The View From DAVID WEIGEL
Fight, the new 2024 campaign tell-all from Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, is loaded with bad Democratic omens. One of them was apparent to a Kamala Harris strategist, who kept encountering Black men who were converts for Donald Trump, and couldn’t be compelled to vote for her.
“Every single one of them said one word and f*ck*ng one word only,” the Democrat recalled. “Stimmy.”
This will be painful for today’s Democrats to read. It was their party that passed stimulus checks in 2020, along with a suite of other pandemic relief measures that voters would associate with Trump. The nostalgia that helped him win again was built, in part, by those checks. The rest was built later, when most Americans experienced the first serious inflation of their lives and began to miss Trump’s economy.
The risk for Republicans right now is that the second Trump term doesn’t bring back those feelings; that people reach for tea-soaked madeleines, and get soggy bread. Trump’s party entered “Liberation Day” very confident in the plan to raise tariffs on nearly every country’s products, ending what he called decades of being “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered.”
Changing that, he said, would mean short-term pain. And he did run on tariffs, waving off Harris when she called them a potential “Trump tax” — countries would “pay us back for all that we’ve done for the world.” But there was no pain in that description. Some voters were ready for some short-term costs that would enable long-term domestic on-shoring, but plenty remembered Trump for low prices and free money. The idea of a “DOGE dividend,” which came up at Elon Musk’s ill-fated election rally in Wisconsin last week, is a good example.
“Do you have any information on when DOGE checks would be written or sent out?” one voter asked. “It’s up to the Congress, and maybe the president, too, you know, as to whether specific checks are cut,” Musk replied. “But whether a check is cut or not, whether you reduce wasteful spending, the economy is going to be better off.”
Sure. But only one of those possibilities is a check with Trump’s name on it. What are last year’s swing voters expecting to get from him? What sort of consequences or higher prices did they brace for? Maybe they’ll dig in and bear it; maybe their answers will be “free money and cheap goods,” and “none.”
Notable
- In Compact, Kenneth Rapoza advises that “Trump must signal that the tariffs are here for the long term,” and suggests that the people panicking about the effects of this will get it all wrong.
- In The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner warns that Trump’s strategy won’t work. “Every one of these nations is planning to retaliate. The result will be an entirely gratuitous trade war, in which the U.S. has no allies.”