Jesus wept, the meltdown continues…
…the market is still trying to digest the enormity of the Tariff war between China and Trump, the added insecurity is Trump’s inane attack on the Fed Chair which is quickly becoming a test of submission and domination.
For Trump’s MAGA fanatics, they are still happy!
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Why do Trump voters have no regrets? Because the people they hate are getting hurt more
The stock market is plunging, prices are rising, federal workers are getting laid off, students are being snatched off the street by immigration agents. The US is many things at the moment, but stable is not one of them. So, amid all this turmoil, how are all the Donald Trump voters feeling? Has buyer’s remorse set in? Are they starting to wonder whether voting in a convicted felon as president – a man who has declared bankruptcy six times – might not have been the wisest move?
Not according to the polls. Rather, the US appears to be a nation of Édith Piafs: they regret rien. I’m not saying that disillusioned Republicans don’t exist; do enough digging and you can certainly find a few. And journalists have been doing a lot of digging. During Trump’s first term, there was a steady stream of media pieces profiling the regretful Trump voter. The genre has remained popular through the first few months of Trump 2.0. But, according to a much-discussed segment by CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten this week, polling proves that the idea of “regretful” Trump voters is “more of a media creation than anything else”.
“I hear all these stories, all these articles, all the Trump voters, they regret what they did back in 2024. I’m here to tell you, uh-uh. Very few of them regret what they did back in 2024,” Enten said on Wednesday.
Enten was referencing a new poll from the University of Massachusetts Amherst which found that just 2% of Trump voters agreed with the statement “I regret my [2024] vote and would vote differently if I could”. That’s almost half the number (3.5%) of Trump voters who said the same thing in February 2017. Meanwhile, 74% of Trump voters said they feel very confident that they made the right choice.
Of course, polls aren’t always reliable. Indeed, I’m going to be a little cruel and refer you back to an Enten segment from five days before the election, where the data guru looked at three 2024 polling trends that pointed to a potential victory for vice-president Kamala Harris. “If Harris wins the signs were clear as day,” he declared. In short: Mark Twain had the measure of polling when he said “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”.
Asking people whether they regret an important choice they just made is also a loaded question. It’s akin to asking them “are you a complete idiot?” So I would treat these particular polls with a dose of caution: just because people don’t actively admit to regretting their vote, it doesn’t mean that they’re not worried about the direction the country is headed in, or that they’re thrilled about Trump’s performance as president. On the contrary, Trump’s approval rating is dropping and a lot of people are worried about inflation and higher prices. Everyone is feeling some pain right now.
In a hyper-polarised country, however, what seems to really matter to many voters isn’t how much pain they’re feeling themselves, but whether the other side is suffering more. I could cite various academic papers on the politics of resentment; I could surface endless statistics on the subject. But I think the best summation of Trumpism is a quote from a woman called Crystal Minton from back in 2019, which went viral after being included in a New York Times report. Minton lived in a Florida town that had been ravaged by the double whammy of a hurricane and a Trump administration-instigated government shutdown, and was suffering. “I voted for [Trump], and he’s the one who’s doing this,” Minton complained. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
…back in 2016 as I watched the woke social media Lynch mobs sacking people from their jobs for crimes against identity dogma, I coined a phrase ‘proxification’ to define something I saw the social media algorithms doing to our political debate…
Why are free societies sinking into an anarchic pit of social media hate?
Is it right to deny people who incite violence a public platform? You bet it is. All free societies do this to a greater or lesser extent.
Open democracies which guarantee freedom of expression have always drawn lines. You cannot attend a civic meeting, or even stand on a street corner, and shout death threats without being arrested. The obvious charge would be of threatening behaviour or causing an affray.
Scarcely anyone would be likely to dispute this. So that’s the easy one. There are far more difficult questions to examine in what is becoming a major political issue for our time.
Social media algorithms have allowed for a toxicity of debate that is easily manipulated. A cacophony of sweaty truths all screaming for attention and no one listening. Woke Identity Politics activists have seized the joy of having no gatekeepers to express how much they hate white men while alt right Incel Nazi’s have seized upon the joy of having no gatekeepers to express how much they hate everyone else.
This is the sadomasochistic Politics of Resentment – MAGA culture war fanatics adore Trump despite pain he’s causing them as long as he hurts people they hate more!
Aside from the rampant racism, transphobia, sexism, anti-intellectualism and hatred for anyone poor, liberal media despise Trump because deep down in places they never like to admit at their plush dinner parties, Trump truly represents what America is.
A shallow narcissist culture looking for its next selfish ego stroke paranoidly armed to the teeth with enough corporate weapons to destroy the planet many times over
That’s fine when you are the host of a reality TV show, it’s terrifying when that person leads a nuclear armed country.
Trump is the ultimate resentment politician. He understands how it feels to be looked down upon by his peers who have laughed at his achievements. His overcompensation resonates with every white working poor American who have perceived their culture and their values belittled for cosmopolitan pretensions while economically robbing them of any resilience.
Trump’s revenge fantasies against every imagined slight ignites those voters own resentments while also becoming a flare to attract white supremacists and Nazi sympathisers.
That’s what politics, thanks to social media hate algorithms, has degenerated into, “I’m hurting, but you are hurting more”.
Trump wants the world to cower before him.
He wants the threat of American aggression to gain him power and submission.
Threatening friends and allies is not what friends or allies do.
That is what a vile and selfish narcissist on an ego trip does.
That is what a toxic bully does.
We should not cower to Trump.
We should boycott America, shun America, and work with everyone who isn’t America for the next 4 years to see if American Democracy can rebalance itself.
We should not cower before an Orange fascist.
DON’T LOOK AT YOUR KIWISAVER!
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