Trumpists Are A Lot Happier To Put Up With Economic 'Sacrifice' Than We Give Them Credit For
We can't count on them regretting this.
Last week and this weekend, Trump found himself dragged through the media coals for saying that kids might just have to live with three dolls instead of 30. “Aha!” thought many who oppose him, “This will be the thing that kills him. His fanbase does not like sacrificing things. Look at how they behaved during COVID when we just asked them to make the small sacrifice of wearing a mask so they didn’t kill people with their germs!”
I am here to tell you that, unfortunately, that is absolutely not what is happening or what is going to happen. Not only that, but the more we suggest that they will be upset about it or should be upset about it, the more they will dig their heels in and talk about how they are more than happy to accept some “short term pain for long term gain.”
It’s not that the Trumpian Right won’t put up with sacrifice, period, but that they won’t put up with it if it’s meant to help people other than themselves — particularly if it’s those they deem unworthy. We can compare this to COVID if we want, but if we do, we have to look at it a lot more clearly than we have been. When everything first happened, they wanted to buy masks and were told not to because there was a limited supply and frontline healthcare workers needed them. This pissed them off because “how dare you say those people are better than us!”
Then, after they started manufacturing cloth masks, the Right was generally on board because it allowed them to go to some places at a time when we actually all were pretty scared of the virus. It didn’t become “a thing” until they were told “masks won’t protect you, but they will protect others.” That’s when it turned. It turned even further when it became a situation where they were told to listen to scientific experts, again triggering the “So you think you’re better than us?” response. And when the data showed that Black people were being hit hardest by COVID, that’s when the bottom fell out entirely.
This matters because the fact remains that they are not averse to sacrifice in and of itself, just certain flavors of it. In many ways, they are far more willing to sacrifice than we are, particularly when it comes to things that benefit people as wealthy as Donald Trump. We could have all kinds of nice things, or at least all the nice things that every other developed country on earth has, but they don’t want to see the rich taxed like that. We could, at the very least, have universal health care, but they don’t want to live in a world where health insurance and pharmaceutical executives cannot get wildly rich off of people getting sick. They’re willing to live with regular mass shootings at schools, to which their own children could fall victim, just so that everyone who wants an AR-15 can have one.
We are also, nota bene, talking about people who are more than happy to send off their Social Security checks to televangelists who have literally been convicted of fraud, because they think it will get them into heaven after they die, okay? People who will buy food buckets (sometimes from the same televangelists) in preparation for the apocalypse, which they dream about surviving. They’re the people who send their kids off to fight and die in shitty, pointless wars, who live for the Horatio Alger “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” rhetoric, who want to go back to homesteading. They’re people who think “tough love” and “personal responsibility” are the solutions to every problem on earth, the people who believe abortion needs to be illegal in order to punish women for having been sexually active.
And let’s not forget the guy who was literally willing to die rather than get a vaccine in order to qualify for a heart transplant.
They will happily deal with rising costs and with losing any social services they may use because, for them, what they are getting in return is so much greater. Trump, their glorious leader, is asking them for a favor. He is asking that they sacrifice some material wealth for him — and if you don’t think that has the effect of making people more loyal and devoted, take a look at pretty much every religion or cult on earth. He has also promised them that this small sacrifice they are making now will result in untold richest later (also just like pretty much every religion or cult on earth), and that they will get to rub their rightness in the faces of everyone they hate, everyone who doubted them and their leader (again …).
There are few things as deeply motivating as spite, and the fact is, these people hate us so much that they will be willing to put up with almost anything so long as they feel they’re hurting us. Not hurting us more, just hurting us at all, even if they hurt more than we do (which, in many cases, they will).
I’m not saying that austerity isn’t going to hurt the GOP at all, and I’m not saying that there will not be a few defectors, because there always are (and there already are). What I am saying is that we need to be realistic about the fact that they’re not worried about themselves and their own welfare. They may, however, be worried about other people — not so much in terms of their general welfare, but in terms of how they vote. They should be worried about how independents, centrists, and people who don’t usually vote will be affected and how they will vote. Because let’s be real, the only thing they really have that’s working for them with those who are not true believers is transphobia and hysteria over imaginary “wokeness going too far,” and, believe it or not, that can only take them so far when people are unable to make rent or buy groceries.
After all, the chaos and failure of the Iraq War and the economic terror of the Great Recession set the stage for people also growing tired of right-wing culture war nonsense like opposition to same-sex marriage and trying to teach creationism in schools. We could soon see history repeating itself, and that’s a hell of a lot more likely than devoted Trumpers dumping him over not being able to buy enough Barbie dolls.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
They didn't care about COVID when it was killing their own spouses and parents. They remained in denial to the bitter end, often blaming the deaths on hospital's refusal to administer the quack remedy du jour. Or insisting that it wasn't COVID, because COVID wasn't real.
Anybody who lived through that and still remembers it (it was just five years ago, people!) can never again be surprised at what they will overlook and excuse.
Most people would rather die than admit they were wrong.