Hacker News Reader

Comment by scarface_74 | Hacker News Reader

I’ve always thought it was crazy when either side said they were leaving the country based on who won the presidency.

Last time between moderate old school Republicans, business interest and the bureaucracy, they were able to keep Trump in check. But it is different this time.

Trump is no normal Republican and neither are his flunkies in Congress. I’ve seriously been looking at retiring to Costa Rica or Panama City. It’s stable. It’s relatively easy to become a permanent resident and buy into their health care system.

View on HN

As a person who left the US almost 9 years ago (part of my reason was I saw the writing on the wall and knew a big political mess was coming. Part was similar to you with wanting good health care), one thing that's bothering me about a lot of the nü-emigrants from the US is they're bringing the politics with them that they're claiming to escape from. I've been feeling American politics creep more and more into my life here despite thinking I escaped them nearly a decade ago, and it's due to more Americans moving abroad and not really adapting to the mindset of their new home.

There are some good people who leave out there. But it's feeling like the world is becoming more and more uniform with this bizarre political worship and cult of personality all centered on America.

I strongly doubt those immigrants are causing any of that, rather than the enormous online reach of Tate et. al alt-right along with Russia-backed campaigns, and now Musk over the last decade. Those have left a large impact even in countries with zero American immigrants to speak of. That's a much more likely cause.

English speakers keep pinning the blame solely on Russia. Russia has some degree of influence and that's undeniable. But the word of mouth bizarre chatter online and in real life is very organic. Until people accept that their own culture has problems, nothing will change. Pinning the blame on some other culture that they don't like and blaming them for everything has a long history but it never fixes the problem.

Go to some bars or even random discord servers and you'll quickly find that it's not Russians trying to proselytize everyone with their political beliefs. They're actual people.

And I'm not only talking about the right wing stuff that Russia does promote. There are bizarre political brainworms leaking out of America in many political directions.

When this discussion comes up I always like to remember that the founding fathers also fled England to escape political turmoil.

A bit like the guy that “always seems to run into dysfunctional teams”, that should give food for thought.

The difference is that always being on a dysfunctional team is caused by people who can’t judge the company before they work there or make the team dysfunctional. Either way, they had some amount of power over their own situation.

We are at a third scenario, the second law of thermodynamics, everything goes to shit over time including teams and countries.

When that happens it’s usually time to leave. It often happens when the company is acquired like the US has been bought by President Musk with his useful idiot puppet.

I’m 50 and I’ve never seen anyone - Republican or Democrat - try to wreck the US either domestically or internationally like President Musk has.

Don’t get me wrong, even at retirement I would be hedging my bets and should be able to keep my by then paid off condo in the US and rent in another country and go back and forth.

Americans can’t vote in other countries. What would Americans want to bring to other countries? A shitty expensive health care system?

I fully plan to learn more than the little Spanish I know if I move.

They can take citizenship and vote.

What I've encountered is more and more Q style thinking these past few years. Sometimes outright support of it. Sometimes even pro-Q demonstrators in the middle of town. The worst part is these people talk about it at their workplaces, they talk about it with their friends, they teach it to their kids and spouse. The whole line of thinking is a mindvirus.

It went from happily being detached from American stuff entirely to random locals saying, "You're American, right? What do you think about (bizarre conspiracy theory originating in the US)? It makes a lot of sense to me and I'm glad (politician) will take care of it. We need a guy like that here." When I ask where they're hearing about this, it's often "This American friend of mine tells me about it and he makes a lot of good points."

And this is just the more extreme kind of thinking that's spread. There are various other americanisms creeping in that I wish I could've escaped forever.

> I’ve seriously been looking at retiring to Costa Rica or Panama City. It’s stable.

Panama? Did you forget about https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/26/panic-and-defi...?

I’m looking at a least a 10 year time horizon. Trump has talked about taking over Greenland, Gaza, Canada and Panama.

> I’m looking at a least a 10 year time horizon. Trump has talked about taking over Greenland, Gaza, Canada and Panama.

I'm confused, how does a 10 year time horizon make Panama look more stable w.r.t. Trump's threat? Wouldn't it be worse? If negative impact on Panama is going to unfold, I'd expect it to be more painful over the long term than the short term, not less.

I think their point was a military incursion is just as likely in Panama as Canada Greenland and Gaza. Can you honestly picture boots on the ground in any one of these? The man is the definition of “mouth writes checks he can’t cash”

> I think their point was a military incursion is just as likely in Panama as Canada Greenland and Gaza. Can you honestly picture boots on the ground in any one of these?

Military is irrelevant here. You don't need boots on the ground to throw a country into chaos. Did Russia and China send soldiers on American soil to make the US as unstable as it is right now (...leading to people's desires to seek a more stable country)?

The concern was regarding stability, healthcare, etc. which means economic and political stability. How stable do you think Panama would be in (say) an economic war with the US that is focused on controlling their canal? What if the US decides to covertly influence their government (or worse)?

But to answer your question directly anyway: for Canada he specifically said "economic force", not military. For Gaza, he said Israel would handle the military aspect and hand it over. For Greenland, the military is already there, but also it's not like they would meet any resistance via combat there. For Panama... it seems unlikely but it's also hard to put anything past him. Not because of his word, but because his actions are just so unpredictable.

> Did Russia and China send soldiers on American soil to make the US as unstable as it is right now

Wait a minute. We did this to ourselves. Of course do Russia and China meddle in the USA's infosphere (just like we meddle in their infospheres), but there are always two involved: those meddling and those believing it. I mean, Reptiloids, blood-harvesting, Pizzagate... Seriously, what would China have to put in your china to make you gullible enough to believe that? Yet there are obviously people out there that do believe. It made headlines!

Unlike China or Russia it still matters in the USA what the population believes. Thus we, as members of the general public, regardless of our political leaning, cannot exculpate us from the state of the nation by pointing at some foreign power and say "they made me do it". As an expat I thought, I could keep out of it, but I can't. We have to face up to the fact that all of this is our doing and nobody forced us to do it.

> Wait a minute. We did this to ourselves. Of course do Russia and China meddle in the USA's infosphere (just like we meddle in their infospheres), but there are always two involved

I have no clue what this has to do with the current discussion. Yes, there are two involved. Panamanians could also become similarly involved in any instability the US decides to sow there. How does that imply Panama is going to be stable? Are you under the impression that Panamanians are somehow immune to to this?

It's not that he threatens things he can't go through with. It's that he presents himself as unhinged and capable of any sort of messed up thing. So when he says he's going to send troops to Panama to retake the canal, he probably doesn't expect he'd ever actually do it. But Panama's government can't be sure, so when Trump asks for something perhaps a bit more "reasonable" than returning the canal to US control, Panama will look at that as better than risking a military incursion, and capitulate.

This has already happened with lower-stakes stuff, like the tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods that Trump never even put into effect once he announced them but immediately got concessions from Canada and Mexico. Whether or not those concessions are actually useful or will materialize is another matter, but that's almost irrelevant: Trump knows he can push them around now, and pretty easily at that.

Trump caved and really didn’t get anything

https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-canada-mexico-shein...

> But many of those outside the White House looking at the tariffs drama say little was accomplished, arguing that the measures taken by the two U.S. neighbors were already in place or likely could have been achieved without Trump’s ultimatums. Even the financial markets seemed to shrug off the showdown with a modest sell-off on Monday.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com