There is joy in MAGAville right now.
They’re arrogantly reveling in a euphoric moment they’ve been lustfully coveting for the past four years: their mobster messiah has risen from the dead, his glorious second coming imminent, his anti-woke American kingdom come.
And in their emotionally-intoxicated state they’re puffing out their chests on social media, brazenly posturing on street corners, toasting to their oppressed white victory with Solo cups filled with liberal tears. They’re wildly dancing to Kid Rock on the grave of Kamala Harris and Democrats.
But their strident victory celebrations will be short-lived.
Soon, and very soon, they’re going to feel the crushing weight of objective reality come smashing down upon their red hats, as the truth that cannot be covered over by Fox News fictions or GOP spin doctors becomes terrifyingly clear: they have lost, too.
As they finally take the thirty seconds they should have months ago to do a Google search and see exactly what a tariff is and how it will impact their manufacturing jobs, their take home pay, and their cost of living here—they’ll have the sudden gut punch of buyer’s remorse.
Watching brown-skinned farm laborers violently rounded up and driven out of the country, they will be met with the brutal economic cause-and-effect of this on grocery store prices and inflation, that they couldn’t see in the midst of their nationalistic, white-power fever dreams.
When their nieces and wives are bleeding out in hospital emergency rooms because their doctors have their trained hands tied backs by their state legislature, they’ll reckon with the reality that health emergencies and anti-women legislation are nonpartisan in the threat they pose. And as they feel the rush of helpless bedside panic, their spray-tanned savior will be nowhere to be found.
As Project 2025 quickly transforms from a laughable Leftist myth into the sobering true horror story of a life without access to education, no public health protections for their families, and an economic quicksand they will be unable to extricate themselves from—they’ll ask why no one warned them.
When Trump supporters come to grips with the fact that he doesn’t give a damn about them, they may finally understand something their tribalism could never allow them to see: we Liberals were fighting for them all along.
We’ve haven’t just been incessantly battling him for our families but for theirs, too.
We’ve been trying to secure affordable healthcare for red voters as well as blue voters, knowing illness and injury don’t acknowledge party lines.
We have been working for public school funding and environment protections and women’s autonomy and fewer assault weapons, because these things improve the human experience of conservatives, as well as progressives.
This has been true for the past eight years in matters of the law and human right and civil rights: we have been opposing him on behalf of them, as much as ourselves.
The election results, while a cheap and easy high to red voters in the moment, will prove to be a mirage that gives way to a grim reality that no rally speech can distract them from.
And maybe, just maybe, in the coming weeks and months when there is no Democratic president or congress to lazily blame for the fact that they can’t pay their mortgage, afford their medical bills, sustain their business, or provide for their children, they might actually be ready to stand alongside us and defeat the real enemy within.
Here’s hoping when that times comes, it won’t be too late.
MAGAs have lost, too. They just don’t know it yet.
It will be the biggest I Told You So in history....
but what good will that do?
I subscribe to Letters From an American by Heather Cox Richardson, a historian. Today she wrote:
Social media has been flooded today with stories of Trump voters who are shocked to learn that tariffs will raise consumer prices as reporters are covering that information. Daniel Laguna of LevelUp warned that Trump’s proposed 60% tariff on Chinese imports could raise the costs of gaming consoles by 40%, so that a PS5 Pro gaming system would cost up to $1,000. One of the old justifications for tariffs was that they would bring factories home, but when the $3 billion shoe company Steve Madden announced yesterday it would reduce its imports from China by half to avoid Trump-promised tariffs, it said it will shift production not to the U.S., but to Cambodia, Vietnam, Mexico, and Brazil.
There are also stories that voters who chose Trump to lower household expenses are unhappy to discover that their undocumented relatives are in danger of deportation. When CNN’s Dana Bash asked Indiana Republican senator-elect Jim Banks if undocumented immigrants who had been here for a long time and integrated into the community would be deported, Banks answered that deportation should include “every illegal in this country that we can find.” Yesterday a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a policy established by the Biden administration that was designed to create an easier path to citizenship for about half a million undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens.
Meanwhile, Trump’s advisors told Jim VandeHei and MIke Allen of Axios that Trump wasted valuable time at the beginning of his first term and that they will not make that mistake again. They plan to hit the ground running with tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, deregulation, and increased gas and oil production. Trump is looking to fill the top ranks of the government with “billionaires, former CEOs, tech leaders and loyalists.”
After the election, the wealth of Trump-backer Elon Musk jumped about $13 billion, making him worth $300 billion. Musk, who has been in frequent contact with Russian president Vladimir Putin, joined a phone call today between President-elect Trump and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky.
In Salon today, Amanda Marcotte noted that in states all across the country where voters backed Trump, they also voted for abortion rights, higher minimum wage, paid sick and family leave, and even to ban employers from forcing their employees to sit through right-wing or anti-union meetings. She points out that 12% of voters in Missouri voted both for abortion rights and for Trump.
Marcotte recalled that Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of the Washington Post showed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them. An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats. Many Americans turn for information to social media or to friends and family who traffic in conspiracy theories. As Angelo Carusone of Media Matters put it: “We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.”
In The New Republic today, Michael Tomasky reinforced that voters chose Trump in 2024 not because of the economy or inflation, or anything else, but because of how they perceived those issues—which is not the same thing. Right-wing media “fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win,” Tomasky wrote. Right-wing media has overtaken legacy media to set the country’s political agenda not only because it’s bigger, but because it speaks with one voice, “and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.”
Tomasky noted how the work of Matthew Gertz of Media Matters shows that nearly all the crazy memes that became central campaign issues—the pet-eating story, for example, or the idea that the booming economy was terrible—came from right-wing media. In those circles, Vice President Kamala Harris was a stupid, crazed extremist who orchestrated a coup against President Joe Biden and doesn’t care about ordinary Americans, while Trump is under assault and has been for years, and he’s “doing it all for you.”
Investigative reporter Miranda Green outlined how “pink slime” newspapers, which are AI generated from right-wing sites, turned voters to Trump in key swing state counties. Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, who studies focus groups, told NPR, “When I ask voters in focus groups if they think Donald Trump is an authoritarian, the #1 response by far is, ‘What is an authoritarian?’”
In a social media post, Marcotte wrote: “A lot of voters are profoundly ignorant. More so than in the past.” That jumped out to me because there was, indeed, an earlier period in our history when voters were “pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.”