Trump’s tariff‑shaped stick can’t beat reality on US chip fabbing Ending America's reliance on foreign chip fabs remains a high priority for Uncle Sam, but the Trump administration's "my way or the highway" approach to the issue threatens to do more harm than good. Where the Biden administration sought to use federal subsidies and tax breaks as a carrot to encourage investment in domestic …
"...all he has to do is make a threat, and those in its path scramble to appease him..."
True, but all they have to do to appease him is tell him what he wants to hear and then do the bare minimum to live to fight another day. These companies particularly, as the article points out, are used to playing a long game whereas Trump only cares about the day's social media upvotes before fluttering off to the next emergency that he read about in a 3-year old Xitter post that was probably made up anyway.
He's alienating everyone who will actually do anything to support him staying in office. The military won't rise up to keep him in office because of a few of his toadies are at the top. Most of the guardsmen sent to L.A. felt depressed and ashamed about being there. No one's going to open fire on their fellow Americans for him.
"No one's going to open fire on their fellow Americans for him."
Wondering what the legal liability situation would be for soldiers if fatalities occurred as a result of military action on native soil subsequently regarded as unlawful.
Icon: Mine's the one with the transcript of the trial of Soldier F in the pocket (the UK has history with these things, honestly, think deeply about this)
I, too, was alive, as was my oldest brother who had graduated the year before and was visiting the week before (had a significant conversation with the ROTC student who was killed). What of it? The only real question is was any legal precedent established in the following investigation and legal proceedings that may have relevance today.
The US oath of enlistment requires defending the constitution and obeying orders. Instead of obeying orders officers swear to defend the constitution against enemies foreign and domestic. The oath of allegiance for immigrants and the oaths for government office also require defending the constitution against foreign and domestic enemies.
Exactly who is a domestic enemy is not clear, but inciting insurrection is one of the minimum required conditions. TACO has been impeached by congress for inciting insurrection and a majority of the senate found him guilty.
The only trouble with that suggestion is, historically, the (equivalent to) "someone who actually respects the Constitution" tends to be the General who is leading the troops. And Generals are rarely used to working in a democratic fashion and tend towards "might is right".
Then again, DT; six of one, half a dozen of the other.
The Army should take him out and hand over power to someone who actually respects the [US] Constitution.
On the evidence it is likely no native born US citizens would qualfy.
The few that might qualify, wouldn't take the job if only because the whole exercise would be in breach of said constitution and likely have already emigrated to saner climes.
To be honest the whole of contemporary America escapes the appellation "sinister" simply because of the totally retarded clowns who are running the circus. As is said in these parts: "If they had half a brain they would be dangerous."
> If POTUS can't break the law
Bloody enormous "if" there!
However, my understanding (IANAL but do watch "Legal Eagle" on YT) is that DT has been arranging things so he gets "presidential immunity": i.e. he does things that *are* acknowledged to be illegal but then everyone turns a blind eye.
This is not correct. The Supreme Court determined that a president could not be criminally prosecuted after leaving office for actions taken as part of his official duties (this is a very brief and vague summary). A former president may be prosecuted after leaving office for crriminal acts that were done outside the broad and somewhat vague limits of official duties. For example, without President Ford's pardon, Richard Nixon could have been prosecuted for a number of actions he took, while in office, in connection with the Watergate burglary, and Donald Trump could (if the AG of the time hadn't been slow off the mark and a competent federal judge had the case) have been prosecuted criminally in connection with theft and retention of government documents, some of them apparently classified, that he took from his former office in the White House after his successor was inaugurated.
The real intended control on presidential abuse of office is and always has been impeachment and removal from office, after which he would be open to prosecution for non-official criminal acts as described in the Constitution. Congress, feckless and self-serving as usual, failed twice to do that, and othe current one is on track to repeat the error despite overwheming evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors.
No one's going to open fire on their fellow Americans for him.
He'll probably replace them with ICE personnel. They don't seem to have a problem with inhuman treatment, irrespective of who it is. If I recall correctly, there was once a weirdly moustached chap who didn't appear to have a staffing problem either when it came to setting up the SS.
If you're willing to mistreat women and children you have in my opinion left the human race.
"If I recall correctly, there was once a weirdly moustached chap who didn't appear to have a staffing problem either when it came to setting up the SS."
And if I recall correctly, no matter how much some ghouls are rubbing their hands together at the prospect, The US in 2025 is not Germany in 1933. Anyone who thinks so really needs to brush up on their history and the differences between the two cultures.
I agree. No chance with today's gas prices.
Too dark? Remember, this is the country that wanted to shut a broadcaster for a bad (and frankly -maybe deliberately - misunderstood) joke but barely twitched when a broadcaster on their side suggested lethal injections.
"the country that wanted to shut a broadcaster for a bad (and frankly -maybe deliberately - misunderstood) joke"
Talking about Kimmell? Please note that he's back on the air. Even on the Sinclair and Nexstar stations. EVERYONE folded when the people spoke with their wallets.
Hesgeth's address today, to the top couple of hundred brass, appears to have managed to piss off / insult most of the audience. Half of them dislike the implication that they, personally, haven't earned their rank and the other half know their colleagues well enough to know Hesgeth is talking crap on behalf of a draft dodger.
As someone born in the US, to watch this deranged idiot be the guy in charge. Everyday it is something else that just makes you think how? How did my fellow countrymen vote for this clown. Twice. From indicting Comey and it now looks like Obama is next in line, to deploying troops in places no one asked for, to yoyo tariffs, to bribes, ... Well you get the idea. It is exhausting. I watched an interview with LuLa right after our clown gave his speech complaining about the escalator, the teleprompter, how UN should have given him the contract for updates 30 years ago, blah blah blah. You know a 2 year old. Meanwhile Lula speaking in Spanish(Portuguese maybe) via a translator sounded presidential. Maybe the translator made it sound presidential, somehow I don't think so though. I expect Lula sounds presidential to his native speakers too. My hope is our 2 year old man-child falls down Air Force 1 steps and plunges to his death. Then we can move on.
"My hope is our 2 year old man-child falls down Air Force 1 steps and plunges to his death. Then we can move on."
Only if Vance falls first. Not being in the US myself, not sure if that would be good or bad. Which loon is next in line of succession after Vance? And what are the rules on how quickly an election is called if El Presidente dies? Or does the "natural successor" get to hold office for the rest of the term?
Actually I don't think it matters. How the orange clown gets away with it is a mystery. I don't see charisma there. But he has something. And Vance does not have the thing. If the marshmallow bounces off the tarmac, his successor will get pushback if he pulls blatant unconstitutional crap. Nixon was the last one to really trample & stomp on the constitution and he kept his mouth shut when he did it. Trump broadcasts it and his minions cheer.
"How the orange clown gets away with it is a mystery."
Easy. By appealing to the sizable proportion of the electorate who are (a) pretty thick and (b) subscribe to the same felonious, misogynistic, racist, disrespectful opinions that he does. Every time he shoots his mouth off, or exceeds his powers, or blames everybody but himself, these people are lapping it up on Fox News or whatever social media cesspit they subscribe to, and want more.
Take a look at Nate Silver's blended poll assessment, Trump's approval ratings dropped fair steadily in the first five months from his inauguration as some voters realised the horrifying mistake they'd made. In the subsequent five-ish months however it's flatlined, with 44% pretty consistently approving no matter what act of America-harming stupidity he does, nor what clumsy, oafish words fall out of his piggy mouth. In the context of tariffs, Trump's supporters clearly understand nothing of how tariffs work, nor the consequences of trying to re-shore manufacturing to the US, nor even the vast presidential power-grab as their country is stolen from them by a convicted criminal. But they don't really care, and don't intend to educate themselves, they'll just crack another bottle of weak-as-piss pretend beer, grab their AR-15, and go out looking for migrants to harass.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-silver-bulletin
It's unlikely any successor to Trump will be able to hold the party in their thrall the way Trump has managed to. Jay Kuo covered off some hypotheticals as to what could happen if Vance had to take over from Trump (either through death or being forced to stand down) at https://thinkbigpicture.substack.com/p/after-trump-gone-vance-maga.
How did my fellow countrymen vote for this clown. Blaming the voters for the Dem Party failure is like a craftsman blaming his tools.
NBC News - June 25, 2025: Independent and third-party voter registration growing, largely at the expense of Democrats - The analysis shows the increase in the share of independents has come at the cost of the Democratic Party. Except during former President Barack Obama’s 2008 election, the share of registered voters made up by registered Democrats has declined every year since 2000 across the jurisdictions with data. The decline has accelerated in recent years, as the party’s share of the registered voters in jurisdictions with available data fell 1.2 percentage points from 2024 to 2025, among the largest one-year decreases since 1998. Republicans’ voter share has also declined overall, although it has increased since 2021.
The DNC could begin to address this problem by requiring primaries to be open to any voters not registered to another party. And by choosing the presidential candidate transparently by ranked choice popular vote summed over all state primaries, with no special block votes given to DNC donors or leaders.
I know many Dem activists would agree with this proposal - except for the part open about semi-open primaries. And that's a big part of the problem.
Jesus wept. I stumped for the woman out of duty to my country and people and I can tell you the simple fact that she got the votes she did was a miracle.
She didn't even place in her first primary amongst Democrats.
In some ways, you should be relieved that we're doing this now because Harris would have been just another four years of right wing histrionics while nothing got done. A strained smile hiding domestic unrest.
For myself 2024 was a final confirmation that Americans crave free dope and the ability to hit your neighbors in the eye , damn the consequences.
Save your pity for the victims of their greed and foreign policy: the Ukrainians, the Sudanese, the Gazans, the Yemenis, the Kurds and whatever minority the USians are doing witch-hunts against this week.
Hillary Clinton almost certainly would have been elected in 2016 if she had listened to and acted on the advice of people like her husband and James Carville. Indeed, she probably could have won by no more than facing down Trump and telling him to go back to his podium in one really awful "debate" performance.
My hope is our 2 year old man-child falls down Air Force 1 steps and plunges to his death.
Seems he really ought be introduced to el Reg's BoFH - the doyen of serendipitous, rapid but invariably fatal descents of inconvenient individuals from the elevator doors, windows (and aircraft doors) inexplicably left open on to a giddying abysses.
I am confident the consummate artist that Simon is, he could arrange for the next in line to be under the plummeting victim and for the lethal trifecta that the by then defunct defenestree squashes the Secretary of Health on the bounce.
"Anyone making 555s and 741s in the US?"
At a guess, Global Foundaries. But even if they make them, their product would likely be Mil-Spec. Wider temperature range than commercial or industrial grade, but also more costly. And expanding a fab even for ancient chip designs surely isn't either cheap or quick.
Let's take Apple as an example. They assemble 100% of iPhones overseas and that is always going to remain the case. When a shipment of iPhones arrives, how is customs supposed to know whether the SoC in each was made in the US or Taiwan? How are they supposed to know that about DRAM or NAND or modem or any of the dozens of other smaller chips? How about multiple chips in a single package - the SoC is stacked with the DRAM, how would you count that if the SoC was Taiwan and the DRAM was US?
Now sure they could require that Apple (and every other company importing goods into the US) disclose where the chips in their products were made, but they don't always have that information. If Apple ordered NAND from Samsung, they don't care whether Samsung delivers to them NAND fabbed in South Korea or Texas. So now they'd have to start tracking that. What if they order a camera module from Sony, and there is a little bit of DRAM in there and now Sony has to track that information from THEIR suppliers and tell Apple for it to be reported.
This is a lot of complexity. A big company like Apple could manage. It would cost a lot, but they make billions selling iPhones so it wouldn't add a noticeable cost to each one. If you're a smaller company, with smaller volumes, perhaps selling things for $10 instead of $1000, that overhead is going to become much more significant. If you're a small business you're basically at the mercy of your suppliers to provide that information, and in a cutthroat market they aren't going to want to absorb such costs especially if they're overseas and this stuff is all bs to them. A huge customer like Apple can dictate conditions to its suppliers who are all smaller. When you're the little fish you can't dictate any conditions on your suppliers, they dictate them to you.
US Companies like Apple are already well skilled in transfer pricing, where only the minimum value crosses the most advantageous border. For chips that would just be the silicon. Any and all "IP" is a separately billed line item, from a "US" company.
This is what they are already doing to avoid income taxes, so nothing new, just a bit of shifting around which bits of IP are owned in which countries.
When I was in the chip business, we paid a few cents per mm^2 to the fab - including the fabs IP. If you split the fab's IP out into a separate item which isn't crossing the border, then the chip price is even less.
But you are right that this advantages big companies, and also reduces competition.
It isn't clear whether they are talking about "chips" by number or by value, but there would be no benefit to playing transfer pricing games because it is ultimately intended at try to strong arm TSMC into making more chips here.
A chip manufactured by TSMC in Taiwan is manufactured in Taiwan regardless of who owns the IP it contains, who paid TSMC to fab it, and through how many countries it may have passed on its way from TSMC until it was imported into the US as part of some product. The issue with this is tracking all that for every product, which would be required if you have to show that half your chip content (again, unclear whether by number or by value) comes from the US.
Only things that physically cross through customs into the USA actually get duty. Trump has been quite vociferous in trying to stop other countries taxing pure IP crossing borders e.g. movies, software services etc.
A chip's price includes:
1) Printing the wafer
2) wafer testing
3) packaging and package testing
4) NRE for mask sets, setups etc
5) semiconductor or fab/process SDK IP (e.g. ram cell designs)
6) Core module IP (e.g. licences from 3rd parties for cpu cores, usb modules)
7) Functional design IP (the functional chip design)
8) profit margin
Only #1 has to cross the US border from TSMC. All the others are either things that could be done in the US without building fabs, or are pure IP charges that don't attract duty.
When I was making chips
1) Israel
2) USA (wafers tested by the chip designers)
3) Thailand (chips diced and packaged)
4) Israel - stays in Israel
5) Included in NRE but could be broken out
6) Poland
7) USA chip designer
A consequence of high tariffs is that all countries which have them, also have "duty-free export zones" where factories that make products for export from imported materials are located. If the USA persists with high tariffs it will also establish these e.g. in Detroit, San Diego.
It is easy to see Apple or TSMC putting a packaging plant in the USA, and importing wafers. Wafers would be the only part tariffed. The cost of wafers in an Apple product is probably negligible.
I think that happens via the Bill Of Materials (BOM). After all, it's not like customs has to examine every single iPhone - once the BOM has been assessed there is a tariff calculation and each device will thus have its extra bit of Trump sponsorship added to the price.
The only question is if Apple has the cojones to leave the prices abroad still unadjusted (as no tariffs need to be paid), or raise them so Agent Orange isn't exposed for the idiot he is when it comes to tariffs.
He might decide to squeeze Apple more if they do, so there's a cost/benefit issue to be worked out. Personally I don't think Tim Cook has the balls, given what he's already given to Trump even before being prompted.
"The only question is if Apple has the cojones to leave the prices abroad still unadjusted (as no tariffs need to be paid), or raise them so Agent Orange isn't exposed for the idiot he is when it comes to tariffs."
There's no question here. They couldn't possibly double the price of an iPhone outside the US and stay in business there. Most of the rest of the world favours Android even as it is.
