Trump Voters Will Get An Ice Water Bath Very Soon Buying Groceries But the Information Fight Is the Dogfight

Let’s start with the bottom line on all of this: People always think that they’re the good guy and the other guy is the bad guy and Donald Trump has vowed to stick it to the bad guy. Wait until people realize that it’s getting stuck to them. And that is in the very near future. Paul Krugman said in a recent interview, “A lot of Latinos voted for Trump believing that he’s going to reduce the cost of living. They’ll presumably be really shocked when it turns out that he does the opposite, and also when people they know get rounded up, which is going to be another thing that they haven’t really taken on board. For Trump, clearly it is not that he really is concerned that immigrants are taking American jobs. For him, it’s all really blood and soil. And he doesn’t really care whether they’re legal or not. It’s just they’re scary Brown people basically.” That’s about the size of it.

The truth of the matter is that the immigrants aren’t taking any jobs that are in high demand. The immigrants complement, rather than conflict with, the rest of the work force. The immigrants or undocumented migrants that Trump has targeted, take jobs picking the fruit, cleaning the hotel rooms, many other things that are actually good for the economy and which are not jobs which are eagerly sought after. That’s because they’re not well paid. This is a partial transcript of an interview of Paul Krugman by Greg Sargent that I believe to be prescient.

And you’re going to see the corruption of information to carry out a large-scale demonization campaign against immigrants as well. We already saw Trump campaign pretty relentlessly on this invented idea of migrant crime, which is absolutely a despicable notion. If we were to generalize about another group that way, no one would tolerate it. But because it’s immigrants and because it’s Trump, everyone just shrugs. We’re going to see government information being corrupted in order to create a bigger impression of migrant crime. I’m talking about people at the agencies flagging particular crimes, and then the White House press operation blaring it out. Something like that.

Krugman: Look, I’m in New York right now. I’ve been out for the afternoon running various errands. In MAGA mythology, I should be afraid to leave my apartment. It should be an urban hellscape where you get murdered if you try and buy a loaf of bread. And the reality is New York is, in fact, one of the safest places in America. But what will happen eventually is that—I don’t quite know how it will work because crime data are initially supplied by local police agencies, but the FBI summaries of that will probably be corrupted quite soon.

Just in general, if what we are actually going to be seeing is inflation, quite a lot of inflation, we’re going to be seeing enormous pressure to report that, first of all, things were worse. The retrospective description of what America was like in 2024 is going to bear no resemblance to the actually pretty good state of the nation right now. Also, we’re going to be seeing a lot of pressure to not admit things that are going wrong.

This is going to be just like the scene in 1984 where the real headline that Winston Smith is lookin at is “chocolate rations to be cut to 30 grams.” He changes that to a much more upbeat, “chocolate rations to be increased to 25 grams.” So the consumer is totally losing but is overwhelmed with gratititude for the good news of the increase — which is pure fiction. This is Orwellianism, fascism, and Trumpism. And we are there.

I think about Stephen Miller; he doesn’t just want to go after low-wage migrants from Latin America. He wants to go after high-skilled executives in Silicon Valley because this idea is that there are these jobs and they should be going to Americans. I would be surprised if they actually back off on this. They’ll go quite a ways, and business community will scream. A lot of people in business believe that this is all going to be a Potemkin deportation, that it’s not really going to happen, but they’re probably wrong about that.

Sargent: I just wonder how far they can actually get even if they fully intend to do it. It seems to me like you really need an enormous amount of money to substantially ramp up the removals. I don’t know whether he’ll get it from a Republican Congress. It seems to me there’ll be some legal problems with trying to repurpose military funding. Look, the last thing I want to do is be at all complacent. I think we’re looking at a terrible situation. I just wonder if they are going to run into some trouble.

Krugman: What is this thing you call legal obstacles? It’s not clear to me that rule of law is going to apply at all in the years ahead. It’s very likely that they’ll just find ways to do it. Of course, the costs are … If you try to do these draconian policies in any remotely humane way, they’re very expensive. Well, the obvious next sentence follows, right? If you’re really prepared to be quite brutal, and basically build tent cities in the desert, maybe not so expensive.

And don’t forget, in DeSantis Florida, he has already done a bit of a crackdown and it’s been disastrous for agriculture. Krugman comments, “You might’ve thought that the business backlash would cause him to back off, but he hasn’t. So I would take all of this stuff very, very seriously.”

I think we’re in for one hell of a ride. And I also think that we’re in for a lot of disillusioned voters when all this is said and done. Sometimes people can only learn in the school of hard knocks. We’re about to see the truth of that adage demonstrated. We tried to tell them. They decided to live in Pollyannaville and believe what they wanted. Only life can teach these dummies the lessons that the rest of us tried to.

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