Trump voters got exactly what they wanted — so why are people complaining?

John Stoehr
04 April
A supporter of Republican presidential nominee 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

This week, Donald Trump announced sweeping new tariffs that the Associated Press called “a historic tax hike that could push the global order to a breaking point,” and what I want to know is this:

Why are we still wondering what Trump voters want?

He promised. He delivered. What’s the mystery?

I ask, because our discourse seems to be invested in the idea that his supporters don’t really want this, and I don’t just mean his hardcore supporters. We tell ourselves that the last election was about inflation and the high cost of living, like the price of eggs, and that it doesn’t make sense for people who voted against that to welcome it now.

Resolving this tension is important. The Democrats believe that if they can show Trump voters what he’s going to do – how he’s going to make everything more expensive – then they can get some of them to see why supporting a Democrat in the midterms is good for them.

In doing this, the Democrats assume that Trump voters are motivated by their wallets. That’s understandable. The conventional wisdom is that inflation caused the electorate to burn up the incumbent party.

But the conventional wisdom also asks us to do something that we should not do and it prevents us from asking the hard questions. In effect, it treats Trump supporters as if they didn’t really understand what they were getting into, and as a consequence of not truly understanding, they can’t be held responsible for what they did.

It treats them like children.

We shouldn’t do that.

If we treat them as adults who have their way of understanding tariffs, we might ask ourselves what’s really going on, because what’s really going on isn’t about money, and because of that, it’s harder to beat.

Look at it this way.

Trump supporters are going to trust him no matter how incoherent, no matter how dumb. Indeed, the dumber and more incoherent, the more they trust. His choices trigger reactions, which in turn force his people to choose between trusting everyone who says tariffs are a tax, which they are in fact or trusting Trump, who says they’re a tax cut. (Evidently, the idea is that tariffs will bring such prosperity to America that the government will no longer have need for an income tax.)

Over the last 10 years, Trump has swept them up in a story about the cosmic battle between good and evil, in which the chosen people, free and innocent and pure, have been taken advantage of by “globalists” who are trying to replace them with foreigners with the intention of “poisoning the blood” of the country, leading to America’s destruction.

Of course, this story is about a white man’s country fighting to reclaim its birthright against multiracial democratic politics, which seeks to flatten the hierarchies of power. But it can be told in a way that appeals to anyone, even nonwhite people, and that’s why I keep saying the challenge isn’t just hardcore supporters. It’s swing voters, too.

Liberation requires personal sacrifice and “short-term pain.” So if supporters do end up recognizing that his policies are impoverishing them, they almost certainly will not attribute their suffering to him.

They will blame whomever he tells them to, including nations, as he said yesterday, that have “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered” the country. These foreigners are the reason he implemented tariffs in the first place, using emergency powers usually reserved for wartime.

Indeed, the more Trump supporters suffer, the closer they are likely going to bind themselves to the president. Their suffering will be taken as proof of their patriotism and devotion to the cause of justice, and because their savior will be the only one who can relieve them of it.

This cosmic story about a white man’s country fighting to reclaim its birthright does not make sense to those who can’t or won’t see the role of racism in politics. So they chock it up to just another conspiracy theory before looking for “the real reasons” why voters chose Trump. The Democrats, meanwhile, tend to accept this, which means their solutions to the problem are as phony as the problem itself.

I’ll conclude with this observation.

It could be that the last election was about money, but not in the way most people think. Fact is, the economy was booming. Inflation was down. Wages were up. Unemployment had rarely been lower. Joe Biden really did grow the economy from the bottom up and the middle out. And in spite of stubbornly high costs, most everyone prospered.

But that may have been the problem.

It’s not that Trump voters were mad at Biden, because he didn’t do enough about inflation. I think they were mad at him, because he did more than any president to expand the economic pie to include all those who are usually left behind, especially Black people.

Sad as it is, the fact remains that when Black Americans are doing well for themselves, too many white people in this country start feeling like something is wrong, something is being taken from them, someone somewhere is cheating them, even when they are in fact thriving. It’s white-power’s zero-sum. If America includes “them,” it excludes “us.”

The mainstream view used to be that the party that presided over boomtimes was the party that could expect to be rewarded. But for Trump voters who believe they are the real America, and that the real America has been “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered,” it’s likely that boomtimes meant something else – evidence they were right.

The Democrats tend to believe they can win over some Trump voters with economic politics that are designed to be in everyone’s interest. But it’s because they are designed in everyone’s interest that most Trump voters are unlikely to be won over. They want economic policies for them, not everyone. And if tariffs end up hurting them, they can take comfort in knowing Black people are hurting more.

Yes, these tariffs are the biggest tax increase of our lifetimes.

But that’s what they wanted.

He promised. He delivered. No mystery.

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