MAGA Cultists Are Delighted To Turn Out For Their Cult Leader-- Others... Not So Much

Yesterday, I noticed that the Financial Times had dug up the same photo that we had of robber baron/bankster, putative Democrat Jamie Dimon with Trump that I had. Ed Luce’s story, though, wasn’t about robber barons per se. It’s about Wall Street selling out America, once again, this time in a deal with Señor T. “The Financial Times,” wrote Luce, “had only nice things to say about Benito Mussolini in a June 1933 supplement entitled ‘The Renaissance of Italy: Fascism’s gift of order and progress’. Trains were running on time, investment was humming and friction between capital and labor was a thing of the past. Wrote the FT’s special correspondent: ‘The country has been remodeled, rather than remade, under the vigorous architecture of its illustrious prime minister, Signor Mussolini.’”

No one on Wall Street cared about the “pacification of Libya,” during which almost half of the non-Italian population was killed. If Wall Street had any interest at all, it was in infrastructure improvements and public works Italy was boasting about, in particular expanded railway and road networks and the establishment of new industries and dozens of new agricultural villages. It wouldn’t be another 2 years before Italy invaded Ethiopia and longer than that before Albania, Greece… France.

“The 1930s,” continued Luce, “ought to have buried the idea that business is a bulwark against autocracy. Today’s America offers a reminder. After Donald Trump’s attempted putsch on January 6 2021, U.S. business leaders lined up to condemn the storming of Capitol Hill. Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan, issued a statement calling for a peaceful transition of power. ‘This is not who we are as a people or a country,’ he said. In Davos last week, Dimon had changed his tune. Trump did many good things when he was in office, Dimon said. Business was ready for either Joe Biden or Trump: ‘My company will survive and thrive in both.’”

Yesterday, a team of NY Times reporters drilled down [an inch] into why some business executives are excited about Trump. “Many forecast a drastic pullback in regulation,” they wrote, “particularly in antitrust, and a swing in support from clean energy businesses back to fossil-fuel producers. Holger Schmieding, an economist at Berenberg, added in a note today that a second Trump administration may also include increased government spending and ‘a lack of fiscal discipline that would likely be at least as pronounced as currently under’ President Biden. That said, he concluded, he would not expect forecasts for U.S. growth to change much under either a Trump or Biden second term."

In the ’30s, no doubt, Dimon would have been investing in the booming Italian economy, if not in the tanks Mussolini was building to slaughter Ethiopians. Yesterday, Charlie Sykes noted the obvious: there was never any chance Señor Trumpanzee wasn’t going to win the GOP primary, despite a media desperate to create a click-baiting narrative to the contrary. He sees the problem pretty clearly though: “the Republican Party has lost its mind... [Most] Republican voters simply love Trump, and therefore they’re willing to say that he was the real winner in 2020 or that he’d be fit to serve again despite a criminal conviction. But that’s just another way of conceding their pathology. Sensible people don’t let sympathy for a politician drive them to such recklessness. The derangement doesn’t stop at election denial. It extends to violence… [E]ven though the shouting will continue a bit longer, today marks decisively the pivot from the primaries to the general election… [T]he next few weeks will be Trump’s high-water mark, as he triumphantly struts amid the ruins of his GOP opposition and reasserts his imperium. But watch how quickly the vibe now shifts.”

For months, the punditocracy has focused on the obdurate post-indictment loyalty of the MAGA base, the GOP’s enthusiastic embrace of the culture wars, and the party’s race to the right. This has been bookended with (often quite justified) pearl-clutching over Joe Biden’s weakness and the incumbent’s many vulnerabilities.

Now that the primary is over, however, attention will be paid to something else: Donald Trump, who has throttled opposition in the minority party he heads, has a much more serious problem with the voters who will decide the actual election in November.

…There’s a whole swath of the Republican electorate and a good chunk of independents who appear firmly committed to not voting for him in November if he becomes the nominee… [In Iowa] fully 43 percent of Nikki Haley supporters said they would back President Joe Biden over Trump. And it’s a dynamic that has been on vivid display as the campaign shifted this week to New Hampshire.

There may not be enough of these Never Trump voters to determine the outcome of a Republican primary; but there may be more than enough to sway the outcome of the general election, especially in the key swing states.

Fellow-fascist, the recently defeated Ron DeSantis was already on TV this week— and he was warning Republicans that Trump won’t beat Biden (despite his endorsement of his former adversary and tormentor). He sw the same thing Sykes did. Speaking to neo-fascist radio host Steve Deace DeSantis “bemoaned news stories published this week that said Trump was bleeding out centrist voters and traditional Republicans who previously voted for him. DeSantis, who argued throughout his candidacy that Trump had an electability problem, accused the ‘corporate media’ of having ‘flipped almost on a dime’ this week about the former president's chances, given that earlier reporting projected that Trump would best President Joe Biden in swing states in November. ‘When I have people come up to me who voted for Reagan in '76 and have been conservative their whole life say that they don't want to vote for Trump again, that's a problem,’ DeSantis said. ‘So he's got to figure out a way to solve that. I think there's an enthusiasm problem overall, and then I also just think there are some voters that have checked out at this point that you got to find a way to get them back.’”

Trump won 12 delegates Tuesday. Nikki Haley won 9. Trump is blowing his stack and, wrote Dan Pfeiffer, the swing voters Trump needs in November, rejected him. “Despite Trump’s victory, the results show that Trump has real political vulnerabilities masked by his dominance of the Republican Primary.”

46% of the voters on Tuesday were independents, in a state over-represented among the college-educated and the suburban-dwelling. “These are the voters who have turned against Trump since 2016— and the ones Biden needs to hold onto in order to return to the White House. Therefore, last night’s results give us our best— and perhaps last— real look at how Trump is doing with the voters who will decide the election… [A]mong the swing voters who will decide the general election, Trump showed potentially debilitating weakness. According to the exit polls, Trump lost Independent/undeclared voters by 30 points. What makes this number especially troubling for Trump is that the universe of Independents who voted last night is a Republican-leaning slice of New Hampshire Independents.”

Trump also lost moderate voters by a stunning 53 point and voters with a college degree by 15 points. Additionally, 40% of New Hampshire Republican Primary voters said they would be dissatisfied with a Trump nomination.

Like in Iowa, the exit polls asked voters if they viewed Trump as fit for the presidency if he is convicted of a crime. In Republican Iowa, a third of voters said Trump was unfit, a number that should concern every Republican. In New Hampshire, 44% said Trump would be unfit for the presidency if convicted. In swing states, Trump can’t lose 4% of his voters, let alone 44%.

It’s always worth reiterating that Trump lost in 2020. To win in 2024, he must improve with the moderate, college-educated suburban swing voters. Last night’s results show he may be doing even worse with swing voters than last time.