“Cultural Heroin” is how J.D. Vance described Donald Trump before tech billionaire Peter Theil made him a rich man, paid for his Senate campaign, and helped him become Trump’s 2024 running mate. As Tom Nichols so insightfully describes it in The Atlantic, the deadly addictive drug, for which so far there is no antidote, is the rush of racism, hatred and revenge that Trump feeds his MAGA base:
For millions of the GOP faithful, Trump’s daily attempts to breach new frontiers of hideousness are not offensive but reassuring. They want Trump to be awful—precisely because the people they view as their political foes will be so appalled if he wins. . . But plenty more want Trump to be terrifying and stomach-turning so that reelecting him will be a fully realized act of social revenge. . . A toxic combination of social resentment, entitlement, and racial insecurity drives many Trump voters to believe not only that other Americans are looking down on them but that they are doing so while living an undeservedly good life. . . This unfocused rage is an addiction fed by Trump and conservative media, and the MAGA base wants it stoked continuously.
Lest Trump’s MAGA base tries to escape its self-destructive cultural heroin, Donald Trump and his allies, such as Elon Musk and other assorted multi-millionaires and billionaires, have the American working-class, most especially its young men, right where they want them, down and desperate, with desperate being the operative word. An increasingly technological information economy has robbed many of them of their hope for a better future and left them struggling to tread water (the recent spate of hurricanes and floods make for a painful analogy). Even if they know that Trump is a threat to democracy, they’ve fallen so far economically that many have no choice but to acquiesce; they’re down for the count and, if we’re not careful, the rest of us will go down with them.
While Trump’s Working-Class MAGA Base is Preoccupied with its Addiction, His Donor-Class Enablers Happily Plunder Away.
Trump’s supposedly “middle-class” tax cuts disproportionately benefited the wealthy and big business (i.e., the “Republican donor-class”), while adding an estimated $1.9 trillion to the federal deficit. Incredibly, millions of Trump’s MAGA supporters remember those years fondly, seemingly because inflation and interest rates were relatively low—despite the fact that economic inequality was going off the charts. These same people seem to suffer amnesia when it comes to Trump’s dereliction of duty in the face of the Covid pandemic, what it did to the supposedly wonderful “Trump economy,” and how his poor judgement and irresponsibility contributed to an economic catastrophe and well over a million deaths, something it took the country years (and the next administration) to recover from.
Now Trump is championing an across-the-board tariff on foreign imports, something the vast majority of economists think will be a disaster for the American economy—and possibly the world’s. I won’t recite all the grim predictions, but most economists agree it would lead to an economic downturn and very possibly a recession. Most importantly, it will amount to a huge tax increase for middle-class consumers in the form of higher prices for many of the goods they buy. (Trump doesn’t understand, or claims not to understand, that tariffs are paid by consumers, not foreign manufacturers or their governments.) The end result will be another enormous transfer of wealth from the already shrinking middle-class to subsidize the ever-burgeoning coffers of the Republican donor-class, as if they don’t already have a large enough share of the pie—as if our economic inequality isn’t bad enough.
If Trump is elected, he and his allies will not only have the American people down for the count, they’ll put on the screws, big time, until the fabric of our society is hopelessly beyond repair.
