Ah yes, the recommended oil checks on a famously electric vehicle. /s

I get what you’re saying, but more likely is that nobody would ever notice. Which also seems unlikely, since we’re quite an oversharing culture.

Sure, but then you’d also expect to hear about Teslas with odometers that massively underreport the distance, too. Or that fail altogether. And while no one would be likely to report the former, the latter might be a bigger deal.

Products are really the only thing that can be marketed. Even oneself is a product when marketed; you’re saying “please buy my services” or “please listen to me” or whatever. Once you’ve begun to market it, it’s become a product.

And in this scenario are you the creator of the product (in which case, why)? Or some rando on the street?

If the former: you could say something really, really terrible; or release the product in a broken or laughable state; or collude with a foreign power to put an unqualified idiot into political power. There have been plenty of case studies in recent American history.

If you’re just an average joe, probably nothing. Products are created and positioned in the market in such a specific, intentional, and anodyne way these days that you probably can’t really find a way to make its marketing fail; short of discovering one of the things mentioned in the above paragraph and making it public.

I’m also an American. And I am frankly livid about the tariffs.

Oh, to be clear, I don’t think the US has been dethroned on the world stage in terms of being the largest single elephant in the room. It’s just that the weight between the US elephant and all the other elephants (combined) has evened out quite a lot.

These tariffs might well do a lot to swing that even further.

You’re very kind, thank you.

They will if the conservative media machine falls apart and they start actually seeing reality.

It’s possible…someday…maybe…

Yeah, the US has a lot of economic weight to swing around, but the world has also spend the decade (!) since Trump was first elected finding other business outlets and generally needing the US less, meaning that the relative weight of the US and the rest of the world has normalized significantly. The EU is stronger, China is stronger, Canada is stronger. The US withdrawing from the world economy would hurt everyone, but it would hurt the US a whole lot more than everyone else.

He failed to sell alcohol and beef to Americans

The only thing harder to do is to fail at selling sub-prime mortgages before the 2008 recession

which he also did

Ok. The bottom line is, either it “won’t do all that much”-- meaning it won’t affect prices, it won’t affect the economy, it’ll be basically useless–or it will be disastrously expensive for ordinary people. There is no other option. The “disastrously expensive for ordinary people” is the only thing that will cause any amount of the change Trump promises: it’s the mechanism by which the plan operates.

There is no option where companies just eat the tariff costs, or countries pay them. Maybe a few scattered companies and countries do, but by and large, not a chance.

Every country in the world needs all the other countries more than all of the other countries need it. There’s just no real leverage, because we’re all interconnected; you can snip one country out, and it’ll slightly hurt everyone, but it’ll wreck the country that was snipped out.