No, Assholes, You Are Going Back

 

     First and foremost, I'd like to reiterate that I don't believe Trump legitimately won this election any more than I believe he won in 2016. There's a serious gap between the enthusiasm generated by the Harris campaign and the early voting totals and the actual election results. I don't truck in conspiracy theories but I will ask questions when the facts don't jibe with the official narrative force-fed to us by the MSM and the government.

     

 

     For instance, why should we believe that Kari Lake got more votes in her Senate campaign than Kamala Harris in her presidential race, with 83% reporting? And how could it be possible that Harris underperformed in all 3244 US counties and county equivalents compared to Biden's numbers in 2020?

     She also got fewer votes than Jon Tester in Montana.

 

     I could go on and on but I think you get the picture. 

     Now, we're less than a week since the election and right wing voters are already showing buyer's remorse. Take a look at this alarming graph that was tabulated by Google the night of the election. 

 

 

     Just hours after voting, people were asking the search engine how they could change their vote. And not only is that telling, look at the top five states where that question was asked: Oklahoma, Utah, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, all states that Trump "won".

     Now, the fact alone that these morons were asking a search engine how they could change their vote, which is of course impossible, shows you the faulty grasp, let's charitably put it, that they had on the issues. So, what was the cause for alarm?

     Well, in a classic case of being a day late and a dollar short, many of these voters who voted to deny women reproductive freedom, the loss of transgender rights and protections, immigration, or whatever their single issue was realized hours after casting their vote for the fascist that his proposed tariffs would hit them in the wallet.

     Several people fanned out on election day and asked them if they understood tariffs as well as they thought they had and many of them were gobsmacked to find out they didn't. Of course, the way tariffs work, when you raise them, the countries affected simply pass those added tariffs onto the countries buying their goods. This means that American companies and consumers would pay those additional tariffs.

     So it only goes to show that it's only natural that such ignorant voters would in turn vote for an idiot who also refuses to learn how tariffs work.

     This has already resulted in a ripple effect. In anticipation of another ruinous round of tariffs from the incoming Trump administration, companies have already begun buying up goods before the tariffs take effect, which will result in higher storage costs. Nissan has also just announced 9,000 layoffs at their plant in Tennessee, another redneck state that went for Trump.

     And, yes, it was about the tariffs.

     Like Rick Wilson once famously titled a book, "Everything Trump Touches Dies."

     Now, willful ignorance is bad enough but we have years of precedent to guide us. For instance, this is what happened the last time Trump imposed these idiotic tariffs on China: Mid-Continent Nail in Poplar Bluff, Missouri was the largest nail manufacturer in America, employing up to 500 people. But by June 2018, they'd laid off 150 of those workers. Only a meeting with then-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross saved the company from shutting its doors forever when Ross granted them an exclusion from the tariffs.

     Some weren't so lucky. There were other companies that were killed outright by Trump's tariffs. And today, companies are already planning on moving out of China because they've been made moving targets by these tariffs that could, theoretically, crash the entire planet's economy. Nearly five years ago, Heather Long of the Washington Post wrote,

     “U.S. economic growth slowed, business investment froze, and companies didn’t hire as many people. Across the nation, a lot of farmers went bankrupt, and the manufacturing and freight transportation sectors have hit lows not seen since the last recession. Trump’s actions amounted to one of the largest tax increases in years.”

     Moody's Analytics had discovered, about a year before that, that the Trump tariffs would cost 300,000 jobs (A big reason why Trump's the only occupant of the White House in the modern era who'd actually lost jobs) by September 2019. At the same time as that, Bloomberg Economics predicted that the tariffs would cost the American economy $316 billion. And a joint study by Columbia University and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York discovered US corporations lost $1.7 trillion of their stock valuation as a direct result of the Trump tariffs.

     So it's not as if we weren't warned or as if history couldn't act as our guide. And now, this psychopath who's about to sleaze back into the Oval Office on a tidal wave of electoral fraud is promising 2000% tariffs, which alone ought to prove how batshit insane Trump is. Trump's argument is that tariffs would bring trillions into the national economy but the plain fact is, it would go into the pockets of foreign corporations, essentially making it the biggest lateral income redistribution in world history.

     And I'm just talking about part of the economic forecast. I could devote a multi thousand word post on how Trump will affect women's health care and how ruinous this will be on public education. In fact, the psychopath put in charge of Oklahoma's schools is already preparing schools for the complete destruction of the Department of Education.

     So, sorry, assholes. Now's a little late for sticker shock and buyer's remorse.