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Is that all there is? A flip-flopping Trump is about to discover how much losing MAGA will tolerate [1]
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Date: 2025-04-23
MAGA bought the illusion that a serial bankrupt knows how to run an economy. For four years after losing in 2020, Trump claimed he was robbed. That Biden was a geriatric incompetent. That the economy was shit. And only he could save the nation and make America great again. Then he got re-elected. It has not gone well.
Trump promised tariffs were a cost-free cure for our fiscal ills. Foreigners would pay trillions to the treasury to right our economic ship, negate the deficit, and disappear our national debt. The braggart boasted he had the fiscal legerdemain to reduce prices while adding cost. Economists scratched their heads. The base wasn't worried. They believed Trump when he said 2 + 2 = 1. Conservative media called anyone questioning the math a victim of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
However, there is a consequence to winning an election. You're now responsible. When things go badly, you can try to blame-shifting. But when your party controls both legislative houses — and you enjoy a 6-3 SCOTUS majority — your whining rings hollow. You soon lose the swing voters who won you the election. And even your base starts to wonder, "Where's the beef?".
Who knows?
Take tariffs. I don't need to tell the reader how that's going. The markets know. Since Trump's inauguration, the Dow is down 10%, the S&P is down 11%, and the Nasdaq is down 15%. And that includes the last two days of gains engendered by Trump's almost complete capitulation on his signature tariff policy, his flip-flop on firing Fed Chair Jerome Powell, his unfulfilled DOGE ambition, and his underwhelming numbers on deportations.
He promised his base the moon. But his rocket ship blew up soon after launch — (insert Space X joke here.)
Trump's failure is not just numerical. It is reputational. If he had never instituted a tariff, or threatened to fire Powell, or sicced Musk on the government, or sent legal residents to foreign jails without due process, he could have kept the base happy by pretending he was doing all the things he had promised to do. Those guys will swallow almost anything. And the independents who backed him in 2024 would assume that the best was yet to come.
But because he tried and failed — comprehensively and quickly — the reek of that failure is stinking up the administration. Add to that the incompetence of Trump's cabinet choices. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is getting most of the attention for aggressive ineptitude , but he is not alone.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is a master of malapropism and addicted to making sweeping statements on TV talk shows substantively at odds with the administration's latest spin. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem cannot keep her handbag secure in a restaurant. Health Secretary RFK Jr. is chasing conspiracy theories while measles is spreading nationally .
Trump's National Security Advisor, Mike Walz, famously adds journalists to the discussion of top secret war plans — which, beyond being dumb, highlights the administration's cynical choice to use unsecured commercial communication to share sensitive information. (Cynical because the likely reason for Trump apparatchiks to color outside secure lines was their desire to thwart official record-keeping laws.)
Ironically, it is the promises Trump is keeping that might hurt him the most. He said the states should bear the cost of disaster recovery. Now he is telling a leading fangirl , his ex-press secretary and current Governor of Arkansas, to piss off. If Sarah Huckabee Sanders thought her blind allegiance to the man ensured her ailing state would get some bucks, she is as clueless as she looks.
She is not alone. It is Trump's superpower to convince toadies he has not yet pissed on that they are somehow different from all the toadies he has already pissed on — (insert golden shower joke here.)
Farmers, a group loyal to the man who promises to slash their exports and expel their laborers, are wondering why they backed a man who has likely never been on a farm. MAGA federal workers in red states are amazed to discover that their federal job was axed . (They had two dots and still couldn't connect them.)
Even some Republican House members are begging GOP leadership to stop enabling Trump in slashing Medicaid. Not because they care about their constituents but because they fear losing their jobs.
The numbers bear witness to Trump's diminishing appeal. It will not help that powerful forces in the brosphere that elected him are now raining on his parade. Prominent MAGA-adjacent podcasters, including Joe Rogan and David Portnoy, are questioning Trump's policies . Where they go, some of their audience is sure to follow.
Trump's future is not rosy. His chances of a dictatorial takeover are diminishing. Hitler realized his ambitions by buying the German people's affection with deficit spending, free radios, new roads, and other bribes. Trump is doing the opposite. He seems bent on making everyone poorer, including the MAGAs whose ground support he needs to advance his totalitarian dreams.
Sadly, he will still substantially damage the country even as he goes down in flames.
However, maybe America needs an inferno to burn out the MAGA cancer metastasizing through the body politic. It took losing a war and the death of millions for Germany to move beyond Naziism and for Japan to stamp out its ultra-nationalist, imperial state Shintoism. Hopefully, the rot is not as deep in the US. And our recovery will prove less costly.
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