Yes, they voted for this
"You knew damn well I was a snake before you brought me in."
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Donald Trump launched a destructive global trade war last week, devastating the US economy and quickly erasing a record $6 trillion in value from the stock market. Americans everywhere watched their retirement savings catch fire, and now amidst the rubble, many Trump voters lament that this wasn’t their desired outcome when they willingly returned a madman to power.
Over the weekend, billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman called Trump’s tariffs “a self-induced, economic nuclear winter” and insisted, “This is not what we voted for.” (Ackman pathetically changed his tune after Trump walked back some of his tariffs on Wednesday and the markets temporarily ticked up, tweeting, “Textbook, Art of the Deal.”) Many Trump supporters have complained that they voted for “affordable groceries” and “lower taxes” but not a “global trade war.” But they were kidding themselves.
The 2024 election wasn’t a restaurant where you could order cheaper eggs but politely ask for the server to hold the fascism. You’re still getting the fascism, and your eggs aren’t just overpriced now, they’re broken and rotten.
Perhaps the most damning commentary about the US electorate and media is that Trump never even tried to conceal his malicious intentions and deranged policy positions. Despite some revisionist history from pundits and Trump voters with serious regrets, his second term is largely what his campaign promised. He was consistently fixated on personal grievance and revenge, with no serious solutions for the country’s problems, many of which were of his own making. That’s hardly the blueprint for an American Golden Age.
Almost exactly a year ago, Trump gave an extensive interview with Time Magazine that served as a detailed confession of his plot to ruin the country. The interview was conducted in April, months before he’d receive the Republican presidential nomination for a third time. His general election campaign was even more radical and divisive: He offered a dirty ashtray’s view of the future, with migrant fear-mongering, transphobic attacks, and outright threats against his enemies.
Trump wanted to win the presidency for his own self-aggrandizement and to inflict pain upon everyone he hates and who he believes has wronged him. Now he’s doing just that. He’s targeting immigrants, trans Americans, minorities, his political opponents, and anyone who ever tried to hold him accountable for his past crimes. He’s abandoned America’s allies and embraced democracy’s enemies. He’s governed even more lawlessly than during his first term, which is really saying something considering he was impeached twice, the second time after inciting a coup attempt.
There are cultist MAGA voters who supported Trump because he promised mass deportations, no matter how inhumane, and further persecution of marginalized groups. Then there are the supposed “normie” Trump voters who were willing to overlook the actual words coming from his mouth and assume he would restore the economy to how it was in 2019 — conveniently before his botched pandemic response. Now, neither group is happy with Trump’s insane, self-harming revenge tour, even though it was completely predictable.
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Tariff Man
During the presidential campaign, Trump paid lip service to distancing himself from the unpopular specifics of Project 2025, but he wouldn’t shut up about tariffs, which he called the “most beautiful word in the dictionary.”
In 2023, Trump threatened an across the board 10 percent tariff on imported products to the US — a plan the Economist called “disastrous” for the nation and the world. (Even after Trump’s tariffs walk-back earlier this week, he’s currently imposing 10 percent across the board tariffs, plus higher rates on China and on some goods from Mexico and Canada, as well as 25 percent tariffs on steel, aluminum, and automobiles.)
During the campaign, The Wall Street Journal and Reason agreed that a trade war would only make goods more expensive for American consumers.
Trump mentioned tariffs during just about every one of his incoherent rally speeches. He declared tariffs “the greatest thing ever invented” at a rally last year in Michigan, a swing state he’d carry. A PBS News article from September reflects the overall problem with how the mainstream media covered Trump’s tariff proposals. It simply repeats Trump’s nonsense claims that tariffs would “create more factory jobs, shrink the federal deficit, lower food prices and allow the government to subsidize childcare.”
“He even says tariffs can promote world peace,” the article adds. Tariffs would objectively do none of these things — the world peace angle is especially absurd — but the media promoted an unhelpful “both sides” narrative by highlighting that the Biden administration had supported tariffs in the past.
This framing is incredibly misleading. Biden’s tariffs were targeted and rational. Trump’s tariff strategy is the economic equivalent to angrily hurling ketchup at the wall.
It grows clearer every day that Trump doesn’t understand how tariffs actually work. He still talks about them as if we’re shaking down foreign countries directly, rather than putting an additional tax on foreign goods that American consumers will have to pay. Ken Langone, GOP donor and co-founder of Home Depot, complained that “I don’t understand the goddamn formula.” This assumes Trump’s arbitrary formula for applying tariffs is anything but bad math on steroids.
The media insisted on treating Trump like a normal candidate and avoided connecting his economic proposals with his ignorance and skewed view of the world. Everything with Trump is about exerting dominance over others. Tariffs were never a “negotiating” tool but just a means of turning the global trading system into another mob-style protection racket.
There was only one sane choice in 2024 and it wasn’t Trump
America barely survived the first Trump presidency, and during her 107-day campaign, Kamala Harris repeatedly communicated the risks of a second one. She specifically warned voters about Trump’s poorly considered tariff proposals, stating that it would cost the average family $4,000 a year.
“You don't just throw around the idea of just tariffs across the board, and that's part of the problem with Donald Trump," Harris said in September.
“He’s just not very serious about how he thinks about some of these issues," Harris added. "And one must be serious and have a plan, and a real plan that's not just about some talking point ending in an exclamation at a political rally, but actually putting the thought into what will be the return on the investment, what will be the economic impact on everyday people."
Yet, according to Andrea Mitchell, the business world was more skeptical of Harris than Trump. “They don’t think she's serious,” Mitchell said in October. “They don't think she’s a heavyweight.” These same business leaders are now freaking out because Trump’s idiocy is costing them a fortune.
The economy can’t thrive during uncertainty, and Trump not only intentionally unleashes chaos. He relishes it. But his chaotic, disordered thinking isn’t some new event. In fact, his presidential primary opponent Nikki Haley described him as “unhinged” and “unstable,” but like so many establishment Republicans, she still endorsed him. The delusional presumption was that adults in the room could “control” him.
A normal president needs good people around them to help inform their many difficult decisions. But they don’t require emotional support straitjackets, like Trump apparently does. It was the worst type of magical thinking to imagine that he would have any serious constraints in a second term, especially since the relatively responsible members of his first administration were either fired or resigned in horror and disgust.
Former Trump White House officials such as Olivia Troye and Miles Taylor all spoke publicly about Trump’s instability and recklessness. Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly warned that Trump would rule like a dictator if given the opportunity. More than 100 former Republican officials declared Trump “unfit to serve” and endorsed Harris. Predictably, Trump staffed his current administration with partisan hacks and flunkies like National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick .
Trump spent the past eight years purging the Republican Party of any meaningful resistance to him. Current Speaker Mike Johnson is a loyal MAGA stooge who promoted Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election. Far from trying to counsel Trump against his insane tariff policy, Johnson is instead telling Americans that the nude emperor has impeccable fashion sense.
What the Big Lie demonstrated is how committed Trump is to his delusions and how he rejects any real-word evidence that contradicts his preferred reality. January 6 showed how little he cares about anyone who stands in his way, even his own supporters in Congress. And of course, covid is a painful reminder of what happens when you put an anti-science buffoon in charge of public health. Reelecting Trump didn’t cause him to learn from his past mistakes and excesses. He’s only become more emboldened.
Giving Trump near absolute power and hoping to reason with him was always a fool’s bargain. Anyone who challenges the mad MAGA king risks banishment from his court. Ackman and others who know better are now reduced to praying that everything they know about sound financial policy is somehow proven wrong.
Trump voters had a clear choice between no tariffs and tariffs, between sanity and chaos. They chose poorly. If they believed that Trump wouldn’t be stupid and malevolent enough to obliterate the US economy for no good reason, they simply didn’t pay attention to his first term or his most recent campaign. They made a classic deal with the devil, but we’ll all have to pay the price.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
Before Trump rode down the escalator in June of 2015, I did not realize how many voters were uninformed, uneducated, and eager to support an ugly, vicious, greedy buffoon to run our once great country into the ground.
Boys throw stones at frogs for sport, but the frogs do not die in sport, but in earnest.
Yup, SER. Everyone attempts to apply some sort of complex reasoning to it all. Their frame of reference just can't grasp that he is simply--as Tom Nichols put it, a 'disordered child' who's finally gotten his paws on that bag of M-80s and gleefully blowing shit up, wide and sundry.