Where the rubber hits the road

What Trumpist gaslighting on his sabotage of America's economy could look like

(A quick note)….

The continuing cratering of the Dow, NASDAQ and the S&P 500 flows directly from the lunacy of these first two months of the Trump/Musk regime. Trump’s on-again/off-again/on-again attacks on our major trading partners; Musk’s rampage through the VA, the Social Security Administration, the FAA and more; and the broader uncertainty and disruption these actions have unleashed, threaten to turn what was a possible cyclical downturn into something much worse. That Trump intends to gut the social safety net in order to fund massive tax cuts that will benefit his billionaire buddies is clear enough. That’s been his economic agenda since he first ran for president. Beyond that, as I suggested in my last post, I am not sure Trump knows what he’s doing, other than swinging his dick around and, he presumes, delivering biblical justice against those he has deemed his enemies.

Beyond the immediate gratification of wielding and abusing power, and a bunch of ill-considered and half-baked notions about how all this wanton destructiveness will somehow make America great again, Trump and his cronies really have no idea how all of this is going to shake out. What we do know is that, if economic circumstances deteriorate further and ordinary Americans in significant numbers do start to experience and understand the adverse consequences of Trump’s actions, he won’t engage in deep self-reflection about where he might have gone wrong. Instead, Trump and his minions will use their vast propaganda machine to unleash their usual torrent of lies in order to blame anybody but themselves, no matter how incoherent and contradictory their blame-shifting is.

I’ve mentioned Brian Beutler before, for my money perhaps the best single analyst we currently have of the day-to-day unfolding of American politics in the post-2017 era. Brian’s post today is about that impending blame-shifting and how we need to be prepared for it.

Brian says, in part:

As markets continue to deteriorate and if growth turns to contraction, the right will shift…from panic to scapegoating. We’ll hear, loudly and endlessly:

• That Trump inherited a depressed economy from Biden (false);

• That Trump’s recession is a sadly necessary but carefully devised program to whip inflation and kick off a manufacturing renaissance (also false);

• That the economy is doing great, actually (false again);

• That wokes and “globalists” (😉😉😉) sabotaged the economy (false, bigoted);

• That the macroeconomic indicators are fake news (another lie);

• That the real numbers are these official government statistics (which have been manipulated by political appointees).

Brian further argues that while it is possible to rebut rightwing propaganda — “reality can break through in dire circumstances,” he notes — it’s also true that Democrats need to lay the groundwork *now* so that the public understands what is happening when the full force of the consequences of the regime’s actions become inescapable. When that happens, and when Republicans unleash their fusillade of fact-free folderol (:)), it will be critical both to challenge the individual claims and also to remind people, endlessly, of the bad faith and ill-intent of the coming storm of disinformation and of the larger agenda it undergirds.

Democrats need to get over their diffidence, including their general penchant for trying to tailor their rebuttals as narrowly as they can to the given claim they’re challenging. Normal people, after all, respond to and think in terms of narratives, not discreet informational bits. There’s no reason to assume anything but the worst about why Trump/Musk are doing what they are doing. They are utterly indifferent to (if not gleeful about) the suffering they will inflict. Their wantonness, not any coherent strategic ambition (again, self-enrichment and retribution don’t amount to a strategic plan), largely explains their actions. And though Trump insists that everyone bends to his version of reality, reality does in fact have its own logic. Injecting massive uncertainty into the global trading system, supply chains and people’s lives is a recipe for economic chaos, whether Trump likes it or not.

Long ago, Stephen Colbert mockingly said, while standing just a few feet from then-President George W. Bush, that reality has a well-known liberal bias (not for nothing: we could use more of such guts today). Such reality could, sooner rather than later, deliver a very hard punch in the face to the Trump/Musk regime and to many ordinary Americans (in addition to those who are already experiencing the blow). If and when that happens, Democrats need to do everything they can to make sure the public understands what it is seeing.