People expecting Trump voters to turn on him are fooling themselves

John Stoehr
19 November 2024
A supporter of Donald Trump rallies outside an early polling precinct as voters cast their ballots in local, state, and national elections, in Clearwater, Florida, U.S., November 3, 2024. REUTERS/Octavio Jones

There’s an argument I want to discuss. It goes something like this: Donald Trump’s policies are going to alienate some of the people who voted for him. To be sure, many of them wanted something done about the economy. Prices were too damn high. But they didn’t sign up for tariffs, deportations and cuts to social services, like food stamps.

As a liberal pundit put it, Trump seems poised to follow through with that policy agenda, though going through with it is “political suicide.”

My question is why.

Why are we expecting so much from Trump voters? I’m not making a distinction between his base and those who chose to go along for the ride. I mean all of his supporters, and I’m asking: Why should we place our democratic faith, and the future of the republic, in their hands?

It’s not like Trump had an agenda to bring down the cost of living. All he said was “Make America Great Again.” Deport “illegals.” Suppress transgender rights. Beat down weak and marginalized folks. Voila!

His one economic plan was tariffs. A tax on imported goods from China and elsewhere will raise prices on everything, not just imports, as retailers will price-gouge under cover of inflation. They’re the opposite of what you do to reduce costs. And that’s why he lied. He said nations would pay for them, not companies bringing goods in.

His voters chose to believe him.

So let me get this straight.

People who can’t or won’t understand tariffs are going to deduce all by themselves that tariffs are the reason they’re now paying three and four times more for their sneakers, T-shirts and video-game consoles?

People who voted against their own economic interests are going to figure out on their own what exactly those interests are, butonly after they’ve been screwed over by the president they voted for?

To paraphrase Mark Twain, it would be easier to continue scamming these people than convince them that they’ve been scammed.

And the scamming will continue.

The rightwing media apparatus, which is global in scale, prevented these voters from knowing what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had done for the economy, inflation, wages and the GDP, but especially for the material interests of the white working class. Biden and Harris literally ditched 40 years of supply-side consensus in favor of growing the economy, as Biden liked to say, from the bottom up and middle out. But no one who watches Fox or listens to Joe Rogan or reads The Daily Wire or sees YouTube ads for gold bullion knows any of that.

This same rightwing media apparatus, which has only grown larger since 2020, is going to prevent Trump voters from knowing who’s responsible for price hikes, job losses and soaring interest rates that will be directly attributable to deportations, tariffs and other insane policies. If there’s someone to blame, it won’t be Donald Trump. It will be RINOs or “Marxist, communist, fascist, socialists” or immigrants.

If Trump voters are not especially attuned to the rightwing media apparatus, they will nevertheless feel its ambiance, as the Washington press corps habitually launders Trump’s talking points and, as we have seen, appeases him by either self-censoring or acting as if already under threat of investigation or prosecution by his administration.

If Trump voters are able to see through the fog of the rightwing media apparatus and the Washington press corps, they still might not understand the damage done by Trump’s economic policies, as his administration will almost certainly try to corrupt government data. The jobs report, inflation index, consumer spending – there will huge incentive to fudge those after Trump commits “political suicide.”

If Trump voters are able to connect all the dots and blame him for everything he did or didn’t do, as they blamed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for everything they did and didn’t do, so what? Is Trump going to respond to the backlash as if he were a normal president?

He doesn’t care about his party. He doesn’t care about the next election (presuming he doesn’t run again). It’s hard to see any incentive outside his self-interest that would move him to back off anything.

I haven’t mentioned the fact that these voters, even the ones who chose to go along for the ride, inhabit a world of fantastical fiction, absolute trash reality, that none of us should put our hopes in.

These people believe mothers “abort” babies after they’re born or if they don’t believe it, they don’t mind people who say so. They believe a student goes to school as a girl and comes back as a boy or if they don’t believe it, they don’t mind people who say so. Even if we give them the benefit of the doubt, and treat them more like children than adults, are we going to trust them to realize Trump is bad for them?

And even if Trump voters turn against Trump, thus creating an opportunity for the Democrats to win them over, are they going to recognize what the Democrats are offering in terms of economic policy given the hold the rightwing media apparatus has on them and given their past record of voting against their own economic interests?

I’ll pass.

I’ll pass on believing these people can learn the hard way what happens when you don’t take democracy seriously, when you can’t figure out whether it’s a good idea to put a crook in the White House. They don’t take their own lives that seriously, neither their physical nor spiritual selves, much less the fate of a constitutional republic.

I’ll put my faith in good people who seek out good trouble in the name of liberty, equality and justice for all. They’re a minority these days, but that’s OK. The world never changed for the better because a majority wanted it. It changed because a righteous minority demanded it.

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