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Are Trump Voters Belatedly Over It?

As of this morning, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed with Iran vowing retaliation for a U.S. attack on an Iranian cargo vessel.  Meanwhile, the price of oil is sliding back upward and oil and gas scarcity in Asia is worsening as noted in a piece in the New York Times:

When the war in Iran started on Feb. 28, Asia expected to see serious, gradual impacts from losing access to a huge portion of the world’s oil and gas. But the conflict’s economic and social impacts have hit the region harder and faster than officials and experts expected.

Even if there is a peace deal soon, the future of this industrious region that has driven global economic growth for decades will likely include months of canceled flights, surging food prices, factory pauses, delayed shipments and empty shelves for products long considered quick and easy to buy worldwide: plastic bags, instant noodles, vaccines, syringes, lipstick, microchips and sportswear.

Collectively, according to many officials and experts, if the war’s strangling of commercial traffic through the Middle East lasts for even a few more weeks, and uncertainty lingers, shortages could push several countries into convulsions of unrest, followed by recession.

What happens in Asia will eventually spill over across the globe and will eventually hit Americans.  Indeed, one well known economist believes a global recession could occur, all because of the Felon's impetuous war of choice: 

Another week, another false all-clear. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. It appears increasingly obvious that the 20 percent of world oil supply that normally flows through it to world markets won’t be restored to normal anytime in the near future — quite possibly for many months. What will this disruption do to the world economy?

The International Monetary Fund raised the economic anxiety level last week with a projection of a global slowdown “in the shadow of war.” Yet while the IMF brings great expertise to this subject, I think that it is seriously underestimating how badly the global economy could be hit. In my view, a full-on global recession is more likely than not if the Strait remains closed for, say, another three months, which seems all too possible.

All of this is building economic pressures that the Kool-Aid drinking MAGA base cannot ignore.  A new poll shows that 63% disapprove of the Felon's performance and are in a sour mood.  Some belatedly realized they were - and continue to be - lied to, something many of us realized during the Felon 1.0 when the Felon lied over 30,000 times according to the Washington Post.  Now, as a piece at The Atlantic notes, voters who voted for the Felon in 2024 realize they were played for fools:

Tomas Montoya has sold festival foods—funnel cakes, burgers, hot dogs—across the American Southwest for years. But lately, business has been rough. Costs are up, so he’s increased his prices. Employees are begging for hours he can’t give them. In Arizona, where he lives, Montoya pays $6 a gallon to fill up his food trucks with diesel. This summer, he may have to skip the California leg of his festival route because fuel is even more expensive there.

“It’s Trump,” Montoya told us outside a popular Hispanic grocery store in Casa Grande, Arizona, much of which sits in one of the most evenly divided House districts in the country. Montoya voted for President Trump in 2024, but now, well, frustrated doesn’t begin to cover how he’s feeling. The president is bragging about the economy, even though everyone Montoya knows is hurting; he promised to stop wars, but started one in Iran. “When Trump opens his mouth, three-quarters of what he says is stories, lies,” Montoya said. He’s planning to vote in the midterm elections this fall. But he may not choose a Republican.

You can’t flip a funnel cake in this part of Arizona without spattering someone who sounds just like Montoya—anxious, and a little regretful about how they voted two Novembers ago. These days, a shocking number of the president’s supporters have turned against him. . . . Some Republican operatives in battleground states told us that they’d rather Trump not campaign too hard for their candidate; others have seen their small-dollar donations plummet.

Midterm elections are typically rough for an incumbent president’s party. But this year threatens to be brutal. Trump’s approval is lower right now than it was at this point ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, when Democrats won back the House in a historic blue wave. Almost every new poll is a red flag for Republicans: Independents, young voters, and Latinos—groups that were crucial to Trump’s win in 2024—aren’t in the bag anymore. Even non-college-educated white Americans, once the president’s strongest group, have turned on him, according to a CNN polling average.

Casa Grande, a pit stop between Tucson and Phoenix where agricultural fields give way to new subdivisions, is on the northwestern edge of Arizona’s swingy Sixth Congressional District. . . . Shoppers outside the market bemoaned the rising price of everything: gas, meat, store-made chicharrones ($9.29 for a big bag). And they were ready to punish Trump’s party for it.

The mood among voters was just as grim some 60 miles southeast in Oro Valley, a northern suburb of Tucson known for its scenic mountain views—and home to many conservative voters whom Ciscomani and statewide Republicans rely on. Sitting inside of her car after a shopping spree at a dollar store, Zuriel Reyes told us she feels “shitty” about having voted for Trump in 2024, her first-ever election. . . . . and feels like the president is “putting all our lives in jeopardy with this weird war game that he’s playing.”

On Easter Sunday, Trump’s threat to wipe out “a whole civilization” in Iran drew ire from many onetime Trump devotees, such as Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Megyn Kelly, who subsequently declared on her SiriusXM radio show that she was “sick of this shit.”

Earlier this week, when Trump posted the AI image of himself dressed in flowing robes, surrounded by a heavenly glow while healing a sick man, he alienated the one group of Americans that has rarely left his side: Christian conservatives.

Trump—or, more accurately, the conditions Trump has helped create—also seems to have affected GOP fundraising. Some donors are giving half the amount that they would normally contribute to Republican candidates and blaming economic instability for the decrease, one Georgia county GOP chair told us. Two Republican consultants from another battleground state told us that small-dollar donations to their candidates plummeted in early March, days after the U.S. and Israel launched strikes across Iran. In races that could be decided by very thin margins, these donations could mean the difference between sending out a final round of mailers to low-propensity voters or not.

[The Felon] the president and his party may find salvaging the broader Trump coalition difficult. In Casa Grande, Montoya told us he’d give Trump three weeks to end the war and fix the economy. In the meantime, he’s eating leftovers more often, putting fewer miles on his food trucks, and setting the air-conditioning higher than he’d like as Arizona temperatures climb. Montoya will also, he added, be researching his options for November.

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The Felon's Strategic and Moral Failure in Iran

Another day and the Strait of Hormuz is closed, the price of oil remains elevated, and the Felon still lacks any exit strategy from his war of choice that seems to have been doing the bidding of Benjamin Netanyahu (who seemingly wants a never ending war) despite the warnings and reservations of numerous advisors.  The Felon continues to bloviate with his statements ranging from threats of genocide against Iranian civilians to claiming that negotiations with Iran are "going well" - causing the stock market to gyrate with hints of insider trading. Recently, polling has shown that lately only 15% of Americans believe the Felon's claims on Iran while the majority seems to understand that America is caught in a quagmire thanks to the Felon's foolish war of choice even as America's standing in the world has been greatly diminished.   At this point, the Iran war looks like a huge strategic failure not to mention a moral failure with heavy "Christian" nationalist messaging that increasingly depicts the war as a war of religion laced with claims of good versus evil. A piece in The New Yorker looks at the Felon's huge failings:

Not many years ago, a ruthless man with an uneasy mind took power in his country and created a cult of personality. In the center of the capital, he erected a gold statue of himself that rotated with the sun. He stashed billions in a foreign bank. He closed the academy of sciences, the ballet, the philharmonic, the circus, and all provincial libraries. His autobiography became the nation’s spiritual guide. . . . Such was the world of Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenistan’s leader from 1985 until his death, by cardiac arrest, in 2006. For the Turkmen people, there was nothing comical about life under his dictatorship. He barred dissent and packed his jails with prisoners of conscience. The only consolation was that he could not impose his grandiosity on the globe.

Donald Trump, by contrast, has, from the first day of his Presidency, posed an emergency to both his country and the world, even as he has ceaselessly invoked the language of “emergency” to inflate threats, suspend norms, and expand his own power. A decade ago, he was already making statements that flouted the ordinary standards of adult behavior. . . . Trump embodies the notion that, with age, you become what you always were, only more so. In the final days of the 2024 campaign, he met with the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board. When asked whether he would deploy the U.S. military if China, under Xi Jinping, were to blockade Taiwan, Trump replied, “I wouldn’t have to, because he respects me, and he knows I’m fucking crazy.”

The MAGA coalition has long countenanced Trump’s bigotry and cruelty. But now, with the repeated violations of an America First foreign policy, his poll numbers have plummeted. Since returning to office, Trump has ordered military strikes on Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, and Iran, and has felt little need to provide a coherent rationale for any of them. According to reporting by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, of the Times, Trump and his national-security advisers gathered in the Situation Room on February 11th to listen to the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, argue for a coördinated attack on Iran. Even though the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, the C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Dan Caine, made their reservations plain—Rubio called Netanyahu’s talk of regime change “bullshit”—Trump blundered ahead. And, as in the days of the Turkmen dictator, everyone fell into line.

But when the Iranian regime failed to collapse or capitulate, when Netanyahu’s prediction of a national uprising failed to materialize, Trump turned to threats of war crimes and genocide against the very people he claimed to be helping liberate . . . . These were not the words of a strategist. They were the words of a maniac.

And they had a galvanizing effect, though hardly in the way Trump might have intended. Some of his erstwhile acolytes—Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones—seem to have woken up to how dangerous he has always been. Yet around the Cabinet table, at Mar-a-Lago, and in the Republican caucus on Capitol Hill, it is gospel that his deranged threats forced a ceasefire and scored a major victory. The President’s war, though, seems poised to achieve little that was not already available through prewar diplomacy, or through some renewed version of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J.C.P.O.A., the Iran nuclear deal secured by the Obama Administration.

In fact, the original sin of this disaster was Trump’s abandonment of that deal, in 2018. For all its limits, it had stalled Iran’s march toward an atomic weapon. But Netanyahu, long eager for a full-scale war against Iran—aimed not only at its nuclear program but at its proxies, such as Hezbollah—shrewdly played on Trump’s vanity and his contempt for Barack Obama. Trump destroyed the J.C.P.O.A. with nothing to replace it.

So the war stands as a strategic failure and a moral calamity. The ceasefire is already fragile. “The whole point of this exercise was supposedly to advance the cause of freedom in Iran,” Karim Sadjadpour, a Washington-based specialist on the country, said. “To go from ‘help is on the way’ to ‘we are going to wipe out your civilization’ is strategic malpractice.” According to Danny Citrinowicz, an Iran expert who formerly worked in Israeli intelligence, Trump’s principal envoys to the region, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, almost certainly misread Iran’s capabilities and intentions. “This is a colossal disaster and should never have happened,” Citrinowicz said, noting that it will “haunt the region and world for many years to come.”

[T]he theocracy and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps remain in place, equally radical, equally repressive, and more determined than ever to acquire the ultimate deterrent: a nuclear weapon. Why give up that pursuit, as Libya did, and leave yourself exposed, when you can, like North Korea, achieve it and deter attack?

Trump has gone far toward shattering what’s left of America’s global stature. His preposterous bluster about Greenland, Cuba, and NATO has undermined the postwar alliance. . . . . And all the while Vladimir Putin, who aims to press Ukraine for still more territory, and Xi Jinping, who keeps Taiwan in view, watch the spectacle of Donald Trump for what it reveals about both his instability and the cratering credibility of American leadership.

In the midst of the war, Trump released plans for his Presidential library. Its centerpiece will be an auditorium with an immense gold statue of himself. Whether it will turn with the sun is not yet known. 

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Trump Has Become What He Most Despises: A Loser

This morning, Iran is saying it has again closed the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian gunboats have reportedly fired on tankers, claiming the American naval blockade violates the ceasefire terms. Meanwhile oil prices were down, they will likely begin increasing again.  Both are indicators that der Trumpenfuhrer, a/k/a the Felon, continues to twist on a rope of his own creation and that while Iran's military capabilities have been seriously degraded, the Felon has not won the war, making his desire for a gigantic triumphal arch all the more ridiculous.  In short, the Felon has become a "loser" who sense of his own exceptionalism and unrestrained ego - and perhaps dementia - set the stage for the Iran debacle that has sent gasoline prices soaring at home and is inflicting real harm of America's onetime allies in Asia and Europe. And try as he might, in the final analysis, the blame for the situation rests on the Felon and the Felon alone.  Meanwhile his grievance filled base is discovering that enhanced feelings of white supremacy and white privilege do not help them at the gas pump or grocery store checkout. A piece in The New Republic looks at how the Felon has become a loser:

The last two weeks have been disastrous for the Trump administration. In Europe, Vice President JD Vance made the extraordinary move of campaigning for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whose illiberal far-right regime is a beacon for authoritarian conservatives around the Western world. Vance framed the election to Hungarians in stark terms.

“Will you stand against the bureaucrats in Brussels?” he asked them at a campaign rally. “Will you stand for Western civilization? Will you stand for freedom, truth, and the God of our fathers? Then, my friends, go to the polls and stand for Viktor Orbán!” Vance was apparently not very persuasive: Hungarians backed the anti-Orbán party by such an overwhelming margin that it will have enough seats in the country’s Parliament to enact far-reaching constitutional reforms.

[The Felon's] President Donald Trump’s illegal war against Iran continues to disrupt shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz—the geopolitical equivalent of stabbing the global economy’s femoral artery. A ceasefire last week reportedly required the U.S. to accept Iranian control of the strait among other concessions, leaving the world with the distinct impression that the U.S. had effectively lost the war. Trump himself, however, was unconcerned. “Whether we make a deal or not makes no difference to me, because we’ve won,” he told reporters on Saturday.

This is what happens when losers are elected to lead the world’s only superpower.

“Loser” is the president’s favorite insult. He has used it to describe, at various times, Rosie O’Donnell, John McCain, Chris Christie, Mitt Romney, Graydon Carter, Russell Brand, Bill Barr, Jimmy Kimmel, Ron DeSantis, Paul Ryan, Joe Biden, Mark Cuban, Liz Cheney, Michael Bloomberg, Sadiq Khan, George Conway, Hillary Clinton, as well as ABC and CNN. This is only a partial list, but I think you get the picture.

[A] loser is one who thinks in terms of winners and losers at all—and who believes that they have not received the status and rewards to which they feel entitled. They always seem slighted by the world at large, which has cheated and denied them things that they think belong to them by virtue of their supposed innate superiority.

In his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, for example, Vance criticized his fellow conservatives for going soft on their own constituents. “What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations they had for their own lives,” he wrote. “Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.” His implication is that it is your fault if you’re a loser.

Losers do not actually care about the reality of winning and losing. Instead they care about the perception of success and failure. Trump, who is hardly the wealthiest New York real estate mogul nor the most successful, always insisted that he was the biggest and the best. . . . To that end, he has covered the White House in tacky gold ornaments and plans to build a giant triumphal arch in Arlington, Virginia, despite having won no wars (and having lost at least one of them).

Most importantly, losers internalize their own self-perception and seek to reinforce it in the world. They are drawn to hierarchy, and are therefore hostile to America’s fundamentally egalitarian ethos. A stratified society gives them a clearer sense of their inferiors, which is usually bound together with their perceptions of race, sex, genetics, or some other apparently inborn trait. Racism is the most familiar redoubt for the loser, since it provides what they think as highly visible proof of their own supposed superiority.

Trump, for example, often describes migrants in eugenic terms, claiming that they are “low IQ” or bring “bad genes” into the country. Conversely, he often describes himself as highly intelligent on genetic grounds.  . . . In 2020, The New York Times reported, he described a largely white crowd at a Minnesota rally as having “good genes.”

Fascism and loserdom go hand in hand because fascism is predicated on the notion that the fascist has been unjustly cheated and robbed, and that only through force can they restore and revitalize themselves. Fascists idolize losers because no fascist society has ever flourished and because they see themselves reflected in other people’s failures.

The goal of Trumpism, it could be said, is to create losers of us all. The political and economic project’s goal is not to materially improve its adherents’ lives. Instead, it is to create a sense of social order for some people that offers an aesthetic sense of improvement, even as one’s standard of living declines in real terms. These illusory gains can only go so far. Or as one frustrated Trump voter told reporters during Trump’s first-term trade war with China in 2019, “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

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