Summary
Conservative economist Oren Cass warns that Donald Trump could jeopardize his presidency by focusing on donor and activist agendas rather than the priorities of swing voters who secured his victory.
Writing in The New York Times, Cass argues that new presidents often mistake donor interests, such as tax cuts and deregulation, for the will of the electorate, leading to ineffective governance and loss of public trust.
Cass urges Trump to prioritize issues that resonate with the broader American public to avoid a fate that has derailed past presidencies.
How are we already letting this fucking narrative take root?
TRUMP DID NOT WIN SOME EVER-IMPORTANT SWING VOTER. He kept his base while democratic support shriveled. This is the exact recipe to get the same fucking thing happening in four years where democrats refuse to offer anything but some “centrist” bootlicking bullshit.
Don’t let them spread this fucking bullshit
If the last few years have taught me anything, it’s that what you do is not important as much as the narrative that you are able to spin.
As long as TV news networks, podcasters, news outlets, and Musk’s Twitter exist, people who are too ignorant to understand they are being lied to, or too lazy to parse credible information, will stay in the dark and vote red in the next election as well.
Democracy doesn’t work when the electorate is too illiterate to cast their vote justly. They’ll just vote for the next clown who promises them the moon.
I don’t have a solution.
Exactly.
I’ve had Republican friends send me articles, I read them, start the debate, only to realize they literally only read the headline.
I’ve found myself reading terribly written articles just so that I’m sure I don’t misunderstand anything being portrayed in the article. Sometimes spending an extra 20-30 additional minutes for fact checking.
Trying to have a subsequent conversation with them is like pissing in the wind.
We need never be afraid of the vote of informed Americans. It is only the ignorant voter we have to fear, ignorant politically, no matter how fine his house or how expensive his schooling. Such people have never experienced democracy; they have merely enjoyed its benefits. It is hard to explain what democracy is; it is necessary to participate in it to understand it.
—Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government
Unfortunately, there seems to be an awful lot of ignorance out there today.
Well, if goods become even more expensive, and wages fail to improve or get worse, then people tend to notice that more than the spin.
Sure you have very loud passionate politically active people who are game for “their team” to win no matter what and will listen to anything to rationalize their position and reject anything that disagrees, but a lot of folks are just looking at their personal circumstance and deciding if they think it’s bad or not and voting either to continue or change, without a whole lot of consideration of what either side says will work or why things are the way they are, they just know “keep it going” or “change it out”.
Did this fucker say Trump shouldn’t focus on tax cuts & de-regulation?
Do people have fucking amnesia these days? That’s literally Trump’s strongest economic platform from his first term. The guy even said he wants to lower the corporate tax rate even lower to 15%!
How is this an economist?
That summary was a bit misleading compared to the linked summary.
“What Americans really want, sir, is fewer protections on the job and a weaker safety net,”
The conservative economist is not saying that he shouldn’t have tax cuts and maybe some deregulation, is that he shouldn’t screw the pooch for swing voters in the process.
As he looks toward his new term, Mr. Trump could claim a mandate to lead however he wishes,
As an example, I heard a MAGA politician on the radio the other day. Admittedly it didn’t sound like anyone “hooked in” to Trump’s circle, but I suspect his rhetoric was consistent. The interviewer put to him a question like “given how divisive things are, what do you hope Trump will do to be a good leader for all the nation, including those that didn’t vote for him?”. The response was that Trump won, therefore, there’s no mandate to do anything for the losing voters, and the mandate was simple to do whatever Trump wants to do.
Further, Don Jr. said a key facet for anyone in Trump’s administration is that there must be no one who would dare think themselves smarter than the president. Only yes men allowed.
Ultimately, people need to feel like they have viable livelihoods with a return to relatively affordable goods, and they need to see that within 2 years or else the house and senate will be hard blue come 2027. Of course, there’s always the potential for dismantling the democracy, but the economist would probably think that would be disastrous for stability, and a grave threat to everything including economic concerns. So best outcome for him, as a conservative economist, is somehow making the electorate willingly want to keep the republicans, and he knows that Trump listening only to himself and hard core sycophants is not a recipe to make the electorate happy.
It is not a formula for a successful presidency
That all depends on how you define successful, doesn’t it. I rather think Trump has a different definition than most of us.
It seems he is out for revenge on anyone who slighted him in the last 8 years.
Don’t forget the money. Any action that will personally enrich him will be taken. From Trumps point of view the electorate are now irrelevant.
Conservative economist Oren Cass warns that Donald Trump could jeopardize his presidency by focusing on donor and activist agendas rather than the priorities of swing voters who secured his victory.
Jeopardize how? He’s already been elected, and it’s not like a Republican congress is going to impeach the head of their own party for… checks notes… focusing on donor priorities, lol
The whole reason the Republican party exists in it’s current form is to rubber stamp the agenda of the ownership class. Maybe he’ll get his ass kicked in the midterms in two years, but so fucking what? He’s got more than enough time to trash everything before then, especially since the RS are going in with an actual plan this time.
No, the only ‘jeopardy’ for Trump in his second term is that the hamberders might finally catch up with him and his black, unfeeling heart explodes.
Well, a scenario is that he cuts taxes and applies massive tariffs, resulting in a huge regressive expense paid the most by the poorest. That he lets companies be more sociopathic toward their workers and says “screw you” to anyone that needs welfare.
The end result if 2 years sees even more expensive bills and less safe employment and less recourse when the employment screws them over would be an electorate that demands him out and takes it out on the house and senate races. Perhaps to the point where they could remove him from office, and maybe even Vance too, and have a Democratic president finish out his term.
So his point is simply that while he pursues republican economic policy, which I suspect the author agrees with broadly, to take it easy and make sure he doesn’t piss everyone off in the process.
