- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24046998
Summary
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum mocked Donald Trump’s proposal to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” by suggesting the U.S. be renamed “Mexican America.”
“It sounds nice, doesn’t it?” she said, pointing to a 17th-century map showing California, Texas, and Arizona once belonging to Mexico before the Mexican-American War (1846–1848). She also noted the Gulf of Mexico has had its name since 1607.
Sheinbaum warned new U.S. tariffs would prompt reciprocal measures.
While advocating for cooperation, she emphasized Mexico’s sovereignty and its historical ties with the U.S.
Who’s manipulating Trump?
Or, asking the same questions through different words: who’s able to manipulate him, and benefits from USA losing all its soft power?
I’m asking this because there’s a clear pattern in all this shit: he’s taunting every single of USA’s long-standing partners. First the EU (Greenland), then the Commonwealth (Canada), now Mexico. In the meantime the shit that Americans whine on the internet is becoming increasingly more relatable, hinting that the situation there is becoming more and more similar to the one here in Latin America.
Unpopular opinion: it’s not Putin, it’s Musk’s buddies the oligarchs.
They’re trying to isolate the USA, so when they decide to take over and turn it into a dictatorship, nobody will come to USA’s aid.
It’s an interesting viewpoint, certainly not improbable. There is a strong connection between Elon, Trump and Putin though. It could be that Elon and Putin made some deal and that they both play Trump. That Elon used Trump is clear to me, Elon is the dominating one there. That leaves us with the Putin/Elon relation.
Let’s roll with this hypothesis for a moment and say that Musk, Mellon, Adelson etc. want to instate a dictatorship in USA. In that case isolating USA politically seems like a bad deal, since it would make it harder for them to conduct businesses elsewhere.
If however they are trying to do this, I’d expect an autocoup similar to Hitler in 1934. For that they’d need to solidify Trump’s power, and remove the ability of the house of representatives to impeach him - by getting rid of it, or silencing it, or transforming it into meatpuppets.
Political isolation would allow them to decide which countries to do business with, and on what terms, in order to maximize their own profits. Instead of a “free for all” market, it could become a “limited for all, except for some chosen ones”. The USD has been artificially propped by the USA being “the world police”, or the largest bully on the playground. In a multifaceted world, where some large nations start to put that to the test, chances are the USD could stop being the world’s currency, making it more beneficial to establish selective trade agreements valued in goods, closer to barter.
They could still solidify Trump’s power… or just the opposite: impeach him, throw him away, and put in his place someone they might see as easier to control. For now, having a Republican majority in both Congress and Senate, the threat of impeachment could work to keep Trump in line. As much as Trump’s ability to say “yes, no, and the opposite” worked great for people to cherry pick whatever they wanted to hear and vote for him, the same can work wonders to cherry pick the opposite and destroy him. In countries like China, they use that kind of politics all the time: anyone wanting to advance, needs to commit some irregularities that can be used to blackmail them, then throw them under the bus when the higher ups feel threatened.
As the DOGE works its way through the administration to cull down non-political appointments, it can as easily decide to keep Trump loyalists, or Musk loyalists, or Vance loyalists, or whatever. That’s one part of the autocoup. For the other part, Trump has already promised no more elections, and to get the term limit removed. But even if he manages to get those, whether he’s the one to enjoy them, remains to be seen. Trump’s a babbling loudmouth, but Musk has already gained several time more ($100B) on his election, than Trump’s whole net worth ($6B, maybe).
That makes a lot of sense.
We all know who. But if anyone does need help connecting the dots: https://ponder.cat/post/1252517.
I thought about Putin, IIRC he’s close to Trump. But the hypothesis in the link only makes sense if Putin’s goal is USA isolating itself, not the annexation of those territories. Because:
But I don’t know, I feel like there’s some piece missing here.
There are lots of possibilities.
One being mere FUD - remember that he doesn’t have to succeed to cause disruption, and even the attempt will draw focus away from Russia’s own annexation of Ukraine.
And if that can simultaneously be accomplished while also acting to isolate the USA away from its allies - and perhaps more importantly them away from the USA - then so much the better (for Russia I mean, though at the expense of the Western nations).
Or Putin could have meant it as a jest, and Trump did not realize that.😜
But I also think there’s a halfway decent chance that Trump himself won’t even bother trying - he could back down, and then claim: “see how reasonable I am, I wanted to do this crazy thing, but you didn’t want me to so I didn’t, yet now I want to do this other much more ‘reasonable’ thing and it’s my turn to win so you gotta let me have this new thing I want, if you want me in return to keep doing things your way occasionally, that’s called ‘compromise’ btw” (it’s actually not btw, as a better term would be rather “shifting the goalposts”, but whatever…).
And if that was the case, then we wasted all of our efforts trying to understand the “strategy” behind something that was only ever meant as a distraction to begin with - unless that’s what they WANT us to think, and then they push it through and actually get it DONE!? That’s the thing when facing against an opponent who actually knows what the word “strategy” means - whereas the voting public seems to have no clue, which is why we probably should not have been in charge in the first place 😞 (at least I heard that sentiment a lot after Brexit, by people in the UK - like “whoopsie, can we get a do-over?!” then doing the identical thing again every single time that the latter was granted, proving just how impossible it is to help people who are absolutely dead set against receiving that aid).
Also, bold of you to presume that the USA will ever have another election again… - it is now legal to assassinate his opponent if he so chooses, so the playing field has changed entirely. Probably he’ll allow bad candidates to run that have no chance of actually winning, so it will appear as if his preferred choice had won entirely legally (Jared Kushner? or some other handpicked candidate - in all likelihood by Putin, or whoever succeeds him and inherits whatever other dirt he keeps on all rich and powerful people around the world). The gloves are off now: this is a brave new world.
Putin is a bit too serious and conscious of the impact of his decisions to be jesting, specially near some clueless moron. The other hypotheses that you laid out seem sensible, though.
Even then, his successor won’t be as easy to manipulate as Trump himself.
It seems like I’ve heard this story many many times before throughout history, and elsewhere besides.
It’s a chess game at this point. We sadly have someone great at somehow running casinos into the ground, but here we are.
If the chess board was made of dice.
It is much worse than that: the game and pieces are real, yet one side keeps chewing on the pieces and then rolling them as if they were dice.
I think… I think we might end up losing this one, everything else being equal (fortunately the latter is not the case, and I’m hanging on to that sliver of hope with every fiber of my being:-).