MAGA, Giddy with Newfound Power, Plans for Mutually Assured Self-Destruction
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Donald Trump and MAGA won the 2024 election fair and square. It was a relatively decisive win in the Electoral College, but with an historically narrow margin in the popular vote.
Was it a mandate? It’s debatable, and the answer will depend on who you ask and who they voted for.
Technically, a mandate is someone—such as the electorate—giving someone else authority to do something. So anyone winning an election can accurately claim they have a “mandate”.
In colloquial terms, it has come to mean something akin to one being given obvious and relatively unfettered authority, as opposed to simply “authority”. This subjective definition is largely measured by the weight of a large vote count margin.
In this way, MAGA objectively does not have a mandate.
But do you know who does think they have a mandate? MAGA.
What do they want to do with this mandate? A lot of things. But one of those things is to try to destroy the lives of most of their voters without them noticing or caring.
For example, in order to rein in overspending they want to cut Social Security, Medicaid, and SNAP (food stamps). This is interesting, not because cutting these popular entitlement programs is a new idea, but because the idea is a through line from the old Republican party to the new Republican party that belies the drastic change the party had undergone.
Republicans are now supposed to be the party of the working class, the lower-income, least educated portion of the populace. They voice a populist message of railing against the woke elites that are trying to force your daughters to play basketball with trans persons. They are now for the little guy raging against the machine.
These people tend to be the most dependent on Social Security, Medicaid, and food stamps. So you might think that Republicans want to at least preserve these programs, if not expand them.
But no, the rhetoric the party is putting out into the infosphere is about slashing, reforming, and cutting the programs, with no ideas or plans to make up for it. They’re just honest about economic hardship being necessary to right the ship of America.
Recently, GOP Rep. Richard McCormick had some stuff to say about it:
On Tuesday, Republican Rep. Richard McCormick said “hard decisions” will need to be made on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. “There’s hundreds of billions of dollars to be saved. We just have to have the stomach to take those challenges on,” McCormick told Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network.
Elon Musk has recently been quoted as admitting that the population that Republicans are supposedly populist about will have to undergo “hardship” in order to fulfill their dreams of cutting their own monetary benefits:
Elon Musk is painting a clear picture of what he says is ahead if Donald Trump appoints him to lead government efficiency efforts. Musk told voters to expect some "temporary hardship" as he aims to drastically reduce federal spending. Musk said cuts would be so broad that "everyone's going to have to take a haircut," and he's already predicting pushback, calling it a necessary path to "long-term prosperity."
(Something tells me that Musk won’t be “taking a haircut”)
It’s also pretty obvious now how they are going to attempt to build support for this: by enflaming resentments and distrust of the shady deep state.
But it’s not like they are “owning the libs” by slashing these programs or helping to create antagonistic sentiments towards them. They are going to be outwardly “owning” their own voters.
The Social Security Administration’s data clearly shows which voters benefit the most from the program:
Note that the chart reflects only the SS Disability program, aged 18-64. Therefore, this does not include any retirees or survivors’ benefits. This erases any potential weighting of states that have larger older populations or ones that attracts high levels of retirees, such as Florida. Plus, the measure is a state’s percent of population, so total population effects for highly populated states like California or Texas are erased. This is an apples-to-apples comparison of all 50 states.
Notice a pattern here? The five states with the highest usage of the SS Disability program are all solidly red states. Eight of the top ten are red states. 15 of the top 20 are red states. One can reasonably surmise from this data that Republicans tend to use these benefits more than Democrats.
And the fact that two swing states are on this list, Michigan and Pennsylvania, are all the more interesting since they just voted for this in this cycle. These MAGA policies are traditional for them. We’ll see if they like what they’ve chosen.
And it’s not just SS benefits.
Below is a chart of the percent change from 2023 in food stamp benefits by state. Again, a pattern is apparent.
Eight of the top 10 states with the highest increase in food stamp benefits in the last year are red states.
Does it stop there? No. Below is a map showing Medicaid spending per adult enrollee.
Again, this shows red states use more benefits than blue states. This difference isn’t quite as apparent as the other two programs, but the red states are a majority in the two highest-spending categories in this map, so it’s not like they don’t heartily participate in this socialist program.
What we’re currently witnessing is a major American political party, supposedly now run by economic populists by direct social media decree, telling its own voters to take the painful medicine they are about to administer.
We are in an age of immense distrust of our government and the institutions it runs, so perhaps this is a winning strategy. But taking away from the hands that feed you wasn’t the campaign message, so we’ll see if MAGA voters are willing to swallow this medicine and maintain the gleeful smiles on their faces.
If they are not, then MAGA may have successfully set the table of their own self-destruction.
…two narcissists in one seat for the dictator, what could go wrong 😜🤣🤣🤣…shitshow about to unravel
Love it - cannot wait for the bitter pill