this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/29381241

Donald Trump has threatened to place a 100 percent tariff on Barbie maker Mattel, after the company's CEO said it would continue to manufacture outside the U.S. but would be reducing its reliance on Chinese imports.

"I've heard [Mattel] said: 'Well we're going to go counter, we're going to try going someplace else,'" Trump said in the Oval Office on Thursday. "That's OK, let him go, and we'll put a 100 percent tariff on his toys, and he won't sell one toy in the United States, and that's their biggest market."

In an interview with CNBC on Tuesday, Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz was asked whether it would be cheaper to relocate some manufacturing to the U.S. due to the tariffs, but responded: "We don't see that happening."

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

Once again, Donny-Dumbfuck doesn’t understand how the business world works.

He knows how this works.

However, some of his audience in the US does not, and he's exploiting that ignorance.

What he's doing is just creating this fictional narrative where he's always being seen as fighting against some enemy that's keeping the US from being exactly the way his target audience wants it to be. It's not Trump's fault. He's pushing as hard as possible to make everything perfect. It's .

A couple of years back, when Venezuela didn't pay some Portuguese company for ham, they stopped shipping ham until they got paid. Maduro went out and accused Portugal of attacking Venezuela.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/28/americas/venezuela-portugal-christmas-sabotage/index.html

President Nicolas Maduro has accused Portugal of being behind a pork shortage that left thousands of Venezuela’s poor without their traditional Christmas dinner and sparked a fresh round of angry street protests.

On Wednesday Maduro announced he had been unable to distribute thousands of pork hind legs to the poorest neighborhoods in the country – as he had promised earlier in the month. And he put the blame squarely on Portugal.

“What happened to the pork?” Maduro asked during a Wednesday televised address. “They sabotaged us. I can name a country: Portugal.”

Like many in Latin America, Venezuelans typically eat pork legs, known locally as pernil de cerdo, during the Christmas holidays. Maduro had promised to distribute the pork as part of the monthly subsidized food ration for low-income families.

“It was all set, because we had bought all the pork there was in Venezuela, we bought it all. So we had to import, and so I gave the order and I signed the payments. But they went after the bank accounts, they went after the two giant ships that were coming. They have sabotaged us,” said Maduro.

It’s not unusual for the Venezuelan government to blame other countries, including the United States, for its crippling economic woes.

Every problem is someone else's fault, not Maduro's, who is fighting his very hardest for the public. Maybe it's the CIA. Maybe it's reactionaries. But it most certainly is someone else. Every problem just requires a new story about how someone is countering the Supreme Leader's effort, else everything would be perfect.

We just aren't used to seeing this kind of stuff from a US President. Trump, however, is doing the same sort of nonsense.

Consider some of the following recent Trump stuff:

  • Trump is considering suspending habeas corpus. The Trump administration is intentionally exploiting confusion over the metaphorical word "invasion" and the legal term. So then he's going to probably go declare suspension of habeas corpus, which he can't do short of someone invading, and then a judge is going to shoot it down, and the Trump will go tell his base that the judges are chaining him down, even though he had every right to do this, and if it weren't for radical leftist judges, there would be no illegal immigrants.

  • Trump warns U.S. carmakers not to take advantage of tariffs by hiking prices on consumers. Trump knows perfectly well that companies hit by tariffs are going to pass that on into price increases for consumers. But some people in the US don't, so by publicly standing up and demanding this, he can exploit that ignorance, show himself as standing up for consumers and random companies being the bad guy.

The political strategy is to always pass the buck off to someone else, and try to get as many people as possible to burn their own credibility supporting his false claims so that he doesn't run out of credibility.