Will Buyer's Remorse Overcome American Magical Thinking?

  Disclosure: I am not well and still I am trying to write. I did not go to work today. I managed to sleep pretty much from 4 pm yesterday to 9 am today. Not sure what is wrong. I keep coughing, and now I have mucus. Just exhausted, and a little nauseous - even after eating my first meal in over 24 hours. I hope this post does not come across as abrupt as I feel it will.

Since I was home, I decided I could at least trim the email.

Two of my friends, KH and DM, had pointed reactions to a post by Chris Cillizza, 15 charts that tell the story of the 2024 election. My response today was:

I keep wondering about buyer's remorse. You will see that in my play. It may be good that I did not reply to this yesterday. Since you sent this I have a piece in The New Republic that the real problem is Fox, et al having such a grip on information - or misinformation, as it is. I keep wondering what will happen when reality hits misinformation. I think it was in the Washington Post newsletter this morning that I saw the headline that Putin does not want land. Duh. Trump thinks that. What will Fox say when Putin tells Trump to go fish? Or when Russian tanks enter Poland? Remember I think Trump is at bottom a coward. The kind of coward who will either run or overcompensate. Either way, what will Fox say? 

The TNR article was Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won? 

I like Paul Krugman because he explains things. He puts out the numbers, even if I might not like what they say. In short, I think he has integrity. He never has shown me any propensity to shoot off his mouth just to be heard. Therefore, I spent as much energy as I could reading the transcript of his interview published on TNR, Paul Krugman on How Badly Trump Voters Have Been Scammed. I can only fight so much nausea, so I omitted much that I thought worth repeating. I leave you with this, and the advice to read the whole interview and ask if you really know what you did, voting for Trump.

Sargent: Just to wrap this up, I want to return to your point about how shocked Trump voters are going to be. Can you talk about this? Trump voters are going to suddenly discover how badly they’ve been had, right? On prices, on the impact of immigrants, on all sorts of things, on tariffs. How badly scammed are they being right now? Will this be a shock to them?

Krugman: It will be a shock. Now, how they’ll react to that shock, I don’t know. Trump voters, many of them, really just have no idea. They’re only now learning, and some of them still haven’t, that tariffs are taxes. They have no idea how much of their food supply comes from immigrants; they have no idea really what Trump is planning to do. And they probably think that he can, through smart businessmen, just make prices go back to what they were four years ago, which is crazy. But they don’t know that. Now, whether they will actually blame Trump or manage to somehow say, George Soros is doing it ...

If we look at other autocratic regimes, some of the ones that Trump has admired, I always find it fascinating that they are far more interventionist in the sense of trying to order the economy around. Victor Orbán tried to deal with rising food prices in Hungary by imposing price controls, leading to a lot of empty supermarket shelves. There’ll be a lot of scapegoating attempts to make magic solutions, so it may take a little while before people really realize the extent to which they’ve been had.

sch 12:37 pm