When the Economy Crashes, Will the Trump Cult Crack?

With prices soaring and chaos mounting, even Republicans are starting to question Trump’s economic wreckage.

by Jeremy Novak

There are growing signs of Republican unrest over Trump’s handling of the economy. While still a minority sentiment in the party, a surprisingly large swath of Republicans are feeling uneasy about Trump’s behavior and its economic effects.

But if the economy spirals downward—as it appears it’s going to—how will this restlessness manifest itself when the accountability phase arrives in the form of our upcoming elections? Will there be enough discontent, even among recent Trump supporters, to accept election results if Democrats do well? Or will we be in for more election obstruction based on lies about cheating or “irregularities”?

Rising Discontent

A recent Reuters poll showed that one in three Republicans feel that Trump has been too erratic in his efforts to upgrade the U.S. economy, and that six in ten Republicans said they expect higher tariffs to cause higher prices among typical consumer goods, including groceries.

A recent CNN poll verified that the number one issue people are concerned about by far is the economy, just as it was during the election cycle of 2024. 42% of all respondents stated this. Among Republicans the number was a whopping 45%. Independents and moderates also were at 45%, with conservatives even higher at 47%.

This might bode well for Democrats in upcoming election cycles. Basically, by taking many unnecessary overt actions to try and disrupt the economy, Trump is solidifying an economic slowdown paired with rising inflation.

The Administration’s economic rhetoric has even transformed from a promise to lower prices and bring in a golden age of prosperity to acknowledging that a painful economic correction is coming, and that if you’re a true patriot you won’t complain.

Hope springs eternal

One of the great benefits of democracy is that you can try something, then change course if that thing doesn’t work. That’s what elections are for. You can vote in a “disrupter” and then vote in a “stabilizer” in the next cycle. That appears to be where we are headed, although there is still a long time to go.

Hope springs eternal in a democracy, especially in the strongest democracy in the history of the world—the U.S.

But since the U.S. also now has a strong election denial movement, this hope becomes more diminished. And the role of a democracy to right the mistakes of past elections is likely to be tested over the next couple election cycles as never before.

Will discontent grow so deep that even Republicans accept a Democratic win without attacking its legitimacy?

In the 2020 election, the problems facing the Covid-ridden country at that time could have been considered a temporary blip completely out of the first Trump administration’s control. If it wasn’t for that pesky once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, Trump’s America would have continued thriving, a MAGA cultist might say.

There were problems, but the general discontent wasn’t really a consensus, and a movement began to delegitimize the results of the Joe Biden victory in the 2020 election. Republicans, led by Trump’s rhetoric, spent the next several months sowing skepticism and outright denial of the results.

The stain of election denialism

Election denialism hasn’t exactly gone away in the four years since. Sure, there was very little denial about the 2024 election which Trump won, at least not enough to generate a movement that created any significant actions. But that’s because election denialism is mostly the purview of Republicans when their candidate loses.

There haven’t been many recent polls asking about the legitimacy of the 2020 election now that we’re over four years out, but the ones that have been conducted show that there is still a large portion of the country that believes the 2020 election of Joe Biden was “fraudulent”.

A Monmouth poll from June 2023 found that 30% of all respondents—including 68% of republicans—believe that Biden’s victory was due to voter fraud.

A Washington Post/University of Maryland poll from December 2023 had similar numbers. 69% of those that said Fox News was their main source of news, and 33% overall, agreed that there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.

And these sentiments have had remarkable staying power. They are essentially unchanged from polling numbers in the months just following the 2020 election.

In addition, there’s still activity in the election denial movement to normalize intense election skepticism, but only when a Democrat wins, of course. Just under two weeks ago, the Oklahoma State Board of Education approved a new curriculum that included actively questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election. From The Oklahoman:

The new version of one section of the standards says high school students should “Identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of ‘bellwether county’ trends.”

These new standards still have to pass through the state legislature and the Governor’s office (even the Governor, a full-on MAGA Trumper, has been critical of these updates), so they are not official….yet. But this does show that we are still in a timeline where election denialism has relevance.

Crisis Conundrum

What might be seen as the main solution to the upcoming crises we are likely to endure over the next four years cannot be taken for granted anymore.

I, and many others, thought that a grave crisis of our times would be the conflict that ensued after Kamala Harris won the 2024 election, and whether the results of that election would actually come to fruition. Unfortunately Trump won. So there was no conflict, just the usual peaceful transfer of power.

But as people grow weary of the Trump chaos and long for the country to go in yet another direction, what will the next transfer of power look like?

Will even discontented Republicans allow the transfer to happen without a fight next time around?

Republicans must choose: keeping power at all costs, or preserving democracy as a means for citizens to solve the nation’s problems.

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