Super, telling people you know better than them about their own economic situation is never going to work. You can type as many 8 paragraph essays about the consumer confidence index, GDP, etc. as you want. Biden and Harris just ran a campaign saying how great the economy is.
Income inequality was astronomical prior to Covid. Going back to post Covid levels isn’t enough. Trump’s whole campaign is MAGA, and you don’t get how people making less money than their father is frustrating and alienating?
1. I'm not saying that we should message that way. I'm saying that we shouldn't take that shit at face value. That's a strategy issue, not a messaging one.
2. Look, I want to improve standards of living. I'm against income inequality. I'd like to see more progressive taxation and, as a former antitrust attorney (briefly), I'd like to see more of the aggressive antitrust enforcement (though it's doubtful it will work with these courts). But I just don't see that it works politically.
I keep thinking about Michigan because that's where I thought we would do best. One reason for that was that the Democrats in the state government have done a lot for working people. They got rid of right-to-work laws, which was a huge priority for the unions. And the unions won some big contracts that will increase pay for autoworkers by a lot. They did that with Biden's support and not Trump's. Biden, after all, joined the picket line.
And despite all that, Trump rolled. So what are we supposed to do? Elon Musk was going around to all the battleground states literally promising temporary economic hardship. Did the blue collar workers hear that and think, "boy, I don't want to vote for that, I'm already stressed enough?" They did not.
The unions know that tariffs are bullshit, and will cause more harm than good. I don't know about autoworkers, but certainly unions in export industries. Did that make a difference? It did not.
3. Think about this: what is the commonality between Trump's claim that "we're going to make foreigners pay for the privilege of doing business here" and "Mexico will pay for the wall"? It's the projection of dominance. It's the idea that we can bully foreigners into giving us money. Trump was not the first candidate to propose a border wall. It's been a staple of GOP politics since the first Bush. Trump was the first to use the idea as a weapon, like when he responded to pushback from the Mexican government with "the wall just got 10 feet taller." It was never a serious idea. It was just an appeal to authoritarian dominance.
That's the same work tariffs are doing here. Trumpism, at its core, is about bullying. It's the narrative that runs through everything he does and says. It is, of course, who he is and always has been. And most of his favored policies are presented as bullying, and that's how people respond to it. Or maybe it's just coincidence that his crowds chant "lock her up" even to this day.
This is why I simply don't believe the economic anxiety thing. It doesn't explain at all what we actually see. Bullying is a theory with a lot of evidence. It also helps explain why Trump appeals to men, and in particular men with a certain belief system about male dominance. The GOP's Senate candidate in Minnesota actually said that women were getting too mouthy. Was that something a Senate candidate would have said 15 years ago, or is that Trumpism at its core?
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