The MAGA Riddle I'll Never Unlock

I have come to terms with the fact that, ten years into MAGA, I will never entirely understand the appeal of Donald Trump.  I think, even if you subtract his views (and I do think a lot of people have to do that when thinking about him, mostly because his views are so ephemeral that you couldn't consistently support him without ignoring how often he changes his mind), I still don't get why people find him appealing.  There are Republicans I can understand why people are "into them."  Nikki Haley has a girl boss persona that I could see people liking, same with John McCain being a war hero, or Mitt Romney being a devout family man.  Chris Christie is kind of clever, as is Kellyanne Conway, Mitch McConnell is smart, and there are figures on the right like Megyn Kelly & Ben Shapiro who are objectively attractive.  But Trump...Trump is none of those things.  He's not smart, he's not admirable, he's not attractive, and he barely qualifies as funny.  At best he is random, which maybe might be the appeal-his nonsense drives Democrats (like me) crazy, and the Republicans delight in that.

Which gets me to the point of this article that I've been kicking around in my head for a few weeks.  I have long given up on trying to understand Trump's appeal, but I have always kind of been curious about the MAGA concept's appeal, specifically when it comes bread-and-butter issues like the economy and healthcare.  Over the past few months, Trump's impact on the economy has been terrifying.  The day Trump took office, the Dow Jones was at 44,156.  In the months since then, it has dropped continuously, at one point dipping 7000 below that number, and is now 2000 points lower four months after the inauguration.  Our relationships with other countries, specifically longtime allies like Canada, are in the garbage, and the dollar hasn't had such a precarious position as the most important currency in the world since before World War II.  These are problems, it has to be noted, that were entirely caused by Trump-your 401k would be fine right now if Trump had literally just done nothing in the first few months of the year.

And yet if you watch Congress or the conservative press, none of this is something they are sharing with their base.  Issues like transgender sports, military service, and bathroom bills are regularly trumpeted by members of Congress, the Trump administration, and the GOP media operation.  The only major bill to be enacted by this Congress that wasn't the budget resolution was the Laken Riley Act, a bill that would allow easy deportation of immigrants charged with crimes like drunk driving or theft.  Regardless of your opinions of this bill (I wouldn't have supported it because it doesn't allow for due process), it's also a bill that very few MAGA voters will ever have to encounter.  Crime rates of immigrants are pretty much universally regarded by academics as being lower than that of American citizens, and there are 9x the amount of citizens in this country as immigrants.  Even if you support the Laken Riley Act, it almost certainly doesn't impact you.

It was one thing when MAGA voters cared about these issues but the economy was strong (like in the first couple of years of Trump 1.0 or most of the Biden administration), but the economy is weak now, and it is impacting you in a way it's impossible to deny if you base your life in reality.  You just need to look at your 401k or your bank account or your increasingly high bills to know that you are losing money, and struggling.  Medicaid, which provides healthcare to millions of Americans (including a lot of MAGA voters) is on the chopping block right now and could face serious cuts if the House Republicans have their way.  The thing that I will never understand about MAGA voters is that it appears they don't care about this, or don't care about it as much as punishing immigrants and transgender people first.

I am very proud that I support a party that supports transgender rights and that support Dreamers.  I would struggle to be a member of a party that doesn't support these issues.  But I will be transparent-I don't think about transgender and immigrant rights on a daily basis in the same way that MAGA voters clearly do given how much it consumes their social media & news.  Like a lot of Americans (though apparently not as many as I once thought), I think about things that impact my life first.  I am employed at a frequently-stressful white collar job, and run a single-income, single-family home on which I owe a mortgage (and am solely responsible for cleaning, maintaining, & repairing).  I have some health problems, ones that require me to take significant amount of time for exercise and diet.  I don't have student loans, but I do have a car payment I have to make every month, and am very active in a number of hobbies that take up a considerable amount of time.  I don't have children or a pet, but I will own that between my responsibilities, both the ones I can't escape and the ones I have put upon myself, I go to bed most nights tired and having lived a pretty full day where I didn't get everything done I likely needed to achieve.

I don't have time to worry about problems that don't impact my life.  It would be one thing if Republicans were just trying to ignore immigrants and transgender people...it's quite another when they're actively spending huge swaths of a finite amount of political capital to make their lives worse...while they are not addressing anything that might tangibly benefit themselves.  I say this a lot about MAGA, but "don't you have real problems?"  I support the DREAM Act and the Equality Act-I want the next Democratic president to pass them.  I would also be frustrated if they were the only things a Democratic trifecta had gotten done in the first 100 days of a new administration, as I would want at least some tangible impact to my immediate life if they were to take power (admittedly, the Equality Act would impact me specifically as a gay man, but you get what I'm saying).

It's the lack of self-awareness that I can't comprehend with MAGA voters.  They know they have less money now than when Trump went in office-all they have to do is look at their retirement accounts to find out.  They know that tariffs will cause prices to increase, and that it's unlikely that wages will rise at the same speed.  They know that a recession will put their jobs (and their family's jobs) at risk.  Is the trust so implicit in Trump's abilities that they can't comprehend that he doesn't actually intend to make their lives easier...or is it a case where they have never really encountered real-world problems (and formulated solutions to them) to the point where all they care about is demonizing people they don't know?  This aspect of MAGA will always be alien to me, because, like, I have real problems-I don't need to make some up while I'm trying to solve the ones I face every day.