You Voted for This
Trump’s base is getting destroyed by his own policies.
by Julie Roginsky
Are we supposed to feel bad for Javier Villalobos, the mayor of McAllen, Texas? Villalobos, who is profiled in The New Yorker this week, was elected as the first Republican mayor of his Rio Grande Valley city. In 2024, Trump flipped every county in the Valley, which was once reliably Democratic. Villalobos’ town shifted more towards Trump than any other big city in the United States, save for one.
Now, Villalobos is living with the consequences of the election. The ICE raids that he might have assumed would take place in liberal cities like Los Angeles have not spared the Rio Grande Valley. “You go to some subdivisions that are being constructed, and it’s empty. You go to Home Depot, and there’s nobody around there. It’s weird. It feels like ‘The Walking Dead,’” Villalobos says.
According to the story, a security guard in McAllen named Eric added that, “he doubted the raids would change the minds of the many people he knew who’d voted for Trump. ‘But everybody’s thinking about it,’ he said. “Small companies, big companies, even our farmers. Because I’m not going to wake myself up at no 4 a.m. to go work the fields.”
Well, Eric, you better. Or someone has to. Because those crops aren’t picking themselves. They will be rotting in the fields because you and so many others bought into the fiction that Trump was going to only deport the rapists and the murderers. But he’s not. He is deporting your friends and neighbors, even putting the fear of God into DACA recipients who have lived in the United States most of their lives.
Roel Mareno, Jr. owns a contraction company in southern Texas. He told The New Yorker:
“Most of the time, you have four to ten people at a home that’s being worked on, but right now we’re anywhere from zero to two. Yesterday, I only had two people working, and that’s because they were my friends, and they came down from Corpus to help me hang Sheetrock,” he told me. Moreno said that he called a worker and asked, “‘Hey, can you come to start a house?’ He’s, like, ‘Roel, I’m scared to go. I came over at the age of three—you know, daca, but now daca’s not even good.’ He’s, like, ‘My wife, my kids are here, my parents are here, my grandparents are here. If I get sent to Mexico, I have nowhere to go. This is home.’”
What do we say to Mareno? That he should cry harder? That he fucked around in 2024 and now he’s finding out? That the people he has known his whole life, the people whose labor likely made him prosper, are now scared to death and at risk of losing everything because of the ballot he cast last November? That his decision will undoubtedly make him poorer — and that’s before Trump’s tariffs take another huge bite out of the materials with which he likely constructs his homes?
It’s not just the Trump supporters in the Rio Grande Valley who are finding out. Suddenly, the very people whose conspiracy theories propelled Trump to a win last November — the same people who believed that Hillary Clinton killed Vince Foster more than thirty years ago, the same ones who peddled the nonsense that Democrats were running a pedophile ring out of the back of a D.C. pizza shop, the same ones who thought Sandy Hook was a false flag operation — are up in arms because Attorney General Pam Bondi is hiding the Epstein client list. Several months ago, Bondi told Fox News that the list was sitting on her desk, later adding that the FBI received a “truckload of documents” about Epstein. Now, she says the list does not exist and she will have nothing more to say about Epstein’s co-conspirators and death.
The MAGAsphere has gone nuts. Elon Musk, who earlier tweeted that it is “Time to drop the really big bomb:@realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public” has continued his crusade, posting an “Official Jeffrey Epstein Pedophile Counter” and tweeting, “What’s the time? Oh look, it’s no-one-has-been-arrested-o’clock again.”
Other MAGA influencers have vented their rage at FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino, two of the right’s biggest trolls prior to their appointments to lead the nation’s once-preeminent law enforcement agency. On his podcast two years ago, Bongino promoted the conspiracy theory that Epstein was murdered to prevent him from coming forward about powerful co-conspirators. “What the hell are they hiding with Jeffrey Epstein?” he asked.
Good question.
Today, Bongino is telling the very people he ginned up about Epstein’s death that Epstein killed himself. The Justice Department released eleven hours of video footage from outside Epstein’s cell to prove that nothing was amiss. Unfortunately, the same forces that Patel and Bongino stoked over the years have come back to bite them. There is a minute missing from the video — a minute to which their MAGA allies now point as evidence that the Deep State is hiding something.
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What are we to say to the likes of Alex Jones (InfoWars), Chaya Raichik (Libs of TikTok), Tom Fitton (Judicial Watch) and other MAGA influencers who worked so hard to get Trump elected, in part because he was going to destroy the same Deep State they now accuse his administration of running?
Cry harder?
Here’s the truth, regardless of whether Trump voters and MAGA influencers ever accept it:
Mexico will never pay for the wall. If a wall is ever built along the length of the southern border, it will be paid with your tax dollars. In fact, there is money allocated in the Big Beautiful Bill for its construction — but that money is greenbacks, not pesos.
Tariffs will never be paid by other countries. They will be paid by you.
You will still pay taxes on your social security benefits.
It’s not just “illegals” and lazy freeloaders who will lose their healthcare. It may be you.
Your cities and towns are at greater risk than ever of mass casualties from natural disasters because of Trump’s policies and DOGE’s cuts.
Trump did not end the Ukraine War on Day One. He didn’t even end the Israel-Iran War, which is just temporarily on hiatus.
Trump will not bring peace to the Middle East, no matter how much his flatterers in Jerusalem, Riyadh and Doha want him to believe he will.
Trump, Vance, Bondi, Patel and many others in the administration lied to you about releasing the names of the men who raped young girls alongside Jeffrey Epstein. You might ask why.
All of this will become more and more apparent as Trump’s brutal policies kick into effect and as the pain spreads — not just to “the libs” in LA and New York whom MAGA wants to own but to their own neighborhoods. From the Rio Grande Valley in Texas to Trump’s new home state of Florida, the wakeup call will continue to ring in the ears of Republican voters. Whether the sense of disillusionment will be enough for them to choose their own welfare over their desire to own the libs remains to be seen. Hope springs eternal.
Unlike MAGA, which has a propensity to tell liberals to “cry harder” whenever we complain about Trump, none of us should gloat about this comeuppance for the newly disenchanted. We should empathize with them — and then provide real, concrete policy solutions to address their pain.
Most of the people who made the difference in last November’s election are not Jones, Raichik or Fitton, whose business model depends on stirring up hate and controversy. They are people who were at their whit’s end and decided to take a chance on Trump. They bought his line of bullshit about making American great again, whatever greatness meant for them personally.
Now, some of them are realizing, slowly but surely, that they were had by one of the greatest conmen in history. The FAFO Republican Caucus grows larger by the day. Welcome its members in.
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Why Trump Wants to Lose the Midterms
There is a longer game at play.
by Ben Cohen
Despite Trump’s incessant claims that he is the most popular president of all time, public polling paints a very bleak picture of his actual approval ratings. Just take a look at this chart from The Economist:
Trump began his second term in office far below where Joe Biden was at a similar time in 2020, and his numbers have gone down ever since. In fact, Trump has never gone above a +5 approval rating, and has been under water since early March.
There is little chance Trump’s numbers are going to go up. As we saw in his first term, the chaos, ineptitude and outright criminality cratered his popularity and job approval rating. Democrats flipped Congress in 2018, racked up Gubernatorial races across the country, and flipped several state legislatures. Trump was widely considered to be the worst president in U.S. history by the time he ran for re-election in 2020, and an almost sure bet for federal prison. He lost spectacularly to Joe Biden, and was for a time, politically (and socially) toxic. Only unlimited tech billionaire cash and the largest psyop in modern history was able to turn Trump’s fortunes around.
Trump has not changed for the better. He is no more competent than he was last time, and his intractable personality flaws guarantee an implosion at some point. His “Big Beautiful Bill” is going to rip health care away from millions of his voters, destroy jobs in MAGA territory, and transfer wealth upwards to his billionaire friends. So my bet is that the GOP is headed for disaster in the 2026 midterms.
But that is almost certainly what Trump wants. And here’s why…
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Just yesterday while TX was in the midst of a tragedy Trump was droning on about his redecoration of the cabinet meeting room. Kristy Noem was preoccupied on social media with what picture of her on horseback her fans thought should hang in her home state’s state house. These are the people in charge and yes people made an amnesia laden choice of voting for a moron. Now they and all of us are living with the consequences of their foolish choice. My attitude is we have to stop the blame of what democrats did or didn’t do and try to overcome the resentment towards those who made a choice they are now beginning to regret. We’re in a very grave situation on the cusp of becoming a full on autocratic police state. I know people who are sitting around waiting for lawmakers to save us while they go to the gym and take vacations as though it’s any other time. We probably all do. We’re very early into this national nightmare and sadly Americans are slow to wake up from complacent slumber. Those of us who are wide awake are going to have to do the heavy lifting for now while we also work on waking others up. Unfortunately more personal pain is probably going to be required.
Ah, what an incredibly 'progressive' take - rural America deserves your wrath, because "they vote wrong". Example after example of how the last thing progressives care about is working class and poor people. Instead, 'progressive' politics is identity politics, racism, victim blaming, antisemitism and other antisocial positions.
"Cry harder?" - when you keep losing elections because of your loathsome hating on America and Americans take a beat to consider how your attitude drove the majority to vote for Trump and the GOP. I doubt you will.