Buyer’s remorse
Although elections are typically portrayed as a battle between two bases, the reality is that competitive elections are typically decided by voters closer to the middle. Given that Donald Trump’s base is a fairly small-ish minority of the country, it’s fair to say that he won in 2024 because he got the majority of undecided, uneducated, apathetic voters who don’t like either side and voted based simply on whatever nonsense the media fed them.
Suffice it to say that these dummies in the middle who held their nose and voted for Trump are facing whiplash already. They were told that Trump would magically bring prices down, but now even Trump is admitting that this won’t happen. They were told that Biden was the senile one, yet it’s Trump who has mostly gone into hiding since winning the election. Instead a mentally incompetent Elon Musk appears to be running the government in Trump’s absence, and steering Congress toward an ill timed government shutdown already.
Any new President-elect is typically going to have a high initial approval rating, because there are always people who are going to say “Well he won, let’s publicly get behind him and hope for the best.” At this point in 2020, Biden had an approval rating in the sixties. So it’s a big deal that the most recent polling has Trump’s approval rating in the forties. This means a majority of the country has already given up any hope that this will go well – and this polling was before Trump’s pal Musk started trying to shut down the government as part of a Twitter tantrum.
What we’re counting on here is growing buyer’s remorse from the people who voted for Trump the least enthusiastically. We want them to be scratching their heads and wondering why what’s happening under Trump has no correlation to the line of crap that the media fed them about what would happen. We want them angry and disappointed at the Trump show. We want Trump’s approval rating to be in the dumpster before he even takes office, so that he enters office with as little political leverage as possible. And we’re starting to get that already.
We’ve already seen the Republican Senate rejecting Trump’s highest profile cabinet nominee in Matt Gaetz, even as the Senate considers rejecting multiple other Trump picks. And now we’re seeing dozens of House Republicans voting against the ludicrous continuing resolution that Trump and Musk just threw at them.
It’s not that these House and Senate Republicans are suddenly “growing a spine” or “growing a conscience.” That’s not a thing. What’s happening is that Trump is blowing it so catastrophically out of the gate, Republicans are already starting to worry that his messes and unpopularity will cost them reelection. Hopefully we’ll see more of this. Trump and the Republicans can’t function without tripping over each other’s shoelaces, and that can only play out well for us.
