I wonder if he would go so far as to withhold access to US tech to this end.
I imagine if the current administration does, Europe could retaliate by withholding ASML’s tech or even doing a mass sell off of US treasuries. Europe is admittedly not in a position of strength compared to the US, but there are still a lot of levers they can pull.
There's no chance in hell that he would because if there's one easy way to piss off the oligarchy it's to make their net worth plummet. And losing >20% of revenue in one fell swoop does just that. Europe remains a huge profit center. That's why all the talk by many Americans including on HN in the past about "well if the EU keeps fining Meta and co billions, maybe they'll stop doing business there!". They'd be removed from their positions before they could even utter the phrase considering it. Imagine how that earnings call would go. "Yeah uhh, we left a market where we were making 20 billion per year net profit because we got fined 5 billion. Mhm.".
Trump's grip on the US oligarchy isn't even 1% as tight as Putin's on Russia's, who has everything completely under his thumb. If the US oligarchy conspires to depose Trump, he's gone next week. That they're all sucking up to him doesn't refute that at all, that's just the optimal move until it isn't. All these people do is take the optimal move for their own net worth at the current point in time.
I'm sure this would be better received if I took an LLM and had it rewrite this in a less conversational and higher-brow way, but it's no longer the time for that.
There is literally no such thing as "US tech". Even for those companies domiciled in the US, it is just the label on a world of contributions.
He wouldn't dare, the coward! ;)
That'd be amazing. It'd suck for some weeks initially, including for myself and the companies I'm involved in, but at least then it'll start being a "all hands on desk" sort of thing instead of "Lets make sure we finish this before the end of 2026" which is the current state of affairs.