'They bought into the lie': Trump’s 'price of eggs voters' are turning on him
On The New Republic podcast "The Daily Blast," Salon's Amanda Marcotte says that President Donald Trump's base is starting to crack as "price of egg voters" who bought into his lies are realizing that they've been duped.
Podcast host Greg Sargent asked Marcotte what she thought about the White House seemingly reveling in "pain for lots of people."
"The core problem is that what thrills MAGA turns off the middle," Sargent said. 'It’s just a fundamental conflict — and I think they know it."
Marcotte agreed, breaking down the types of Trump voters into two distinct categories.
"There are the hardcore Trump loyalists — and yes, that’s most Trump voters — but he doesn’t get over the hill without that other 10 percent: the price of eggs voters. They’ll tell pollsters or in focus groups that they don’t like Trump. They’ll say he’s gross, he’s racist, he’s a pig — but they’ve bought into this lie that he’s a competent businessman," she says.
Those "price of egg voters," she says, look to Trump's first term with "rose-colored glasses," she says. "They have this vague nostalgia for what they thought was the Trump economy in his first term, which was really just pre-COVID America."
While he still has the support of his loyal base, Marcotte says, Trump is hemorrhaging his other voters.
"What’s happening now is that those voters — the ones he really does need on board if he wants to get anything done — are turning against him pretty quickly. You can see it when you break down the polling: young voters, a lot of whom were actual kids when Trump was president the first time, and Latino voters who bought into the notion that his racism was a joke," She said.
Those Latino voters, mostly men, are being turned off by ICE agents "going after anybody who speaks Spanish or is perceived to be Latino," Marcotte says. "And that's turning people off."
"And then, of course, the big 800-pound gorilla in the room, which is everything Trump is doing is about increasing costs on ordinary working people who are already legitimately feeling the squeeze," she says.
Although Trump, Marcotte says, showed his true colors during his first term, "Trump Two, like all sequels, is the same story, just bigger, louder, and with more explosions," she says.
The president's attack on health care in this government shutdown is also turning off voters.
"I think the reason health care is such a predominant issue is because, unfortunately, you can get a lot of people to accede to authoritarianism if they don’t think they’re personally going to be affected," she says.
But overall, people are not liking what they are seeing, she says.
"But make no mistake: People do not like ICE. People do not like the immigration raids. If you go out to any community and people are talking about it, it’s upsetting people. And obviously, the Jimmy Kimmel situation — I do think it brought home to a lot of people that Trump is a fascist. He does want to censor free speech."
Sargent says that these perceptions leave an opening for the Democrats.
"At the end of the day what you’ve really got here is Democrats finally sensing Trump’s weakness in a new kind of way," he said.
Marcotte agrees, adding, "We shouldn’t be doing gross AI videos — that doesn’t resonate with the people Democrats are trying to reach. But I do think it’s important to recognize there’s power here, there’s leverage here, and to just keep going forward."
