Donald Trump’s budget cuts and the larger war on federal employees and government are not laser-targeted on Democrats, liberals, progressives, and the other people and communities that he has deemed to be “the vermin” and “poison in the blood” of the nation that should be purged. Trump’s approach is broad, the political equivalent of carpet-bombing, and the casualties include Trump’s own MAGA people and red state parts of the country.
Unable to resist the compelling human-interest aspects of Donald Trump’s gutting of the federal workforce and government, the mainstream news media has profiled many Trump voters who have lost their jobs because of their president’s chainsaw-like approach to gutting the federal government.
There are also many news stories about how Trump’s budget cuts and other policies targeting such programs as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education, support for veterans and their families, and assistance for the poor and other vulnerable individuals will hurt Trump’s voters.
African American MAGA supporters who feel betrayed by Trump’s whitewashing of American history and other regressive policies have been prominently featured by the news media. I am acquainted with one such Black MAGA member. He was very enthusiastic about Trump’s second presidency and basically took on the role of being a Trump evangelist and minister of outreach to the Black people who live in our neighborhood. Last week, my acquaintance was told that his job was being eliminated because of Trump’s budget cuts. He is distraught.
In a classic example of “chickens who support Colonel Sanders,” there are news reports about Hispanic and Latino Trump MAGA supporters (and their families) who have been targeted by ICE because they were assumed to be “illegal aliens.”
Much of this news coverage and commentary, and the reactions to these stories online and elsewhere, is colored by liberal schadenfreude where the Trump supporters are being mocked for getting their just rewards because they voted for a president who then fires them or otherwise causes them great harm. These news stories and commentary also have a tone of shock and surprise about how these same voters, for the most part, do not immediately turn against Donald Trump, the MAGA movement, and the Republican Party even after they have been hurt by their president and Dear Leader.
The Democrats are being trounced by Trump and his MAGA shock and awe campaign. In their desperation, the Democratic Party’s leaders are holding on to the hope that Trump and the Republican Party will overreach, and that the administration and its popularity and power will plummet and implode once their policies begin to hurt wide swaths of the American public. In the case of the federal employees and other people who support Donald Trump and have lost their jobs and/or have otherwise been harmed by his administration’s policies, it is wishful thinking to believe that they will have some type of epiphany where they abandon Trump and MAGA and embrace the Democratic Party.
Why is this? Here are a few explanations.
Donald Trump is an autocrat and the leader of a political personality cult. Trump’s base of support is very strong and seemingly immune to controversy or other events and happenings that would be the end of a more traditional mainstream politician. In all, Trump’s MAGA followers and other supporters are manifesting a type of “psychological adhesion” to him and the MAGA movement. In the most extreme examples, Trump’s followers literally see him as some type of superhuman being, a god and/or prophet who can do no wrong.
Donald Trump and other right-wing leaders and influentials command a vast propaganda and experience machine that consists of traditional news media such as TV, radio and print, websites, social media, podcasts, publishers, movies, sports, film, television, comedy, right-wing Christian churches, schools and “education,” interest groups, think tanks, and other civil society organizations. For at least the last 9 years (and decades before with the rise of Fox News and the right-wing echo chamber) this propaganda and experience machine has been creating an alternate reality that has emotionally trained and conditioned its public to be loyal to Trump, MAGA, and the larger right-wing “conservative” movement and to reject any outside information or influences (their much-hated “reality-based community”).
The American public is highly polarized politically (and socially). Politics is not “just” limited to voting and elections and other explicitly political matters such as support for a given public policy, law, candidate, or party. Politics now encompasses many if not most aspects of American culture from food to entertainment, dating, marriage, friendship networks, where one lives, religion and church attendance, and other aspects of day-to-day life. What political scientists describe as affective/negative polarization describes how political disagreements are increasingly existential value judgments where “the other side” is not just wrong but evil. In such an environment, changing one’s mind, by, for example, deciding to no longer support Trump’s policies becomes less likely
“Conservatives,” authoritarians, and other members (though not all) of the right wing are also more likely to engage in “systems justification” as compared to liberals and progressives. In practice, systems justification encourages a lack of critical thinking about society and power and instead emphasizes an acceptance of unjust outcomes and inequality through deference to the status quo and support for authority figures.
Donald Trump is an expert at sadopolitics. In a 2018 conversation with historian Timothy Snyder here at Salon, he elaborated on the meaning of sadopolitics (what he terms as “sadopopulism”) and its implications for the Age of Trump and the larger democracy crisis:
“Sadopopulism” is the notion that you’re doing half of populism. You promise people things, but then when you get power you have no intention of even trying to implement any policy on behalf of the people. Instead, you deliberately make the suffering worse for your critical constituency. The people who got Trump into office, for example, are traditional Republican voters plus people in counties who are doing badly in terms of health care and other measures, and who need help.
Under Trump, of course, things will just get worse in terms of both the opioid addictions and in terms of wealth inequality. But that’s OK, because the logic of sadopopulism is that pain is a resource. Sadopopulist leaders like Trump use that pain to create a story about who’s actually at fault. The way politics works in that model is that government doesn’t solve your problems, it blames your problems on other people — and it creates the cycle that goes around over and over and over again. I started talking about sadopopulism because I got tired of people talking about populism.
In such a toxic relationship between the leader, the followers, and the larger public, the abuse and misery actually bonds them all closer together. The most loyal followers see their leader as simultaneously being a source of protection and safety even as he or she hurts them. To that point, the more Trump’s policies hurt his followers the more likely they are to cling to him. Trump’s followers are also going to misdirect their rage, anger, blame, and other negative emotions and behavior at some “enemy.” In the Age of Trump, that enemy is Black and brown people and other nonwhites, “Woke” and “DEI, “illegal immigrants” and migrant “invaders,” the LGBTQ community and specifically transgender people, social “parasites” and “takers,” government employees, those not deemed sufficiently “patriotic” and therefore disloyal to MAGA and Trump (which here is synonymous with “Real America”), Muslims and other non-“Christians,” the Democrats, “liberals,” the news media (“fake news” and “lugenpresse”) and other targeted groups and individuals.
Donald Trump’s MAGA people and other supporters will resolve their apparent cognitive dissonance. Donald Trump’s economic and other policies and actions (and those of the Republican Party more broadly) cause demonstrable harm to his supporters who are not rich, white, and “Christian” men — this is especially true for the (white) “working class” Trumpists. Yet, these people continue to support Trump and the Republican Party’s policies and leaders. The cognitive dissonance created by a choice that seemed good at the time and the resulting harm is resolved by reasoning backward and discounting, eliminating, or otherwise rationalizing the negative outcomes as unavoidable, minimizing them, or through some other reasoning that resolves the contradiction. There is also the sunk cost dimension to supporting Donald Trump, where a person has invested so much energy and resources that they are averse to changing their behavior and/or admitting they were wrong.
Democrats, liberals, progressives, and “small c” traditional conservatives (and other members of the mainstream political and media class in America) generally believe in some version of “normal politics” and therefore possess a model of political decision-making and “rationality” that is in many ways imprecise, if not wholly wrong and inaccurate. They imagine the American voter as some type of human calculator who makes political decisions to maximize their material, economic, or otherwise “rational” goal and output. Decades of research has repeatedly shown that the average American voter is not ideological, has a recency bias, is imagistic, and in total lacks a sophisticated understanding of politics. Even more damning, the average American reads at below a sixth-grade level and cannot accurately explain the argument and evidence presented in an editorial or op-ed. The average American voter gropes and searches their way through political questions, seeks direction from sources they trust, and is guided by emotion and intuition.
In this context, Donald Trump’s MAGA people and other followers will, based on their ongoing pattern of behavior, continue to support him. Donald Trump is also a high-dominance leader who is masterful in his ability to manipulate the media and dominate the information space. This amplifies his appeal to his followers. Moreover, Trump’s followers will likely view their suffering and other hardships they are experiencing as a result of his policies as an acceptable form of sacrifice and an act of loyalty for the greater MAGA cause of “Making America Great Again.” In essence, Trump’s followers imagine themselves as patriots who are playing a key role in an existential battle between good (Donald Trump, MAGA, “Real America,” and “Patriots”) and evil (the Democrats, liberals, progressives, “political correctness” and “Woke” and “DEI”). Trump’s followers are willing to suffer greatly to achieve what they see as victory. Contrary to what many people who exist outside of TrumpWorld and the MAGAverse would like to believe, Trump’s voters are not “irrational,” they are prioritizing different values and goals in their decision-making as compared to other Americans. .
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The Democrats and the so-called Resistance cannot rely on the hope that Trump’s policies will hurt his followers and that they will then “rationally” turn on him. The Democrats should also be very weary of James Carville’s advice to “roll over and play dead. Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us. Only until the Trump administration has spiraled into the low 40s or high 30s in public approval polling percentages should we make like a pack of hyenas and go for the jugular. Until then, I’m calling for a strategic political retreat.”
These are passive responses that cedes the initiative — and the future of American democracy and freedom — to Donald Trump, the MAGAfied Republicans, and the larger antidemocracy movement. The Democrats need to rebrand, refine their communications and overall strategy, and give the many millions of Americans who chose not to vote for the Democratic Party (or to vote at all) a reason to support them on the local, state, and national level. Chasing down Trump’s much-obsessed about (white) “working class” MAGA voters is a fight the Democrats, as presently oriented, will not likely win on a national level.
The 2024 election may have been a realigning election where the political future of the country has been directed towards authoritarian populism and based on the first two months of Trump’s administration and how rapidly the country’s democracy is collapsing, something much worse. The Democratic Party’s leaders, the Resistance, and other pro-democracy Americans need to accept the unpleasant truth that Donald Trump’s MAGA movement is not going away anytime soon. This is the new normal that must be navigated. Wish-casting or otherwise holding on to obsolete ideas, fantasies and fictions will not accomplish the extremely difficult work of trying to win elections (assuming there are even “free and fair” midterm and presidential elections in 2026 and 2028, respectively) in a country where democratic “backsliding” is quickly becoming democratic collapse.
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