When ABC News' Terry Moran asked Pres. Donald Trump to respond to voters who may be concerned that rising costs are not what they "signed up for," Trump responded: "Well, they did sign up for this actually."
Trump not only promised to bring down prices, but promised to do so "on day one." In fact, in the final days of the campaign, that was likely the promise he repeated the most.
So not only is he somewhere between delusional and dishonest (which I already knew), but every single person who responded to insist rising prices is indeed what they signed up for is also somewhere between delusional and dishonest.
Why? What compels them? What do they expect to gain?
I'm beginning to suspect that there's some environmental factor or something in the US that makes people delusional, angry and stupid, because this has gone way beyond anything that can be explained by political partisanship alone.
It's racism and sexism. Trump stands for hurting non-whites. As long as non-whites are being hurt, the racist people will endure anything.
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." - Lyndon B. Johnson
Just like with Hillary Clinton, many people will never be ok with a woman president.
Hillary's gender is a weak excuse that the DNC and the establishment Dems trot out to try to duck the blame for sabotaging a sincere progressive in order to run a neolib weasel who gives paid speeches to international bankers and idolizes Kissinger.
This works for Republicans of color also, they see themselves as a step up from the "others". They may not be white, but they aren't just Black/Hispanic/[under-represented group]. That one guy in SC stated online "I'm a black Nazi!"
More generally, it's in-group vs out-group. For many people, the in-group is "white men" and the out-group is "everyone else". But this behavior is pretty baked into humans. We'll form stupid groups over anything. I was reading a book about how people change their minds, and it talked about some experiments they did. Like, they gave kids at a summer camp different colored shirts, and sure enough they formed separate groups. They had to stop the experiment when one group tried to burn down the cabin of the other group.
If you know a way to get from here to there, please share. At my old job I tried to radicalize my coworkers so they'd understand our interests align with each other more than ownership. I had some success.
I think a lot of people are arguing this was the natural outcome. That if you looked at what he was going to do, the only plausible outcome was higher prices.
While he promised lower prices, it was obvious he had no plans to actually achieve it. So if you used any bit of intelligence, it was obvious a vote for him would lead to this outcome, meaning you voted for this.
His supporters aren't going to see this quote or these clips. They're on Truth Social, MAGA podcasts, Meta bubbles, and confirmation-bias-boosting chatbots.
At the least, some considerable part of the problem is that angry, stupid bigots who used to be mostly limited to cringey drunken solo rants are now able to network with each other and cheer on each other's anger and stupidity and bigotry.