Trump's Second Term

The workers in the old lumber town of Bonner, Mont., expected bad news late last month when they were told to shut down their machines one morning and meet on the factory floor.

Their plant, which made high-end trim and siding for homes, was a vestige of the wood industry that once dominated western Montana. President Trump promised a “golden age” for American industry, when the sawmills and copper mining industries that built Montana would roar back. But nothing felt golden that morning. The 104 workers at the UFP Edge factory were told that their plant was shutting down. They would all be laid off.

“They gave up on us,” said Troy Fisher, who spent 40 years working for different mills and lumber companies in Bonner-West Riverside, an unincorporated community of 1,400 tucked beside the Clark Fork River, not far from the college town of Missoula.

The arguments over the demise of the UFP Edge plant have a familiar ring to them, dating back decades, through Democratic and Republican presidencies alike. The powers that be in Montana, now all Republican, say that jobs are plentiful in a state where the unemployment rate is just 2.8 percent, compared with 4.2 percent nationally. The siding plant’s closure was unfortunate, but the workers will be fine, they say.

For its part, UFP Industries, a Michigan-based building-materials company that bought the Bonner facility five years ago, said that Mr. Trump’s tariffs “played absolutely no role” in the closure.

The company said that transporting materials across storm-prone mountain passes had been a challenge, and that the factory suffered a setback when a major customer took painted siding in-house. The plant never turned a profit, according to Abby Mitch, a spokeswoman for UFP.

The disconnect between the views expressed by politicians on the overall state of the economy and those expressed by workers at ground level is precisely what fueled the rise of Mr. Trump’s brand of conservative populism. Mr. Trump’s target had been Democrats and their perceived allegiance to free trade and coastal elites.

But with the G.O.P. now entrenched in Montana, the elite is the president’s party. Just days before the Bonner closure, Gov. Greg Gianforte, a Republican and affluent software executive-turned-vocal Trump supporter, was in central Montana celebrating as many as 500 new jobs created by the arrival of a European company that makes vacuum technology for semiconductors.

But some employees at the Bonner plant groused that Mr. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill had not saved their jobs.

“It’s not trickling down,” said Cameron Harris, 23, a forklift driver at the plant who had been saving up for a house. He said he doubted he would find similar work in the lumber industry, and was hoping to get a certification in auto repair.

Farmers and ranchers are worried about how Mr. Trump’s trade wars will affect overseas markets for beef and wheat. Even an ardent Trump supporter, Josh Smith, who owns the Montana Knife Company, posted a YouTube video complaining that tariffs were driving up his costs for imported steel and a $400,000 German-made grinding machine.
As the event wrapped up, the onetime colleagues bumped fists and headed their separate ways. But Mr. Snodgrass, a father of two, was among a few who had to get back to the plant. Contemplating where he’d go next, he said that his 4-year-old had already started to ask whether he had found another job.
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dudalb said:
ANd a reminder to some here who seem to be taking great schafreude about what is happening in the US that if Democracy goes under in the US, every Democracy in the world is on the endangered species list. If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere.
I suggest of the Euros here look at the support extreme right wing parties have gotten in the last few elections,
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This is just copy & paste for you, isn’t it.
 
Resume said:
The U.S. is broken . . .


Probably for good.
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:(

I wonder how ignorant and insular a society can become before they reach a point of no return. Never mind an alarming number of Americans not being able to place other countries, or even their own, on a world map, lately I've seen more and more of them who genuinely seem to think the US is the only country in the world that has democracy. That's not even ignorance, that's a North Korea-level delusion. It's as if I was to say with a straight face I thought only Europe had electricity, or that we were the only ones who knew how to read. Come to think of it, I've also heard Americans say only they have roads, and private cars, and neighbourhoods where people live in houses, so.

I mean, US history (and for that matter European history) has always been sanitized and to a degree made up, maybe that's true of the history of every country in some way big or small, I guess we all have our myths and misconceptions and things we've swept under the rug. But a country of 350 million+ people being this insular and ignorant is still just mind-boggling.
 
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Hercules56 said:
Hopefully none of us ever have to use it.
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Funny how it wasn't needed for such before the far right political forces that drove the reinterpretation reinterpreted it. Or done much to protect those they've worked to harm after the reinterpretation. It's almost like the longstanding and seemingly ubiquitous pattern of far right CTs and deceptions just happens to be in full swing on that topic.

Andy_Ross said:
Tim Burchett says he lives in his office in DC because he's scared of crime in the city.
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Guilty conscience?
 
He's going to paint it gold isn't he?

The Kennedy Center
@kencen
The Kennedy Center is honored to host a visit from our Chairman, President Donald J. Trump, tomorrow.

Thanks to his advocacy, our beautiful building will undergo renovations to restore its prestige and grandeur.

We are also excited to be announcing this year's INCREDIBLE slate of Kennedy Center Honorees.
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AmyStrange said:
If I recall, didn't this start under Biden? Of course, the fat clown will take all the credit.
Trump may reclassify marijuana as less dangerous drug. Is that a good thing?
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Come to think of it, smoking a doob just before the fat clown gets interviewed or writes his social crap would certainly explain his rambling diatribes, but that's just my opinion.

Your mileage may vary of course.

TBH, I'm also a worshipper of the Goddess Cannabis, and I sometimes do the same thing.
 
AmyStrange said:
Trump may reclassify marijuana as less dangerous drug. Is that a good thing?
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Broadly speaking, yes, if it happens. The one potential downside would be that some fraction of the population mistake such as Trump and the Republicans being "on their side" when the truth is rather decidedly the opposite. While I have no interest in using it myself, it's not hard to see that the current classification is unreasonable through and through. It also takes little effort to find that the why of why things are the way they've been is firmly rooted in racism and that the effects of the current classification are all around harmful to the US with little in the way of silver linings.
 
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