These MAGA voters are willing to ‘suffer’ — so long as others are hurting more: analysis
Some swing voters who went from voting for Joe Biden in 2020 to voting for Donald Trump in 2024 are now regretting their vote for Trump, as they fear his policies — such as steep tariffs and layoffs at the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) — will hurt them.
But hardcore MAGA voters are expressing no regrets. And CNN’s Harry Enten believes that “very few” of the 2024 MAGA voters now “regret” voting for Trump.
In a biting opinion column published on April 18, The Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi argues that many MAGA voters are suffering because of Trump’s policies — but are willing to suffer if others are suffering even more.
“The stock market is plunging, prices are rising, federal workers are getting laid off, students are being snatched off the street by immigration agents,” Mahdawi observes. “The U.S. is many things at the moment, but stable is not one of them. So, amid all this turmoil, how are all the Donald Trump voters feeling? Has buyer’s remorse set in?…. Not according to the polls. Rather, the U.S. appears to be a nation of Édith Piafs: they regret rien.”
Mahdawi is referring to “No, Je Ne Regrette Rien” (“No, I Regret Nothing”), a song famously recorded by the iconic French singer Édith Piaf in 1960.
The Guardian columnist stresses that staunch MAGA voters are still loyal to Trump even though his policies are “hurting” them, and they don’t regret their 2024 vote at all.
“Everyone is feeling some pain right now,” Mahdawi writes. “In a hyper-polarized country, however, what seems to really matter to many voters isn’t how much pain they’re feeling themselves, but whether the other side is suffering more…. Right now, however, Trump is hurting the sort of people many of his voters seem to be interested in seeing get hurt. He’s an avenging angel, wreaking vengeance on the elite institutions, scapegoats and bogeymen that the Republican Party has spent years blaming for the state of the U.S. He’s cut funding to all the Ivy League universities he’s called ‘woke’ and declared out of touch with American values.”
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Mahdawi continues, “He’s gone after transgender people. And he has rounded up immigrants and protesters, just as he promised he would do. Trump isn’t just doing every vindictive thing he told his supporters he was going to do: he’s trolling his detractors via nasty memes. He’s rubbing salt in their wounds.”
Mahdawi argues that although “Trump may be hurting all the people he said he’d be hurting, there’s plenty of pain to go around.” And that “pain,” she warns, could get worse in the months ahead.
“With his tariff plan,” the Guardian columnist says, “he is just getting started.… When the price of basic goods keep rising, there’s only so long you can keep feeding people obvious lies. Perhaps the Trumpers won’t get quite so much of a dopamine rush from ‘owning the libs’ when they can’t afford to own anything else.”
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Arwa Mahdawi’s full column for The Guardian is available at this link.