Red-state Trump voter explains why his past support is 'not aging so well'
Conservative Kansas City Star columnist David Mastio says his list of reasons to be thankful for President Donald Trump’s election last November didn’t pan out as he’d hoped.
“This Thanksgiving, I’ll be filling my plate with big ol’ helping of crow because last Thanksgiving I gave you a turkey,” said Mastio.
Last November, Mastio wrote a Thanksgiving list on ‘why I am thankful for Donald Trump,’ The first five reasons he listed “aren’t aging so well,” he said.
His first: “Convincing Americans that we don’t need to constantly be at war to be safe,” seemed a good start with “Trump’s isolationist-lite foreign policy and Marco Rubio’s establishment ballast” set to deliver four years of peace to the American people.
“With his awful Russian-written peace plan for Ukraine, Trump looks more like the kind of appeaser who is going to invite World War III than any kind of peacemaker,” said Mastio, “even if he has stopped eleventyseven wars around the world. I am just waiting for the invasion of Venezuela. It all could turn out OK, I suppose, because maybe I don’t understand Trump’s 3D chess and all. Rubio sure doesn’t explain it very well, because he has turned out to be less ballast than a wind sock.”
Reason No. 2: “Convincing the Republican Party that working people might be just as important as business and billionaires,” also fell flat, said Mastio.
“Who was I kidding? Trump has barely made a stab at fighting the inflation that made working people’s lives so difficult during the Biden administration.” said Mastio. “He’s tried to undermine the Federal Reserve and tied up the world’s wealth-producing commerce more in tariffs than in trade deals.”
Reason No. 3 quickly devolved into a bitter joke because it was: “The deliciousness of unleashing the brilliant Elon Musk on cutting the government” despite Musk’s fortune coming from government subsidies.
Mastio said Musk “didn’t last through the whole first season of ‘Donald Returns to the Swamp.’
Reason No. 4 involved “Appointing Scott Bessent for treasury secretary,” but that went sour, too.
“As with all things near the Trumpy White House vortex, Bessent went a little crazy,” said Mastio. “Crypto is crashing, the stock markets have had some recent bumps and Bessent is reduced to telling people that the way to fight inflation is to move to a red state where inflation is lower. Never mind that life spans and incomes are lower in those states, too.”
Reason No. 5 took a quick nosedive because it involved Trump finally realizing that not “putting constant petty fights in the headlines makes him more popular.” At the time Mastio wrote his list, Trump was being “uncharacteristically professional during the transition.” But that was, of course, written the month of Trump’s victory.
“That did last almost all the way through last December, but now a new petty fight erupts every week,” said Mastio. “Just yesterday, he was fighting with the Jewish Space Lasers lady and said he wanted to put to death a couple of senators and several House members. Consequently, Trump’s popularity has done what you’d expect.”
Read The Kansas City Star report at this link.
