It’s Find Out Time

“I never thought the leopard would eat my face,” sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.

I admit it. There’s definitely a part of me that isn’t feeling very charitable right now toward the voters who re-elected Donald Trump. And after all, since this is a democracy, voters should get what they voted for, right? As Jimmy Kimmel said the other night,

It was a terrible night for everyone who voted against him, and guess what? It was a terrible night for everyone who voted for him too. They just don’t realize it yet.

At the risk of serving a Schadenfriday lunch buffet after such a devastating loss, today I want to walk through some of the ways MAGA is already starting to find out what a big and tragic mistake they just made.

Some of what I have so far, especially around the likely economic impacts of Trump’s plans to gut government support and impose high tariffs, is anecdotal, so who knows if it’s all 100 percent true. But the principles behind these accounts are valid, as experts and even big companies are beginning to confirm.

A lot of what we are seeing also comes from the far right, which is gloating in its victory and pushing all the boundaries of decency. We have to understand, however, that the trolls who once lurked at the edges of the GOP are now the ones in charge and with access and influence upon the White House and its top advisors, including Elon Musk. So I think it’s fair to point out what they are already doing and saying, and to show how badly MAGA voters, especially white women Trump supporters, have shot themselves in the foot.

I want to focus on four areas in particular.  

First, Project 2025 is real and is coming, and Trump was lying (shocker) when he said he didn’t know anything about it and that it wasn’t part of his plans. With no small irony, many of those who will suffer the most are poor, white and rural—in other words, Trump voters.

Second, and unbelievably, a majority of white women again voted for Trump, an adjudicated sexual assaulter and destroyer of abortion rights. Now misogynists, rape culture bros and Christian nationalists are emboldened to control women’s bodies even more than before. This again will happen most pronouncedly in red states that went for Trump.

Third, Latino men swung heavily toward Trump, tragically not understanding that his promise to deport 15 million undocumented immigrants would turn their own families upside down, too. Many of these men have family members who are undocumented, but even if they don’t, they are still the targets of what’s about to go down. 

Finally, the tariffs that Trump has long promised are already starting to impact in negative ways, and the inflation that experts have been warning about could tank the economy and make today’s high egg prices look amusing in retrospect.

So let’s indulge, at least for a time, the momentarily satisfying feeling of “We told you so.” Let’s get it out of our systems so we can get back to working on behalf of the tens of millions of innocent people who did not vote for that man and who will be devastated by his return.

Project 2025 is real, duh

Gov. Tim Walz put it well. He said you don’t put together a playbook if you don’t intend to use it. A playbook is precisely what Project 2025 is, and the fact that Trump tried so hard to run from it during the campaign was a big clue about both how bad it was and how much his fingers were all over it to begin with.

The plan was so radioactive, in fact, that Republicans forced the head of the policy part of it to step down. But now that Trump has won, the right is gloating that Project 2025 was a real thing and the plan all along. As Rolling Stone reported, 

Trump feigned ignorance of Project 2025 — Sure enough, less than 24 hours after the election his allies, advisers, and prominent supporters were celebrating the now-open road to Project 2025’s implementation.

Here’s Benny Johnson, who was paid hundreds of thousands by the Russians to promote their propaganda, laying down the cards he pretended they never had.

The right is clearing the path rather quickly with some big MAGA leaf blowers. Matt Walsh is holding a big gas polluting one.

There are so many horrific things in Project 2025 that it boggles the mind and would take weeks to explain. I’m going to pick out just two of them for illustrative purposes.

Eliminating the Department of Education

Project 2025 calls for the elimination of the Department of Education. Trump has vowed to do it. “Yeah, kill the bureaucracy!” cheered the MAGA voters. Until they began to learn what this would mean in real terms.

You see, the Department of Education funds programs for kids with disabilities across the U.S. through OSEP, the Office of Special Education Programs. It does so in partnership with states and local districts. As it says right there on its website,

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 2004 (IDEA) authorizes formula grants to states and discretionary grants to institutions of higher education and other non-profit organizations to support research, demonstrations, technology and personnel development and parent-training and information centers.

No more Department of Education means no more of those grants—unless some other federal agency comes in and is authorized to issue them. I don’t see that happening. Maybe the blue states will step up to fill the funding gap, but I doubt the red states will.

It also means there will be no one to enforce the requirement that schools provide an IEP (Individualized Education Program) for kids with learning disabilities. Trump voters with special needs kids—and there are many—are going to learn quickly what the Department of Education was there for: to ensure funding and compliance that provides educational opportunities and expensive, individualized programs for their own children.

Attack upon healthcare

A second goal of Project 2025 is to undo the Affordable Care Act. As the Boston University School of Health notes, the project’s authors were quite explicit about this, writing that a major goal of Project 2025 is to return to “pre-ACA status”:

The playbook details plans to achieve Republicans’ years-long goal to repeal the ACA, which would limit or remove health insurance coverage for millions of people and be replaced with insurance plans that lack many of the ACA’s signature protections, such as requiring coverage for essential health benefits, prohibiting exclusion based on preexisting conditions, and reducing prescription drug costs. 

I wrote on Thursday in The Big Picture about how to try to block this legislatively. But if the repeal succeeds, or is even partially successful, for example by moving those with pre-existing conditions into separate risk pools with higher premiums (as JD Vance has advocated), it will hit poorer citizens, often in red states, hardest.

Even short of a full repeal of the ACA, Project 2025 seeks to privatize and defund key aspects of the Medicare and Medicaid programs, impacting poorer recipients most directly. Specifically, it would deregulate the private Medicare Advantage program while making it the default enrollment option, all while imposing work requirements for Medicaid. That would result in loss of coverage for many of the most desperate patients.

Consequently, as Boston University School of Health further notes, “low-income people predictably would become uninsured, meaning they wait longer to receive care or seek none, their health deteriorates and thus becomes harder and more expensive to treat, they cannot afford necessary healthcare, and any costs accrued are passed on to insured patients through higher premiums.” 

Many Harris voters can’t understand why their own parents would vote to harm themselves so directly by supporting Trump. Project 2025 and the GOP threaten the economic well-being of all elderly Americans, and yet many blindly cast their ballots for them. 

This was a common sentiment—and it’s understandable given the frustrations of living in an underinformed, information siloed world.

The challenge of our time will be how not to lose compassion for those who have brought this upon all of us, including themselves.

Enabling misogyny and rape culture

One of the most depressing facts to come out of the election is that a majority of white women continue to support a serial sexual assaulter and the man who destroyed national abortion rights. Many MAGA women whom I’ve seen interviewed claim that they did not actually believe Trump was anti-abortion, nor did they believe any of the dire warnings of the left about the loss of bodily autonomy that women will suffer as a result of his reelection.

The response of the far right to the election should dispel any doubts. (Warning: The language and abusiveness I highlight below can be very difficult to read about and process, so skip past this to the next header if you don’t want to deal with it right now. I completely understand.) 

The far right now believes it is open season on women. A depressing 56 million have now seen Nick Fuentes’s declaration, “Your body, my choice. Forever.” In his view, women have no bodily autonomy whatsoever.

Some women have been contemplating going the route of many South Korean women, who began the “4B movement” in response to the deep misogyny in that country. It calls for

- No sex with men

- No giving birth

- No dating men

- No marriage with men

Here’s what streamer Jon Miller has said in response:  

As the community notes on this post pointed out, “Having sex with a woman without her consent is rape.”

The message MAGA voters sent to these men is that a man credibly accused of multiple sexual assaults—and even adjudicated to be one by a unanimous jury—can still be elected president. The chilling message this sends to young women, and the support these results expressly give to the worst men among us—cannot be overstated.

Once again, it is the blue states that are moving to protect women, to shore up laws around domestic violence and abuse, to prosecute rapists and to protect abortion. In the red states, by contrast, women who voted in huge numbers for Trump will soon find their freedoms and rights horrifically impacted by their own decision.

A good example of this is Florida, which voted overwhelmingly for Trump. It was also where voters heartbreakingly failed to overcome an anti-democratic 60 percent threshold to pass a constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights. That means a draconian six week abortion ban will now remain in place. And with MAGA extremists in charge of national health and drug policy, the availability of medical abortion pills is now in serious jeopardy, further limiting choices for women desperate for options and reproductive health care.

Let mass deportations begin

Trump has made mass deportations a top priority and campaign promise, and he intends to begin deporting millions of undocumented migrants on Day One. The ones most directly impacted by this will be the Latino community, and yet it swung toward Trump by huge numbers.

How could this happen? Latino families are among those hit hardest by inflation, especially the cost of food and housing, which has remained high even though inflation has eased. Economic insecurity is a powerful motivator in elections.

But beyond that, there is also a fundamental disconnect at work. Many in the Latino community who have achieved citizenship believed that voting for Trump, and pulling the ladder up after themselves, was in their own best interest. But observers warn otherwise. Trump will not limit his deportations to “criminals” as he has said at his rallies. Nor do his advisors intend to limit their actions to non-citizens. 

As Stephen Miller declared after the election, the denaturalization of U.S. citizens will be turbo charged under the Trump administration. 

Miller’s goal isn’t just to kick out the undocumented. No one, even those who have become citizens legally and have been so for years, will be safe from his efforts to rid the country of those he considers brown and foreign.

Indeed, the mass deportation program as currently planned would create a dystopian, inhuman nightmare. Trump proposes using local law enforcement to help identify and apprehend undocumented immigrants, turning to the U.S. military and National Guard if needed. This would result in a permanent police state in many communities and militarization of our border and immigration system.

Trump’s model for this is the racist “Operation Wetback” of the 1950s that deported roughly one million undocumented immigrants to Mexico. But Trump’s proposal sees that horrible program supersized and on steroids. 

Authorities coming into Latino neighborhoods would go door to door, looking for “undocumented” people to haul away. It’s estimated that 1 in 20 people in the U.S. live in a mixed-status household, meaning at least one undocumented person lives there among U.S. citizens or lawful residents. Those most likely to be deported include parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts who have lived in the U.S. an average of 16 years. Removing and deporting these wage earners would immediately impoverish millions of mixed-status families and cut their median household income nearly in half, on top of cruelly separating children from their loved ones.

Further, anyone who even looks like they might be undocumented could also be suspect. We would see racial profiling on a level never before experienced in the U.S. If you are pulled over at a checkpoint you have to “show your papers” or risk being swept into the system. If you didn’t have your ID, they would arrest you and place you into one of many detention centers they will build, where your case could languish for months or years.

This doesn’t even touch on the economic impact of deporting millions of our most essential workers. Trump voters have no idea of the economic chaos and far higher prices such a draconian program would create. 

Undocumented workers currently perform some of the most backbreaking jobs in our country—jobs that most Americans do not want. They pick our crops, build our homes, take care of our sick and elderly, distribute our food and haul our trash. It’s estimated that three-quarters of all undocumented individuals in the workforce, or around five million people, are essential workers. I put together some statistics on this when researching this question for Robert Reich.

Around one million farmworkers are currently undocumented. That’s around 1 in every 5 such workers. If they were to suddenly disappear, either because they were deported or went into hiding, we could face a national food shortage. And as we learned during the pandemic, any disruption in our food supply can result in massive spikes in inflation, panic buying and hoarding by consumers, and price gouging by distributors and retailers.

In construction, there are some 1.3 million undocumented workers. The loss of these workers would result in immediate project delays, meaning increased costs and even fewer available houses. That means higher rents and far less affordable housing for everyone.

We actually saw a mini version of this play out in Florida, when Governor Ron DeSantis signed harsh new laws to keep undocumented migrants from entering or remaining in the state. Migrant workers were afraid to show up at work sites, causing labor shortages among growers and at construction sites. Companies had to scramble and pay far higher wages to citizens and legal residents to salvage their crops and finish their projects. The result was a hit to Florida of around $12.6 billion in the first year of DeSantis’s draconian new law.

According to the American Action Forum, deportation of all undocumented immigrants would result in a 5.7 percent decline in GDP. That’s an economy that would be $1.6 trillion smaller by 2034. Those are Great Recession level numbers. 

Tariffs and inflation

For all those who voted for Trump claiming inflation—which has returned to normal under Biden—was too high, they are in for a shock if and when Trump’s tariffs go into effect. They are expected to add 20 percent to many consumer items, but a lot of Trump voters don’t really understand that or how it could affect them.

This anecdotal account has been making the rounds:

It often appears that Trump voters weren’t even aware he was going to raise tariffs at all.

Indeed, the coming tariffs are already causing companies to adjust their plans dramatically. As CBS News reported after the election (not before, huh):

U.S. retailers that depend on foreign suppliers are prepared to pass along the cost of his proposed import tariffs to consumers, potentially leading to higher prices for a range of products.

Americans stand to lose between $46 billion and $78 billion in spending power each year on products including apparel, toys, furniture, household appliances, footwear and travel goods due to the new tariffs, the National Retail Federation stated in findings released Monday. 

“Retailers rely heavily on imported products and manufacturing components so that they can offer their customers a variety of products at affordable prices,” NRF Vice President of Supply Chain and Customs Policy Jonathan Gold said in a statement. “A tariff is a tax paid by the U.S. importer, not a foreign country or the exporter. This tax ultimately comes out of consumers’ pockets through higher prices.”

For example, a $40 toaster oven would retail for $48 to $52 after the tariffs, while a $50 pair of running shoes would jump to $59 to $64, according to the industry trade group. A $2,000 mattress and box spring set would cost $2,128 to $2,190, the NRF said.

Lots of stories like this one, too:

Workers who voted for Trump may be surprised at what that means for them and their jobs in the not so distant future.

It sadly may prove necessary to simply let Trump crash the economy—not that we can do much to stop him. If Trump were to do nothing and leave things totally alone, including not actually trying to deport millions of our essential but undocumented workforce, the country might still might be fine economically. Sure, we might have to suffer through him claiming that, under Trump, everything is wonderful and prices are low while markets are storming ahead, all the while knowing it’s because of what his predecessor did to fix the mess he had made. 

But Trump’s campaign promises and policies have us currently on a path that will lead to shortages, inflation and misery for many of the most vulnerable families, especially across the red states within the demographics that supported him most enthusiastically. Watching them endure the consequences of their own decisions might feel like poetic justice, but in all seriousness it might ultimately be the only way his supporters are ever shaken loose from their Trumpian delusion. 

With a sudden spike in prices, shortages of goods and essential laborers, and widespread cutbacks and layoffs, it might finally dawn on them that Republican policies are actually terrible for the average working family and have always been. 

Let them find out, and then let’s consider when to reach back out.