Michael Tomasky takes the educated-elite-leftist view that, somehow, the OAFPOTUS actually bamboozled 77 million voters—twice:
How many times did Trump say he’d end that war on the first day of his presidency? It had to have been hundreds. I saw a lot of those clips on cable news over the weekend, as you may have. He did not mean it figuratively. You know, in the way people will say, “I’ll change that from day one,” and you know they don’t literally mean day one, but they do mean fast.
But that isn’t what Trump said. He meant it literally. He used the phrase “in 24 hours” many, many times. So I ask you: Who really believed that?
Ditto with tariffs, “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” Just wait, Trump said, until you see me unveil my beautiful tariffs. They’ll fix everything.
Well … it’s not as if there weren’t hundreds of economists and others pointing out how much smoke he was blowing. Experts predicted exactly what has unfolded: that he’d start a trade war, which would roil the markets and result in higher prices, and that the rest of the world would stop trusting us.
Who’s looking more right today, Trump or the experts? The hated experts, by a mile. In fact, if anything, the experts understated the problem because Trump’s tariffs (at least the latest incarnation of them; it’s hard to keep track) have been higher than everyone thought they’d be.
Paul Krugman takes a more nuanced view, which I think gets closer to the truth, especially for both the extreme right and the extreme left:
Don’t try to sanewash what’s happening. It’s evil, but it isn’t calculated evil. That is, it’s not a considered political strategy, with a clear end goal. It’s a visceral response from people who, as Thomas Edsall puts it, are addicted to revenge.
If you want a model for what’s happening to America, think of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
The Cultural Revolution was, of course, a huge disaster for China. It inflicted vast suffering on its targets and also devastated the economy. But the Maoists didn’t care. Revenge was their priority, never mind the effects on GDP.
The Trumpists are surely the same. Their rampage will, if unchecked, have dire economic consequences. Right now we’re all focused on tariff madness, but undermining higher education and crippling scientific research will eventually have even bigger costs. But don’t expect them to care, or even to acknowledge what’s happening. Trump has already declared that the inflation everyone can see with their own eyes is fake news.
And then just today I stumbled across a thread from Ethan Grey, "a former Republican who is now a consistent Democratic voter," which I believe tells the actual story:
Here is the Republican message on everything of importance:
1. They can tell people what to do.
2. You cannot tell them what to do.
This often gets mistaken for hypocrisy, there’s an additional layer of complexity to this (later in the thread), but this is the basic formula.
You've watched the Republican Party champion the idea of “freedom” while you have also watched the same party openly assault various freedoms, like the freedom to vote, freedom to choose, freedom to marry who you want, and so on.
If this has been a source of confusion, then your assessments of what Republicans mean by “freedom” were likely too generous. Here’s what they mean:
1. The freedom to tell people what to do.
2. Freedom from being told what to do.
When Republicans talk about valuing “freedom,” they’re speaking of it in the sense that only people like them should ultimately possess it.
So let’s add one more component to the system for who tells who what to do:
1. There are “right” human beings and there are “wrong” ones.
2. The “right” ones get to tell the “wrong” ones what to do.
3. The “wrong” ones do not tell the “right” ones what to do.
His whole thread is worth the read, because he's nailed it, though he leaves out the Christianist component at the end.
As I've said for many years on this blog, the modern Republican Party doesn't want to govern, it wants to rule. And it wants to rule so it can steal from you. There's nothing complicated about that.