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WHERE’S MAGA? The dog that didn’t bark. A clue to Trump’s impending demise. [1]
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Date: 2025-03-08
They’re not at the rallies causing trouble.
The brown shirt sightings you do see – like in C’ouer D’Alene – look like the cub scout version.
They’re not in the Trump cabinet. All the seats there are taken, either by the super-rich who could afford to buy them, or by friends of Vlad.
I went to my first protest in a long, long time last month, expecting there to be some sort of showdown with the Proud Boys or a drive-by shooting or something tense. Nope. Just a big crowd of inspired Americans and one oily guy in the back trying to make trouble. No MAGAs.
But I did find them in a Reuters-Ipsos poll from last week.
Trump’s 2024 campaign employed the favorite tactics of fascism – scapegoating the weakest and blasting 24/7 implicit racism. Early in the campaign, remember, after he linked support for Ukraine to delivering a fix on the border, he double-crossed everybody. When Biden and right-wing Senators actually reached a deal, Trump pulled the plug. It was a double win. Not only did he get to exploit people’s bigotry, he got to stall a vote on aid for months and months.
He got the issue and he proceeded to beat the drum with every stick he had, with elaborate Laken Riley mini-campaigns and ruthless bludgeoning of the truth. Migrants are rapists and murderers, not an essential part of the food supply chain and construction labor and health care services. Migrants are diseased vermin, not hard-working families recruited specifically for the work they do, by American farmers, food processors, etc.
MAGA demands the ICE raids and detention camps with razor wire they were promised and we all wre bracing for. MAGA wants migrants to be tortured at Gitmo and if possible boxcars carrying away families with children. Instead they got a made-for-TV Potempkin deportation that is not very convincing and costs a lot to produce. MAGA knows what it bought. They heard what Trump was selling. This is not it. So they are still waiting for delivery.
MAGA did not buy tax cuts for billionaires, rule by the rich, Project 2025, or cuts to Medicaid. They did not buy abandoning an ally on the field and switching to the dictator’s side, nor Musk with his chainsaw and ketamine stupidity cutting their cousin’s job or screwing up social security payments or the VA.
Trump has a problem. He CANNOT deliver for MAGA on deportation. One, he couldn’t even build a hundred miles of wall. But two, to the point, if he did, grocery prices would go up and stay up. Field work, processing plants, construction, even health care depend on migrants to stay affordable. MAGA hates inflation even more than it hates brown people. Trump knows that, so sorry, no deportation.
It was on display when he ran his tariffs up the flagpole a couple of times. The last time they came down so fast he got a rope burn. Those tariffs were going to be instant price hikes. Inflation will not fly with MAGA voters. (Neither will the impending economic slump, but we’ll leave that for another day.)
A secret in plain sight: The proportion of income spent on food goes way up the further down the income scale you go, and a lot of MAGAs are in the bottom half. The median (half above, half below) is about 10% spent on food. The poorest one-fifth pay 30%-40% of their income on food. The second lowest one-fifth pays 15%-20%.
Deporting undocumented workers, or even terrorizing them with ICE on TV, will reduce their participation at the work sites that depend on them – notably in agriculture and food processing. Prices will go up either because wages will get bid up because of fewer workers, or because quantities will go down and capitalists will collect high prices on scarcity. See eggs for an object lesson on the latter.
So Trump is forced to betray MAGA’s blood lust to keep prices down at the grocery store. Since MAGA is not as enthusiastic as Trump about rule by the rich or Musk screwing with Social Security and the VA, they have checked out.
@demandside.bsky.social
[Yes, I cherry-picked, for brevity, not for sense. Here’s a few more for anybody who thinks Trump has rolled America on Ukraine.]
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