Back when he was signing USMCA he had this to say about it

And today, we're finally ending the NAFTA nightmare and signing into law the brand-new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. (Applause.) Very special. Very, very special.

The USMCA is the largest, fairest, most balanced, and modern trade agreement ever achieved. There's never been anything like it. Other countries are now looking at it, but there can't be a border like that because, believe it or not, that is by far the biggest border anywhere in the world, in terms of economy, in terms of people. There's nothing even close.

This is a colossal victory for our farmers, ranchers, energy workers, factory workers, and American workers in all 50 states and, you could almost say, beyond — because it's all beyond. This is all over the world even though it's at one beautiful border — where, by the way, a very major powerful wall is, right now, being built. (Laughter.) Okay? I don't know if I should say that at this particular reading. I know last night it got a very big hand. (Laughter.) Today, they're a little bit like, "Are we supposed to clap now?" (Laughter.)

USMCA has a much weaker dispute resolution process than NAFTA did (something US producers absolutely loathe, Canadian provinces really love doing stupid shit with trade and they can't hold them accountable under USMCA like they could with NAFTA) where countries exchange & approve each others lists of potential dispute panelists. Even in the event daddy has updated this from Biden's list because the treaty requires all the countries to have agreed to changes its unlikely daddy will be able to front load it with yes men. It also allows Canada to just go around the US to the WTO.

The lumber is itself a great deal of lulz that has been going on for decades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_softwood_lumber_dispute but there are three new opportunities for $DRAMA inflation:

• Daddy really doesn't seem to understand how trade works, a tariff on Canadian oil would immediately increase the cost of gas & energy in the US. Just the comment he was thinking about doing it added more than a $1 to oil prices

• Daddy is going to have to argue why his own treaty sucks and why its totally Biden's fault his treaty sucks

• First challenge to congressional authority. Taxing is an enumerated power of congress and the ability of a president to create tariffs is limited. His pet theory is that the impoundment authority that lets sanctions work allows him to create any tariffs he wants. Congress have to choose between challenging daddy or setting a precedent that future presidents could use however they wanted. Bong's PM called you a mean name? 9001% tariffs on all bong goods.

Babies are 6 MONTHS OLD TODAY! We are tired and proud!

!animalposters !cats

certainly not part of a massive step in survaillence

News thread is FILLED with redditors suddenly caring about "muh freeze peach"

CUAD about to get evaporated with a 2000lb bomb

https://old.reddit.com/r/columbia/comments/1id0pom/trump_administration_to_cancel_student_visas_of/

Neolibs snarky as ever

https://old.reddit.com/r/Destiny/comments/1id0mxf/propalestine_students_on_visa_are_getting_deported/

DNC Headquarters secretly love it but still gotta rail against orange man

Personally this is the guy I want to see deported most:

https://canarymission.org/individual/Abdullah_Akl

Mr. -ACKl over here was responsible for this chant at Harvard, which I found quite revealing at the time:

With no shame, @WOLPalestine leader & @Harvard grad student Abdullah Akl calls for mass murder of Israelis, asking Abu Obaida, Hamas' military spokesman, to bomb Tel Aviv. WATCH: "Ya Abu Obaida, ya habib, udrub udrub Tel-Aviv! (Abu Obaida, my love, hit, hit Tel Aviv!)"… pic.twitter.com/7Jn6UvGD6S

— Canary Mission (@canarymission) April 1, 2024

Elected Republicans are pure evil https://t.co/jsx6Wzun6f

— Jessiah (@thepondering_) February 8, 2025

!gaystapo !gayporn

This is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen pic.twitter.com/0wkJA1TLt0

— Lauren McKenzie (@TheMcKenziest) February 4, 2025

20 times more powerful

RED ALERT!!! OLDEST SPAL VICTIM KNOWN TO DATE ALSO HAS A PEEPEE!!!! Rachel (he/him) then cucks him mid-speech about how it's totally a hermaphrodite dooood not a with a shenis!1!1!!

!metashit eat up!

Wish i could post this on the sub but im banned from Reddit :((

https://old.reddit.com/r/WorkersStrikeBack/comments/1iik2vu/i_just_saw_an_entire_family_taken_by_ice/mb7q1q7/?context=8

they are literally the beyond parody borders are immoral people who want to drive down their own wages "uniting" with 6 billion 3rd worlders

What a lovely night, tucked into bed with the boys and mister man

!animalposters !cats

finally we FatCHADS of the penile gender are getting some representation! !foidmoment

Like for real nafo presence died by a lot after USAID stoped Jfl

The South African did another heckerino - in response reddit jannies have taken up their mops in protest to "petition" their userbase about a total ban on Twitter/X links. Numerous subs have already joined, including but not limited to:

r/MadeMeSmile

r/BlueskySocial

r/DnD

r/nba

r/pcgaming

r/newjersey

r/formula1

r/hockey

r/chelseafc

r/boardgames

r/CHIBears

r/ffxiv

r/detroitlions

r/OnePiece

r/steelers

r/ireland

r/magicTCG

r/antiwork (carp added this one with jannie abuse powers hi!!!!!)

Is this totally organic? Will it accomplish anything? Doesn't matter, it's a reddit protest!!

I (14) finished writing my first book!

I know age shouldn't be an excuse for bad writing and I kinda rushed the end of my book, but I put all my heart and feeling into writing this book. I hope you enjoy reading it.

(PS: this is a pen name)

Link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wyfzJTYu7ER34xCSLjETM1YCgBYCm-AvVsCQjuxVsk4/edit

Here comes the critique:

You posted this, so I assume you want feedback.

Your opening few paragraphs do a good job of setting the stage, but there are a few places where the prose could be cleaned up. For example, you mention Starry Hallow I think three times right off the bat.

The year is 2001, when being gay isn't really normally accepted

Try to watch out for unnecessary filler words really normally. We all use them, but they drag the narrative, especially where you can use this opportunity to attach an emotional value to the sentence.

The year is 2001, and being gay sucks.

The grown adults on Reddit, when given a chance to critique the writing of a literal child, somehow make it worse

Not that there's not anything to critique, check out the opening line:

I looked out at my window from the bus to Stars Hollow, Connecticut, and then checked my watch. The time was 1:45 p.m., but I really didn't know what time it was because my clock hadn't adjusted to the time zone yet. It's about an hour until I reach Stars Hollow.

"The time was 13:45:32 on the dot, but actually I didn't know what time it was because my (analog) watch hadn't adjusted to the time zone yet"

the lesson from blowing $80k on options in 2024 should be to stop trading options and park your money in an index fund r-slur

A lot has happened in Lebanon over these last couple years and I haven't given a breakdown on the situation across the country because I didn't know wtf was going on most of the time. Everything is finally settling down so I think I can approach this now. I'm going to skip the events of the war because I have talked about those already. I'll just compare the situation before and after the war.

Situation October 6

Lebanon is a total shitshow in every possible way. The economy has totally collapsed. The politicians are all the same ones from 1990, the gangsters who were lucky enough to not get car-bombed during the Civil War. The government doesn't function anymore. Even the lowliest civil service job is appointed through patronage from one of the gangs parties based on a complicated scheme where power is divided among a dozen religious sects. That system has broken down and nothing is getting down now. For example they can't remove a pile of 2,000 tons of decaying explosives before it explodes or provide power for more than a few hours per day. The presidency has been vacant for a year because the various factions refuse to compromise with each other.

Background note: The President of Lebanon is elected by the parliament, not a popular vote. He needs a 2/3 vote so there has to be consensus. He must be a Maronite Christian.

Every one of the parties I talk about below are from the civil war. I've written extensively about all of them. It's not really necessary to understand this but if you have any questions about them, I probably answered it there. If you haven't read them, short story: They're all buttholes.

Who is to blame for the impasse? There's a lot to throw around.

• The Sunnis for whatever can't come up with any unifying leader beyond Saad Hariri, who is too busy licking caviar off a whore's nipple in Ibiza to inspire political change.

• The Christians are divided. FPM, a vehicle that the last president used to support his megalomaniacal Napoleon-inspired ambitions. He's way too old now so he's turned it over to his son-in-law who is notorious for being even more corrupt, greedy, and r-slurred than your average Lebanese politician.

• The Lebanese Forces during the war was basically the mafia controlling and "protecting" Christian areas. Now they've reinvented themselves as a political party, but they're still run by literal serial killer whose main job during the war was doing massacres and gang hits against Christian rivals. But now he's got a bunch of r-slurred zoomers supporting him, because hey, who care's about his body count if it was a long time ago?

• Marada is a small Christian party that represents the interests of the Franjieh family, who have strong support in one region of the country and close ties to Syria. Notable because he's Hezbollah's favorite and his opponent in the election Geagea personally murdered his entire family.

• The Druze still are completely loyal to Walid Joumblatt. He knows that his sect is a small minority so he throws his weight behind whoever is going to win. At least when he's not too busy smoking weed and shitposting on Twitter.

• Amal is basically all the Shi'a who don't back Hezbollah. Maybe they're secular. Maybe they're normal Shi'a who just don't buy into Ayatollah Khomeini's Vilayat-e Faqih heresy. They don't have the luxury of idealism since most factions in the country and most regional countries are gunning for the Shi'a right now. Led by Nabih Berri, speaker of parliament and a genius for using political patronage to wheel and deal for what he wants. Lots of blood on his hands too from the war.

Hezbollah is important enough to get more than a bullet point. I don't know what to call this organization. It's an army, a militia, a political party, and a welfare system. They gained a lot of prestige for driving the Israeli occupiers out in 2000 after a long guerilla war. Everyone was like "cool, now that the war is over you can give up your weapons". But they found bullshit excuses to not demobilize and resentment has been building since then. Most of the corruption in the country isn't done directly by them, but they use their military power to block anyone from fixing the government, because if they did it would order them to disarm.

They're in trouble now. A lot of their popularity came from social programs that they did in impoverished mostly-Shi'a areas that the government didn't give a shit about. That was funded by Iran. With the sanctions and general decay of the regime, Iran is in serious trouble and has had to cut their donations way back. The population is really pissed off at the complete breakdown of the government and is smart enough to realize that Hezbollah is cockblocking any effort to reform it to solve their problems.

Even more serious, the Assad regime in Syria has dominated Lebanon for most of the last 60 years. Most of these factions have been allied with them at one time or another, but their power has greatly weakened after the Syrian Civil War left the regime as a crippled fragment of the country. Now it's Hezbollah who are most dependent on them. Iran delivers weapons to them through Syria, so they can't keep building up their rocket arsenal without it.

Israel and Hezbollah have both been remarkably good about keeping the cease-fire since 2006. Hezbollah is deterred by Israel's completely overwhelming military power and the damage they suffered in 2006. Israel is deterred by their humiliating defeat in the ground war in 2006 and Hezbollah's massive arsenal of 150,000 rockets, many of which are long-range precision-guided missiles in the same league as ATACMS.

Now

The situation has radically changed in the last few months, more than I've seen in my life time. To summarize the parts of the war important for us here: It turns out that Hezbollah's huge rocket arsenal was vastly exaggerated by the Israelis. The 150,000 rockets didn't exist. The Israelis have infiltrated their organization to an astonishing degree and kill most of their leadership. The Assad regime collapsed like a wet piece of cardboard.

The good news is that the "Shiite Duo" (Hezbollah and Amal) that has cockblocked any kind of reform in Lebanon is not able to do so any longer. They can't be completely ignored, but they can't stop the nation from making progress. Hezbollah is in complete disarray. Their leaders are dead and every means of communication they have is presumably compromised. Just as they can't coordinate their military forces, they probably can't even come up with any political policy. The collapse of Assad's regime means that they can't rearm and replace the weapons lost in this war.

The general public already was very turned off on them before the war started as they were the most powerful faction so they were most to blame for the country's dysfunction. They might have won some moderate degree in sympathy if they had won victories on the battlefield like in 2006 but their catastrophic military defeats have completely undermined their whole raison d'etre. The said that we have to tolerate a "resistance" group outside of the government's control because they were the only ones who could protect the country against Israeli aggression. That made a lot of sense in 1990s, not very much sense afterward, and it makes no sense now. The completely failed to do any damage with their vaunted rockets and on the ground the IDF was too smart to play their game and just didn't attack. So if you're a Christian, a Sunni, or probably most of the Shi'a who don't have a zealot personality type, all Hezbollah managed to accomplish was to drag the whole country into a war and then lose it. Remind me again, why do we let these people have their own private army?

After the cease-fire a president was finally elected after 2 years. The Shiite Duo stopped insisting on Franjieh, who would never have won because if he's president he might remember that Geagea killed his dog (and the rest of his entire family) and go John Wick on him. The winner is commander of the armed forces Joseph Aoun, no relation to commander of the armed forces Michel Aoun who was the last president. ("Aoun" is like "Smith" and they always go to the army for a compromise candidate.)

Joseph Aoun

He seems like a good choice. He joined the army in 1983. During the Civil War he fought for Michel Aoun against the Lebanese Forces of Samir Geagea in the 1990 "War of Elimination" when the army tried to wipe out the gangsters terrorizing Christians and assert the authority of the state. Notice that I mentioned both of these people above and this is the second presidential candidate who fought against Geagea. Are you guys starting to understand why this soap opera is so interesting?

Word is that he's always been very apolitical and gets along with everyone. He did military training in the USA and Syria. His election is approved by Saudi Arabia, the USA, Qatar, France, all the major factions in Lebanon. (Notice this is the one country in the world where their soveriegnty is such a joke that other countries openly declare which candidate they're voting for.) We can only pray that he ends up like Fuad Chehab, the one successful Lebanese president, who was put into power by the US with the same idea, that he was an apolitical compromise candidate who everyone in the country and the region could accept. He went on to create the good times of the 1960s, so who knows, anything could happen.

Hezbollah is playing hard to get, whining about his choice of prime minister, but this is a negotiation tactic. The other factions, even the Maronite patriarch, have said that nobody will be excluded. By this they mean that Hezbollah will get some representation in the cabinet.

Future

What does the future hold for the Lebanese? Hopefully a hot twink with a nice car who can get you a green card. But we're going to look at the national level.

I am very very cautiously optimistic about this new government. I can't think of a single time since 1975 when there was a government that might be willing and able to act like this is a real adult grown-up country. Not even because of Hezbollah. They were just a symptom. The real problem was the Assad regime. There was no way Lebanon could even try to improve itself as long as that existed. They had their tentacles into every part of society. I don't expect we're gonna see true democracy like the USA in 1864 break out tomorrow, but this is legit the first time most of the people in this country could even begin to start trying to make progress in reforming their political system. I mean heck, they might even start breaking down the barriers between the religious sects like everyone has been promising to do since 1943.

There's a lot of dangers left though. Hezbollah and Assad getting the shit kicked out of them brings a lot of opportunities but there's a lot of potential ways to frick this up. I know I'm a nattering nabob of negativity, but I've been saying for decades that when we get rid of them we have to have a plan for how to replace them.

One immediate concern is the Alawis in Lebanon. They have a neighborhood in Tripoli. The population is, I dunno, maybe 10k. There was a lot of fighting between them and the local (Sunni) population several years ago. Not to mention during the Civil War. Now they're totally isolated deep in the territory of people who have really intense reasons to hate them. There's been a lot of cases of isolated communities like this getting massacred. Although on the bright side, those were during wartime and since the Alawis are no real threat to them anymore they'll probably be fine.

Second is the Shi'a. It's difficult for me to follow what's going on with them because they don't post much in English unless it's straight-up propaganda like al-Manar. What I know is, most of them have zero interest in Hezbollah's corruption, its wars, its heresies imported from Iran, its weirdo restrictions on your social life, among other things. They backed them because there is a real legitimate fear among everyone that the other two sects will gang up and wipe you out. The Lebanese Shi'a now have no friends in the world except Iran, which is completely impotent at the moment with a regime bankrupt financially and morally and on the edge of collapse. In my boomer times, the US would have stepped in to reassure these people that they're not about to get genocided.

Third is the Israelis doing their usual bullshit. Signed a "cease-fire" and kept firing. I guess the implicit understanding was if Hezbollah stops shooting rockets they'll stop blowing away all the apartment buildings in Beirut. In the news they report every little detail of the treaty, but it's understood that most of those are just for show and won't be followed. But Israeli domestic politics once again goes against its national interests. They're not going to leave a couple of the villages on the border that they promised to in the cease-fire. This is very typical of Israeli diplomacy: Always break every agreement a little bit just to remind them that you've got the upper hand and they can't do anything about it. Which dooms them to eventually be in constant war with everyone, but at least in the case of Smotrich and Ben Gvir that's exactly the point. The people they forced out of these villages, Christians and Muslims, are not just going to forget about it. And there's already psycho fringe Israelis trying to build settlements there. They're the fringe now, but once they've got facts on the ground, they'll make sure this keeps going for generations.

Fourth is what Hezbollah does when they're in a corner. In 2006 they won a conventional war which was incredibly shocking. Now their conventional army is destroyed. If they go back to fighting, they're gonna go back to guerilla warfare. And they're really good at that. And if they're really desperate, they'll go back to terrorism. You dipshits call them a "terrorist organization" because you think "terrorist" is a synonym for "bad". They stopped doing terrorism a long time ago but it's not because they found Jesus and became nice. If they get desperate they'll go back to it. And it won't be in Israel.

Hopes

Everything is going right for Lebanon right now except for Israel continuing to bomb them. If the cabinet there just has anybody who wants to accept that they won a war and not prolong it, everything will be fine. The ball is in their court.

OP

Canadian here. Not sure if this is PreperIntel worthy but just reporting something I've honestly never seen in my life. Canadians woke up today feeling super patriotic. And super pissed. Not that we aren't usually patriotic but we aren't a bunch of flag wavers. It's more a quiet patriotism we keep to ourselves. And we are generally a polite and reserved bunch in general.

Not today. Holy... the mood in Canada is ... PISSED.

Most of the anger is aimed at your current head of state but also at your country as a whole. Not so much individual Americans. You will be perfectly safe traveling through Canada or visiting. But there is outright anger directed at any product with a "Made in the USA" flag. Every store in Canada is going around with maple leaf stickers marking the "Made in Canada" products. Consumer boycotts are springing up organically across the country. The talk is really sort of ... ugly.

I get the sense there has been significant damage done to the US Brand in Canada. And I don't think it's confined to Canada. I have friends in the UK who say the same. They are also just frankly pissed beyond all reason. I expect it's the same across Europe.

Hopefully it dies down. It's absolutely non-productive and unCanadian. America and Canada have been ride or die BFF's for a century or more. I live in Arizona 1/2 time and I love LOVE it here. I have yet to personally meet an American I didn't genuinely like. You are good people. You do not deserve any of this.

Unless of course you voted for this. In which case... hope you get everything you voted for and then some.

also RIP to /r/prepperintel, it has turned into just another 'Drumf le bad' subreddit