I would have thought so too, but actions like this are in line with this story, so could be evidence for some such plan:

https://invezz.com/news/2025/02/27/the-mar-a-lago-accord-explained-trumps-ultimate-plan-to-reshape-the-dollar-and-americas-debt/

Even if Trump isn’t smart enough to be entertaining a plan like this, you could read the article as “Is there any way Trump could get lucky and have his tariffs actually help the USA?”

They’re busy working on their “messaging” to let Americans know they hear you and care, while doing nothing but collecting donations and messaging.

The fucking derp state they’ve been complaining about all these years.

He wasn’t worth the trouble.

I bumped into the CEO again about 10 years later at a funeral. He was thoroughly obnoxious and spent the time making fun of the deceased (a colleague of ours) and taunting my friend about how many hours he had tricked him into working for free. Then he bragged about his current business and its success. Really one of the most awful people I’ve ever met.

That wasn’t the first deceased colleague of ours he had disrespected. We had a very skilled but very obedient guy working on our team - call him Jim - whose brother (also an colleague) was terminally ill in hospital. These brothers were good guys and popular with all their colleagues. One day Jim got the message that his brother had taken a turn for the worse and might not have much longer, so he asked his manager if he could take the afternoon off to visit his brother. Word came down from Mr. CEO: no, Jim was needed in the office so could not have the afternoon off. Being a loyal employee, Jim stayed. His brother died that evening and he didn’t get to say goodbye. I left the company soon after that.

Miserable as this all was, it was a good lesson in just how self-centred and self-important some people are. This CEO is now very wealthy and still goes through life convinced he’s a success and we’re all losers who don’t know how to do life like he does. He’ll probably never figure out the truth.

That’s because he and his kind believe government is useless and can just be broken without losing anything important. From their point of view, government is just a thing that takes money from them and spends it on people who don’t deserve to live because they’re not asshole billionaire techbros. And it makes poor people’s lives slightly less unpleasant by giving them money and services, which billionaires don’t like because it makes the poor less desperate and exploitable.

Have they tried substituting smaller cakes for the eggs?

I’ve never had a boss who didn’t do this. Promise, set timeline and price, get contracts signed, then come to the development team to ask whether it’s possible to do by Wednesday. Many years ago I had a boss who promised a major client that we’d provide an entire online advertising network to rival Google Ads, and gave us 4 days to design, develop and deliver it. Then when it wasn’t ready he threw one of the developers under the bus in a meeting with the customer. He actually used the words, “This is Dave’s fault.” Dave was professional and didn’t argue. Good look for a CEO. I’m sure he thought he had won. The project went nowhere because all the execs had different ideas about what it was supposed to do, and the dev team was oddly unmotivated to help them out.

the next election.

I do love an optimist.

He’s doing that supervillain thing with his fingers in the picture too.

Maybe they can investigate whether the Earth is flat too, while they’re making such good use of people’s taxes.

Nope, Ukraine would have kept all of its land had they accepted Putin’s offer in 2022. Even the status of Crimea was to be negotiable after 10-15 years.

Right, but Crimea is Ukraine’s land which Russia invaded and stole in 2014. So that’s not letting Ukraine have all its land is it? It’s letting Ukraine keep bits of land you haven’t stolen yet. Can you see how that might not seem very reasonable?

A plummet that takes time is really not in the traditional spirit of plummeting.

Trans rights is simply human rights for trans people. It’s not a culture war issue; it’s a human rights issue.

Oops, whoopsie, that was a lie.

The media will successfully deflect blame away from Trump’s government. These people are eager to believe any story except that they’ve been hoodwinked.

Is anyone keeping track of how many Americans Musk and Trump have directly made unemployed, even before the effects of economic slowdown kick in?

Not only do these people fail as allies and as compassionate human beings, but they’re also very stupid if they don’t see that defending trans rights is the front line of the fight against fascism right now, and we all need to be there fighting it. They’re not going to stop at taking rights away from trans people. It’ll be you next.

It just indicates that Trump doesn’t care what they think any more. He’s no longer trying to please voters. They have done their job and where he’s taking the USA, there won’t be voters. Besides, he knows they’ll always be with him when it comes to hurting people they don’t like. Expensive eggs won’t change their bigotry.

Categorizing inconvenient people as mentally ill so you can lock them up is a common trick for authoritarian regimes. This one seems worryingly plausible.