Last term it was, "He is your president you have to support him". Now it is, "The American people voted for this"
All the same meaningless phrases that do nothing to discuss issues, just an appeal to the masses.
Political sentiment has never been static. We'll see what people think when inflation sky rockets, they max out their credit, etc, and they have fewer social programs to reach out to for help.
Yep? I mean it's threatened every time by Republicans. But it's usually just grandstanding... Take Obamacare for instance. It was threatened to be repealed constantly, over and over, But even when they had full control and could do whatever they wanted it still survived.. at the end of the day, the elected officials know that it hurts their own people more to appeal it, so they just give the issue lip service and tweaks and fly a giant mission accomplished banner from the deck of their ship.
So on one side, I agree with you, who would think that they actually follow through with what they were saying over and over on the campaign trail.... And now they have.
"I never thought the party that's been saying for 20 years that they want to reduce government to the size where they can drown it in the bathtub would ever do anything drastic..."
Let's assume your first assertion is true, and I don't necessarily concede that, but for the sake of argument.
People frequently point out that Trump is doing more or less exactly what he said he would do, either explicitly or by way of Project 2025[1]—a detailed several hundred page diatribe and action plan for a second Trump term that he disingenuously claims to know nothing about, despite having employed nearly every one of its authors to work on his campaign and/or administration. That includes Project 2025’s principal coordinator Russell Vought[2], who Trump named to head the Office of Management & Budget, and who was policy director of the Republican National Committee platform committee from May 2024. So it is fair to say that we were warned.
But it is worth noting that an April 2024 NBC News poll[3] showed Trump leading voters who say they do not follow political news by 26-points. Meanwhile voters who said they read a newspaper every day supported Joe Biden 70% to Trump’s 21%. They very shrewdly targeted fire hoses of wedge issues, disinformation, and fear-mongering to millions of voters who reportedly do not follow politics, and who likely just felt like shit was better for them before 2020. It worked. But I am not so sure that these voters were equipped to know about, or fully understand the implications of, something like Project 2025. There is certainly room to speculate how many of Trump’s 2024 voters were voting for this kind of radical reshaping of American governance, rather than simply desiring a return to the pre-2020 status quo, before COVID-19 and its socioeconomic consequences violently rattled society’s cage.
It is true that Trump won his reelection with 49.8% of the vote, but that isn’t the same thing as 49.8% of voters. With only 63.7% of eligible voters casting ballots last November, Trump’s share of the vote narrows to just under a third of the electorate, significantly less than half. As I mentioned before, a large bloc of those voters do not engage with traditional news media. Along with the NBC poll I cited above, a survey conducted in November 2024 by Northeastern University[4] found that just 24% of Republican voters relied on news media, while the rest said they got their news from family and friends, as well as social media.
This means that while less than 1/3rd of eligible voters cast their ballots for Trump, only ~8.3% of the electorate entered the voting booth reliably informed, and still chose to support him.
Thing is, you can't assume that the 36.3% of eligible voters who didn't cast votes are opposed to this. Some surely are, and couldn't cast a vote because circumstances prevented them. But an awful lot of them seem to have said, "Eh, it makes no difference either way."
If you ask them why, many seem to cite American support for Israel in its war against Gaza. Others cite inflation.
It's hard to restrict democracy to those who are "reliably informed". I wish we could. The whole idea of democracy is that you shouldn't have to, because informed people will be able to have influence enough to win most of the time. That fundamental proposition seems to be in doubt.
