were applied to maximum benefit for students.

The profit margins on school food service is borderline nonexistent. Not even pennies on the dollar. When I left the company I worked for last year, average costs per meal hovered around $2.50 to $3 per meal. The breakfast program as a whole has been a huge financial money pit for at least the past 15 years or so and is almost entirely subsidized by money generated from the lunch program. Overall, my company was making about 3-5 cents per meal by the time the dust settled. You’re talking about profit margins of well under 1%. School districts have to put out an RFP usually every 3-5 years depending on local laws, and I have seen districts either receive single bids or no bids at all because there’s almost no money to be made, particularly in smaller districts. I’ve seen companies pull out of districts mid-year because their projections were nowhere near reality, leaving districts scrambling to find new management companies.

Nobody is getting rich off of school food service. At least, not at the public school level. (Universities, hospitals, and even some private schools are a different story. I’m talking strictly about public schools.). The NSLP program has been severely under-funded for years. As a prime example, Michell Obama’s Healthy meals act that was passed during Obama’s presidency increased the average costs per meal in my area by about 14 cents per meal at the time, but compliance with the act only netted six cents in increased reimbursements. Doesn’t sound like a lot, but if your district is serving 10,000 meals per day for 180 days a year, that 8 cent difference comes out to $144,000 that the district has to cover just to remain in compliance. School lunch programs are often the first to receive cuts whenever possible because school districts consider lunch a low priority. Many districts would do away with it entirely if they were legally allowed to. And federal reimbursements for free and reduced students are several years behind the times.

I could go on and on and on, but I’m sure you get the idea. Nobody’s making money. If anyone has questions, I’d be more than happy to answer, but I just want to make sure everybody understands this.

So if they’re saying that the entirety of the 119th Congress counts as only one calendar day, they should only get paid for one calendar day. Right? Their salary would then be $476 to cover the entire two years.

That’s a savings of $347,524 over the course of 2 years, per representative. Or a savings of just under $152 million. That’s what it’s supposed to be about, right? Saving taxpayer money? I’m sure the GOP will be on board with saving hundreds of millions of dollars! They’re only working for one calendar day!

I usually don’t like tooting my own horn, but I’m speaking as someone with 18 years of experience in the financial aspects of school food service. I was one of those middle-management bean counters working for large districts around the Northeast. It is the job of people like me to not only research possible grants and funding sources and ensure the district is getting the maximum benefit, but also to ensure that those benefits are used to their fullest potential to deliver meals to students. We are used to having to deal with fluctuations in what funding we receive and are expected to be able to plan accordingly. If we of all people are the ones saying there’s a problem, there’s a fucking problem. Like 9.5 on the Richter scale type of problem.

There’s a problem.

This will absolutely wreck school food service in many schools. Even before Trump ever set foot in the White House, school food service was often the red-headed stepchild of many school districts that operated on shoestring budgets and were almost always the first to get cuts whenever the school district needed to tighten its belt. These food aid programs in many districts were the only things keeping these programs anything resembling solvent in the first place. I cannot emphasize enough how reliant that our NSLP programs are on this funding.

At least right now, schools are still required to continue serving lunch under federal law. Of course, I’m sure that this will be rectified once Trump realizes that the NSLP exists and decides to cut that too because the program is using food grown in Canada to feed gay kids or something. What this is going to lead to is that NSLP programs are going to be cut to federally required minimums. And without these grants to pay for it, other school services will have to be cut. Teachers will have to be laid off. Other programs will have to be cut in order to pay for school food service. All of this and students will end up receiving less nutritious meals than they received before anyway. Again, that’s until Trump realizes the program even exists and just shuts it down entirely.

You know how we occasionally see those articles about students carrying huge lunch debts at school? Think that, except worse. And everywhere.

The scary part is I cannot tell if this is real.

My point stands. Whether it’s society breaking down and local citizens looting off of each other, or you’re worried about a Trump Gestapo coming for you doesn’t matter. If you advertise that you’re stocking up on ammo and supplies, and either other citizens or Trump’s thugs decide they want it, they’re going to come for it and you’re not going to be able to fight them off. You are not the Terminator. You are not Rambo. You are not a one-man-army.

If you want to stock up on ammo, more power to you. Build up a cache like Schwarzenegger’s shed in Commando. But you are not Schwarzenegger. The best way to make sure that you still have that stuff if shit goes sideways is to make sure nobody else knows you have it. Otherwise, they’ll just barge in and thank you for building up a huge supply cache for them to take by putting a bullet in your head. Whether you’re worried about looting citizens or Trump’s thugs is irrelevant.

Is there an “or else” with that order? And is there an actual way to enforce that “or else”?

Because if the answer to either one of those questions is “no”, then Trump is just going to tell this judge to go fuck himself with a chainsaw and probably demand he be impeached.

Chuck Schumer, minority leader of the Senate, said that Hakeem Jeffries (who himself has taken the “cower in the corner” approach) needs to work with New York Republicans in the house and ask them to play nice because there’s nothing he can do in the Senate.

There’s your answer.

That MAG have lots of guns? That I’m prepared to defend exactly what my constitution says? Or that I’m armed? Because all of them are things I would advertise. People need to learn that progressives/the left are armed too.

If it gets to the point where you actually have to use your guns in that manner, all you’re doing is advertising that you have a whole bunch of ammo and supplies for other people to steal. Thump your chest all you want, but you’ve gotta sleep sometime and if you’re going to advertise that you have a shitload of ammo available, someone’s gonna come to your house in the middle of the night when you’re least able to defend yourself and kill you to take it and everything else you own.

Arm yourself to the teeth if you can and if that makes you feel better, but keep quiet about it. The best way to make sure nobody comes to try to take what you have is making sure that nobody knows you have it in the first place.

“In unrelated news, the acting inspector general has been fired by Trump today. Trump has tapped another member of the OPM to lead the department while Trump considers a new Inspector General. The acting lead at OPM expects that the DOGE investigation will be wrapped up quickly as so far he’s seen no evidence of emerging threats or issues.”

He hates it because Biden is supposed to be the worst president in the history of ever and Biden signed the CHIPS act so therefore it must be bad because Biden is bad. It’s not more complicated than that.

I’ll go a little bit further than that, because this mindset started long before Trump came to power.

Mitch McConnell has been championing this mindset for decades. Anything, anything that Democrats are in favor of, Republicans must be against at all costs. How many times have we seen McConnell lead a charge for Republicans to suddenly be about-face on one of their own policies because it started getting Democrat support? The man once filibustered his own bill because it got Democrat support.

Trump is just the manifestation of that mindset brought to its logical extremes. It was always going to end up here. At worst, Trump just sped the process up. But this is where we are now. Any Democrat initiatives are bad by default must be dismantled solely on the basis that a Democrat supported it in the first place.

The algorithm won’t matter.

Look at it this way. Magical new campaign finance laws are in place. What kind of a chance do you think you would have in an election where your opponent has, one way or another, secured the endorsement of a multi-billionaire like Elon Musk, several influential celebrities, or whatever who are willing to independently (or “independently”) endorse your opponent? Would you think your chances are good if all you have available to you is your government-issued war chest? The Elon Musks, Taylor Swifts, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnsons of the world are going to reach millions upon millions of people regardless of Youtube’s algorithm. So of course everybody is going to want to secure those endorsements if they want to even have a chance.

And under these new laws, it’s presumed that voters will no longer be contributing to campaigns. So why on God’s green earth would a candidate even bother listening to voters at all any more? Several decades of political history have already shown that politicians value the desires of their wealthy donors far, far more than the voters. And that’s with voters contributing to their campaigns. What do you think will happen when they have to choose between the wealthy celebrities who would be essentially funding their campaign through the back door and the voters who collectively contribute $0? Your concerns will no longer matter. They know that even if they lose the vote of the 20% of people who are informed and pay attention to politics, they’d be able to rely on celebrity endorsements to deliver votes from the 80% of uninformed voters who couldn’t care less about politics 99.9% of the time. Your vote would be worthless to them, easily replaced by probably 3-4 votes from some uninformed rubes who just voted for whoever their celebrity of choice told them to.

Like I said, you would literally be making the problem worse. The wealthy donor class would have even more influence than they do now. Social media influencers would see their political influence increase, leading to the rise of even more social media politicians like Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. What comparatively little influence the average voter has would evaporate.

I am all for campaign reform. But I’m not for short-sighted solutions that look good on paper but make the problem worse in practice. And not only are the solutions being discussed be blatant violations of the freedom of speech, expression, the press, and the right to petition our government, which is something that I am dead set against, but they would also be easily exploitable by Trump or someone like him, who’s already starting off the ball game on third base. Like you, I don’t know what the solution to any of this is either. But I do know that this isn’t it.

Just spitballing here, but a similar model with campaign finance in mind could do a lot to level the playing field. First, do away with corporate personhood. Then make it so that if a broadcaster or advertiser wants to show political ads, they must obtain a special designation which comes with its own stipulations: limit the quantity/duration of ads any one campaign can purchase, require that they distribute any qualifying candidate’s ads without bias, charge a flat rate for ads for all candidates, and all political ads must be divided up along regular intervals throughout the day.

I agree with all of this. But part of the problem is that exactly none of this applies to social media. You couldn’t apply this to social media even if you wanted to. And that’s where a lot of people get their news and information today. Your suggestion absolutely should be applied to traditional media like CNN and Fox News. But how could you possibly apply that to Youtube? Twitter? Facebook? How does that apply to those who choose to (or “choose to”) advocate for their preferred candidates independently? These are the people that politicians will be chasing, which will give wealthy social media influencers more political pull than they have now. You could be making the problem worse.