Matisyahu's Blog

I’ve been noticing that towards the end of the first year of the second Trump administration that there is a concerted effort by people to rebrand/reinvent themselves or if they’re not as high profile they’re purging their timeline as if their past position regarding Trump will magically disappear. We saw this in the first term of the Trump administration by those who jumped onboard the ‘Trump train’ then went to ground after the 2020 loss to Biden then came back in 2024. The difference is that this time Trump is on his second term and people are planning for a post Trump politics – some have been hurt by the policies being advanced by Trump but some also are jockeying for position when it comes to who will be the new leader of MAGA and whether MAGA is a political movement that can survive beyond Trump or whether it is a cult of personality where there is only one person can lead the movement and without that person at the helm there is no movement to speak of.

The problem with MAGA is that it isn’t clearly defined other than it being an extension of Trump’s personality – whatever Trump says is MAGA is MAGA but even the rhetoric being used on the campaign isn’t translating into policy as we’re seeing MAGA supporters unhappy with the changes, the number of MAGA supporters dropping the label to become traditional Republican. The fact that the definition of MAGA can’t be nailed down is by design rather than by accident – when something is vague then the audience can interpret it the way they see fit, they can project their own hopes, dreams, wishes, whims and desires onto it because it is a blank canvas which is why the coalition is so broad resulting in any most anyone being able to join it.

The problem is that when you make the coalition overly broad it does allow you to create a large voting base but it is entirely useless as a means to bind the party together to work as a cohesive unit once into power. This is why you end up having a big tent filled with factions that are at odds with each other – in opposition the only thing that holds the party together is ‘we hate the Democratic Party’ then the moment they win power they descend into infighting because there is no agreed upon agenda where politicians have put aside their individual egos for the greater good. A good example of that failure to come up with a legislative agenda would be the 10+ years they’ve had to come up with a comprehensive replacement for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) only to have vague ‘concepts of a plan’ and random ideas thrown at the wall by random backbenchers but nothing in the way of a coherent plan.

Getting back to the people who voted for him, this is what happens when you commodify politics to nothing more than “what can I get out of this” instead of asking the bigger question of “what kind of society do I want”. It is clear that those who voted for Trump and the Republicans didn’t think about the larger question by virtue of their reaction when the Trump administration with the support of Republicans passed the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ which resulted in the very same voters finding that they lost ACA subsidies, reduced or losing medicaid coverage, their medicare coverage wasn’t as extensive, the food stamps they had been receiving for years they’re now having to go through a maze of means testing bureaucracy to apply for the assistance again. They thought that the ‘waste, fraud and abuse’ was referring to someone else – they were quite happy to see others go through the pain of missing out because in their mind they were receiving legitimate assistance where as all those people they didn’t know were welfare queens mooching off the system. What these people failed to realise is this, the billionaires view them as the waste, fraud and abuse,

This is what happens when you fail to understand policy, when you think about politics in terms of only yourself and fail to see politics as something that extends beyond your own narrow self interest. It is like watching someone raging against welfare right to the point that they lose their job and realise that they’re now dependent on that very form of assistance they they voted to get rid of – but it now too late because it is now gone. Once again, only caring about something when they’re directly impacted.

Another good example is what I’ve said in the past: “there is a high price to low taxes and regulation”, if there is a tax cut or a promise of a tax cut then the first thing that should be asked is “how is it going to be paid for” because you may find that you’re actually worse off. For example, you get an income tax cut but the cost of car registration goes up, the public transport receives less investment and lower reimbursement resulting in higher fares, the lower regulations result in a coal plan opening but the consequence long term is global warming being accelerated. There is price paid when promises are made for lower taxes and regulations – be careful for what you wish for.

Getting back to the issue of vibes based voters and not allowing them believe that their behaviour will be forgotten. We’re already started to see podcast bros trying to claim that they were never big Trump fans, that ‘the mainstream media blew it out of proportion’ and that they’re an independent. Really, an independent even though you spent literally hours glazing Donald Trump with soft ball questions and giggling like a school girl around their secret crush. Now such podcast bros are trying to reposition themselves as if they’re above the fray but here is the problem, the internet never forgets, there are many, many, many clips that have been uploaded to various fan accounts and other platforms so they may wish for the world to forget but the reality is that the internet never forgets. What it demonstrates is that these podcast bros never believed in anything, it was a giant grift from the outset.

Regarding Trump voters, these are the same people who vote based on vibes which is why when you look through their voting history it is completely incoherent, there is no through line that many any sense – they were all in on the whole ‘compassionate conservatism’ with George W Bush where anyone who questioned the wisdom of going into Iraq and Afghanistan were accuse of siding with the terrorists and wanting make the United States weak, who jumped onboard the ‘freedom fries’ train, the boycotting of the Dixie Chicks even though they never listened to a single one of their songs, and then wearing 10 gallon hats with cowboy boots.

These same people who claimed they cared about budget deficits were silent when under George W Bush they were running deficits of between $300-$500 billion per year but they suddenly jumped onboard the ‘tea party’ bandwagon the moment the first black president was voted into office. The same people who claimed they wanted small government but wanted a constitutional amendment to band same sex marriage. The same people who spent 8 years, while Obama was president, claiming that Obama was a secret Communist who wasn’t really an American (pushed by the Birtherism curtesy of Trump) but when Trump won in 2016 they gave Trump the credit for an economic recovery that continued in spite of the idiotic policies that Donald Trump implemented in that first term.

The reason I say that we should never allow ex-Trump supporters to forget what they did is because these are the same people who 10 years after Nixon left the Whitehouse claimed they never voted for him, the same people who claimed they never voted for Reagan etc. etc. always disavowing their voting choice because their vote was never based on a firm grasp of policies but rather vibes based politics regarding how the campaign made them feeling rather than a firm grasp on what the problems were and what was being propose as a solution. As long as a sizeable number keep voting based on vibes and never learn why voting based on vibes is a bad idea then expect history repeating itself in the future. To avoid this we also need civics lessons at school to ensure that the next generation engage in politics in a meaningful way rather than based on vibes – to make an informed voting decision based on a clear understanding of what is being proposed by what ever political party they choose to vote for.