Oh, to be a MAGA Republican

        A few weeks ago, the Trump Administration and their counterparts in China issued a joint statement reducing their tariffs to before the massive hike for 90 additional days.  As President Trump takes a victory lap for solving the problem he created, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of jealousy.  He will get credit for this.  His approval rating will go up.  The stock market has and will jump.  All for simply undoing the terrible idea he enacted in the first place.  Oh to be a MAGA Republican, where the leader can do no wrong, and only when they do nothing can you truly see their greatness. 

        Whether you take in Trump’s first term in its entirety, or choose to arbitrarily say “the last 18 months of his presidency doesn’t count”, his first term was marked by two things.  The first was Trump was prevented from doing real harm.  His term was decidedly marked by him continuously proposing terrible ideas, and then in practice, they would be toned down, somewhat right wing policies, with only one large tax cut to show any meaningful change. The second was the stock market generally going up, as it usually does, due to a general attitude of deregulation and lower taxes.  In other words, Trump either did nothing, or just undid the work of others.  Due to the incredible strength of the American economy, things generally went well. 

        Of course, the actual text was utterly blown by the Trump Administration.  Covid became a global pandemic, and by month two, Trump was complaining about how unfair it all was, urging people to inject bleach, and dismissing over 1000 Americans dying per day as nothing to worry about.  Yet as the 2024 election heated up, nearly all of his supporters either completely ignored Covid, or dismissed it as “not his fault.”  What bliss.  What a lovely, forgiving nature these people have… for him. 

        This is the pattern we are also starting to see with Donald Trump’s second term in office.  He runs on crazy, oversimplified solutions to complicated problems, then implements them, everything goes sideways, then he undoes them with little to any benefit, then takes credit for undoing his terrible idea. In the first term it was his trading policies, child separation, and dealings with Russia.  This time, similarly, it is his tariff policies and his crackdown on the American Immigrant population, both those here legally and illegally.  Once citizens begin to see how Trump is pursuing these vague ideas on which he runs, they very often are repelled. 

        But it is the simplicity of the other side that will never cease to amaze me.  Each Republican administration since Reagan has been one of relative instability which leads to economic hardship and chaos.  Then, a democrat is elected to clean up the mess.  Which then leads to the public sitting back and thinking how prosperous our country is, we don’t need those pesky taxes or regulations.  So a Republican is elected.  But on a more fundamental level, the true expectation of that conservative candidate has shrunk more and more as the country has embraced its right-wing habit.  There is truly no expectation of any problem solving from conservatives anymore.  The “task” of Republican governments is just to get rid of the work done over generations, say No to any change, and generally make people feel good.  The task of those on the left is to solve every problem. 

#FitzFile