We go golfing and he wins. Then we make a business deal and he wins again. The press takes pictures and he looks like a huge successful winner. Then I go back to doing my job.

By hoping it’s only 4 years.

Weaponized incompetence and flattery

It’s simple, play the field. When the US fucks with you, turn to China, when China fucks with you, turn to the US.

This a major reason why the US has been losing ground to China, because “The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems countries will slip through your fingers.” Countries that used to deal with us exclusively are now dealing with both, countries that used to deal with both are moving in their direction. Every time the US launches an invasion or imposes sanctions or seizes foreign assets, non-aligned countries wonder if they’ll be next. Trump isn’t really a unique threat in that regard.

Over here?

• Create a common EU army
• Put EU defense bases on Greenland
• Invite Canada to become a EU member
• Build an anti-immigrant wall on the EU-USA border and make the Americans pay for it

By ignoring him, really.

What I also don’t understand is why he blames the victim (Ukraine) and cozies up to putin. Not even Reagan would have done something like that.

Reagan just blamed domestic victims of systemic racism and bigotry like black and gay people, not other countries!

The U.S. has always been bullies, fundamentalists, militant, entitled. All the things you don’t want in an ally. Yes, the U.S. is worse now. (I’m American, by the way.) But I hope U.S. allies have kindof seen this coming and made arrangements to weather this sort of thing, even if it lasts forever. Myabe that was kindof the point of the E.U., for instance.

The U.S. isn’t the only country going off the rails, though. Think of Brexit, for instance. I’m not saying the U.K. government is anywhere near as… quite frankly openly fascist as the U.S.'s is right now, but at least the U.K. isn’t immune. Unfortunately no country is.

Same as we did last time. Strengthen our relationships and trade with friendly non-US countries.

Here in Australia Trump puts us in an awkward position. For a long time we’ve meshed our interests with those of the US both necessarily and very much unnecessarily. Some say we’re the 51st state. This makes the increasing power of the US’ executive branch over the past 2-3 decades and the decision to put a joke candidate with the mind of a child in charge of that branch particularly worrying. Our politicians did what you’d expect and more or less refused to make much comment about this and publicly and emphasised the strength of our relationship with the US and how we’ll work with the incoming administration like any other. Unfortunately though we couldn’t really avoid being hit by some of the whirling shitstorm going on over there.

Last time he got his knickers in a knot about a refugee deal from the previous administration where we’d send refugees headed to Australia, to the US. I have to provide some context for that to make sense so I’ll be as brief as I can. I’ll just point out that this deal was the crowning capitulation on top of about 15 years or so of absolute bullshit xenophobia and cruelty on behalf of our successive governments who used refugees as political pawns and entered into a brinkmanship of which party could more cruel. For most of that time the public enthusiastically cheered them on but around the time of Trump’s presidency there’d finally been a seachange and the government of the day found themselves needing to avoid allowing refugees in to the country or be accused of no longer believing in cruelty to refugees as policy whilst also needing to seem maybe not quite so cruel anymore so they tried to make it the rest of the world’s problem instead by finding other countries to dump them in. This mostly involved Papua New Guinea who they paid to take them but who had little capacity to do so and also, but also a small handful of them to the US to try and take the sting out of some of the criticism about dumping them all in PNG where the locals were already threatening violence against them.

Obviously this deal would look bad for Trump given his politics. Known for his tendency to try to solve problems by personally throwing a tantrum at people, he did just that to our Prime Minister at the time in a phone call. That Prime Minister wasn’t, nor really is anyone else in our political system, known for his backbone or courage but nevertheless the leaked phone call seems to show that while he was mostly confused and bewildered by Trump’s directness and stupidity, to his credit he still didn’t give him what he wanted which was a demand to immediately cancel the deal. You could say he stood his ground, I personally think he was more just confused about what to do next probably because I assume politics doesn’t usually work that way and they’d normally operate through technocrats and underlings on anything of consequence rather than deranged phone calls but however you look at it he didn’t concede and the only consequence was that Trump had a big public sissy fit, that he somehow didn’t realise made him look even weaker, and then he just moved on to the next mess of his own making in the 20 minutes it likely took him to make it.

Basically, by that example I want to highlight that, though he is a threat, he does make things hard for us, and in general, long term, moves need to made to begin the long path of finding ways to live without such dependence upon the US, the good thing about Trump is also much of what makes him bad. He’s a baby, he’s got a very short attention span, and he doesn’t like it when he can’t win quickly by just throwing a tantrum and so it appears that when he indeed can’t, he has a little cry about it and then seems to just kind of move on and pretend he was never interested in the first place. This is a kind of silver lining because it seems like you can pretty much just ignore the dumbest of his statements and just try to put out smaller diplomatic and economic fires as he creates them. We’re still in a pretty shitty position here though because we’re so interwoven with the US culturally, economically and as far as defence is concerned entirely, that trying to untangle from that is going to be really complicated and long term and looks near impossible. Unfortunately the chickens are coming home to roost on some seriously dumb and unimaginative decisions for 30 plus years.

Trump only respects strength, so at first no favours, no deals, protect national interests as fiercely as possible no matter the cost.

After enough strength posturing, I think it would be possible to negotiate with Trump and do business without selling off my country completely.

Then just pray we survive until 2029 or Trump dies

It’s probably a good thing I’m not a national leader because the first thing I’d do is recall all diplomats and cut off relations. He wants isolationism? Give it to him and let him feel it for real, not just his tough-guy head-canon version of it.

Use whatever human rights violation justifications necessary (shouldn’t be hard) to hit the US in the wallet. Cut off US businesses from customers abroad. Expel military personnel. Pull travel visas. All the tricks America uses against everyone else. Make the people feel the inconvenience of not being a world citizen.

Tariff.

When he threatens us, raise it 1%. If he raises a tariff of 5%, raise ours 5%. Also, of course we drop out of new-nafta.

They drop their tariff 4%, we drop our tariff 4%. New president, tariffs are 0% again.

We need to buy their shit for now, but I hear Greenland is due for a new port.

Win a trade war, then wait for his mind to drift to fanboying for dictators for life, just like last time.

Wait for opportunities.

Implement policies that reinforce the economic downturn in the US that will inevitably come and jump into the holes it leaves behind in the global economy.

Note that even on a personal level we can do things to accelerate this. De-Google, switch to Linux, quit US social media, torrent movies and tv shows and quit Amazon, Netflix and Apple tv. Boycott America!