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All of those are being unwound as we speak, and it’ll take decades to prove to the world that any trade policy and government agreements may be kept longer than 4 years.
The US was quite isolationist up until the end of WW2, so I’d argue global hegemony isn’t that important when it comes to economic performance.
Spanish American war was mostly isolated to the Western hemisphere (although the US gained colonial possessions after).
It took forever to join WW1 due to the small size of the US standing military. Same with WW2.
It wasn’t until after WW2 the US was able to project power globally and through that, set the global power structure with the USSR.
The US growth trend has been fairly constant since the late 1800s. There's no real discontinuity in the trend around the time the US become hegemon.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/GDP_per_...
Part of why Switzerland is so stable is because of its neutrality. Switzerland doesn't have to deal with Russia interfering in its elections the way the US does.
Trump isn't the problem, he's a symptom.
The recent massive increase in the US governments direct and indirect involvement in business decisions changes things.
Trump is pushing/forcing countries and companies to invest in the US. He's added more restrictions on who they can sell their products. New significant widespread tariffs also exist that forces businesses to decide on how they can handle it while being pressured not to raise prices.
Government involvement in business decisions, even if indirect, is not a market economy. In a true market economy supply and demand should determine prices and businesses and consumers make the decisions on their respective side.
There's also background pressure on businesses to avoid angering Trump and this affects their decision making process.
>attracting talent, innovation,
Trump raised the fee for H1Bs, blocked student visas from 19 countries, and revoked 100k visas for people who were here as students, business reasons, vacation, and other. He also is removing legal status from many groups.
His inflammatory rhetoric and actions have harmed the international reputation of the US. There's also a prevalent anti-immigrant mood in the US and a much smaller
This decreases the pool of people who can choose to come here and for that smaller amount it increases the probability that smart and innovative people may look elsewhere to either study or start a company.
There are also those that had legal status, lost it, and must leave. These are another set of groups that could have contained some talented and innovative people.
Talented immigrants have done so much for our economy and standing in the world. ----
He cut government funding for many scientific research endeavors and government programs. These may or may not be replaced by private industry. It's justified to cut waste as government spending is a problem but speed and extent of the cuts makes it questionable if a proper assessment was done.
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I'm sure you can point to similar actions in the past but I believe the quantity, speed, and intensity are significantly different than in recent times.
I'm also not arguing that some changes weren't justified. I just believe it's a clear change in the ingredients for the worse.
This is true but not a novelty. The US has been doing all kinds of things to harm its markets for decades, e.g. artificially constraining the housing supply, using tax incentives and manipulating interest rates to goose consumer spending and in the process drive up consumer debt, and let's not even get into all the ways it molests the healthcare market.
That isn't to say that they're good -- those markets are very messed up -- but things like this are bad, not new.
> Trump raised the fee for H1Bs, blocked student visas from 19 countries, and revoked 100k visas for people who were here as students, business reasons, vacation, and other.
The H1B program has been widely abused for a while now and in general the US is in need of significant immigration reform. Many of the things Trump does are stupid, because of course they are, but the general premise of "hey wasn't this supposed to be for researchers and scientists rather than mechanic-level IT work" seems to have something to it here.
You can't say we're importing the best and brightest while also doing everything possible to make it so that someone who is a doctor in another country with a world-class medical system has to basically start over from scratch in order to be a doctor in the US.
And then people will have much to criticize about what Trump is doing. But okay then, so do something better instead of all the doing nothing that was happening before.
> It's justified to cut waste as government spending is a problem but speed and extent of the cuts makes it questionable if a proper assessment was done.
It clearly wasn't. The problem is we need some kind of structural reform -- a system that doesn't allow wasteful programs to accumulate and increase in number over time -- but that would require a functioning Congress, which has instead been doing everything it can for decades to abdicate their role to the executive branch. Which has term limits and therefore the attention span of a goldfish for those kinds of structural problems, and then we end up back in the situation where either no attempt is made to fix it or the attempt is amateur hour because it's attempting a contextual fix to a structural problem.
Lots of money will be spent trying to manufacture a replacement, though. That will be fun to watch. If you thought the last-minute rally around Kamala was tough to watch…
Sure, the republicans will look hilarious trying to replace Trump for a while … but those Americans aren’t going anywhere and will gladly vote for the next Trump whenever they show up, same as they voted for Reagan and Bush II.
The American attitude driving this current period is much deeper and wider than one man, and people thinking it will all go away when one old man steps down are going to be “surprised” when we’re dealing with this again in ten years or twenty years or three years.
That being said, I just don’t buy into the notion that the strategy of the party from 2016-2024 (maybe 100 Trump rallies per year?) can carry over into the late 2020s / early 2030s.
If anything, this is me saying everyone is aware that the current window for reactionary politics in America is closing as Trump loses his vigor and gets closer to being too old to do what he did between 2014 and 2024. The reactionaries in the government and behind the scenes may make one last desperate grab at maintaining power.
Also remember it’s not just being charismatic, but charismatic enough to keep people distracted from increasingly unpopular reactionary politics that defy even conservative beliefs (e.g. gun control, speech policing, deficit spending, plenary executive).
