> a big part of the tariff strategy
You mean, a big part of one of the inconsistent explanations people are desperately theorizing, because they're too afraid of the simple answer... that there isn't any strategy at all?
[Edit: Or, to be more precise, no strategy which is both (A) sane and (B) designed for America rather than for specific individuals.]
> chaos in an effort to drive down the price of the 10-year bond
I assume this means "the US government will benefit by being able to borrow money more cheaply than before because so many people can't trust stocks". That explanation rests on a big fat false assumption that trust in the particular debtor issuing the bonds remains unchanged as more people want to lend them money.
Instead, economic trust in the US--built up over decades--is being actively firebombed into the dirt by the new Republican regime. This means the US government can easily end up in a far worse position than before, because creditors will demand higher interest-payments to offset the "holy shit your country might implode first" risk they're taking on.
Or, y'know, they'll take their money out of US stocks and then buy the bonds of some other government entirely...
> Instead, economic trust in the US--built up over decades--is being actively firebombed into the dirt by the new Republican regime.
I think that's an important thing to reiterate.
This isn't Trump. This isn't MAGA. This is the entire Republican Party apparatus that is allowing this to continue. The Republicans of the Nixon, Regan, Bush eras are long gone.
> This is the entire Republican Party
1000%.
The malfeasance from the executive branch could be curtailed almost immediately if there were responsible GOP reps in Congress. They're not powerless passengers on this train, they're actively shoveling coal into the steam engine.
For a concrete example, the law Trump is abusing--where some smuggled fentanyl constitutes National Emergency that lets him invent a tax on Americans--states that any motion in the House to terminate the "emergency" must be given a vote within 15 days or less.
But last month, the Republican majority in the House voted (party-line) to declare that calendar-days for the rest of the year just... don't actually count as time passing, for no particular reason.
That's active complicity.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/house-republicans-block-con...
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-resolutio...
I think that drawing a distinction between Trump, MAGA, and the Republican Party may be a mistake. It's all one and the same. Which makes me wonder about all the "moderate" Republican voters, and what's going to happen when Trump kicks it.