Will The Buyers' Remorse Set In Before The 2026 Midterms? Schadenfreude Isn't Nearly Enough, Is It?

Ben Franklin, 237 Years Ago: “A Republic, If You Can Keep It.”

Sickened by Trump’s cabinet picks? His supporters aren’t. Trump supporters look at Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, Tom Homan, Chris Wight, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Stephen Miller and they are ecstatic, proud, excited… The NY Times interviewed Trump voters around the country and that’s what they found. “In Matt Gaetz, the nominee for attorney general, many Trump supporters look past the ethical investigation into allegations that he had a relationship with a 17-year-old girl and possibly violated federal sex trafficking laws, and see a provocateur who is willing to punish the Democrats who unjustly prosecuted the president-elect. ‘I think it’s so crazy, and I love it,’ Merrill McCollum, 60, of Bozeman, Mont., said of the nominees... Others thought the cabinet was not anti-establishment enough, pointing to Marco Rubio, the Florida senator who was tapped as secretary of state.”

Many Trump voters are simple-minded rubes. I wonder what they’ll think when unvaccinated children or grandchildren die. Or, among Latino voters, family, friends, neighbors, get rounded up, put in camps and deported. The Times spoke with Arab-American pathetic simps, Khaled Saffuri and Sam Alasri who voted for Trump:

One of those voters, Khaled Saffuri, a Palestinian American of Fairfax County, Va., said he worried that Rubio, the secretary of state nominee, is “pro-Israel to no limit.” But Saffuri believes if Trump keeps his campaign promises, he will step in to end the war.

“I didn’t think he was going to appoint angels,” said Saffuri, 65, who leads a foundation involved in foreign policy issues.

Sam Alasri, who heads a Yemeni political organization in Michigan, said he was also willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt.

He said that Trump’s nominations, including Representative Elise Stefanik for U.N. ambassador and former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas as ambassador to Israel, raised some concern.

But, “we trust him,” Alasri said of Trump. “I trust his word.”

Good; let’s hope they both commit suicide when they realize what they’ve done… or at least tear up their voter IDs and realize they should never be near a polling booth again. It's clear that beyond genocide in the Middle East, unleashed xenophobia that will start with mass deportation of immigrants, and war against science and expertise, once Trump is in the White House again, the form of governance these 70-some million morons have chosen will be a blend of oligarchy, plutocracy, kleptocracy, and kakistocracy— each overlapping and reinforcing the others. Why don’t we talk about those, in case anyone as IQ-deficient as Merrill McCollum, Khaled Saffuri or Sam Alasri stumbles onto DWT today.

We can start with oligarchy, rule by a small, powerful group. In the current case, this involves empowering a coterie of loyalists, family members and influential corporate allies. Expect decision-making to be centralized in a small elite and the sidelining of democratic institutions. Expect policies and judicial appointments to be completely skewed to benefit a select group, like fossil fuel executives, defense contractors, or media moguls aligned with MAGA ideology.

Moving right along, a plutocracy is rule by the wealthy, emphasizing the dominance of billionaires and corporate power. Tax policies favoring the rich, deregulation benefiting major industries and reduced public investment in social programs will be the primary results— along with appointments of executives from sectors like Wall Street and Big Oil. It’s never been easy to take the kleptocracy out of oligarchy and plutocracy. It’s a form of governance for personal enrichment, involving public corruption and embezzlement. Trump and his family and cronies can be counted on to use state power to benefit themselves and their inner circle at public expense.

The ribbon tying it all together is kakistocracy, rule by the worst, least qualified and most corrupt individuals, worthy of voters like Merrill McCollum, Khaled Saffuri and Sam Alasri. As we have already seen, leadership appointments are based on loyalty rather than competence, with policies driven by cronyism, nepotism, and populist rhetoric.

Trump's leadership style will give us policies favoring a wealthy MAGA elite, supported by Fox News billionaires, tech investors, and extractive industries, along with rampant cronyism and corruption, inept governance justified by appeals to grievance politics and anti-establishment rhetoric. There’s no doubt that this dynamic will further erode democratic norms, concentrating wealth and power while exacerbating inequality, corruption and the degradation of public trust in undermined, crumbling institutions. 

Musk, the world’s richest man, already seems to have taken at least some control of economic policy and at least one key Cabinet nomination.

Yesterday, Eric Lipton reported about the other layer of Trump supporters, not the simps like McCollum, Saffuri and Alasri: Trump Boosters Expect Big Returns On Their Investment: ‘The Shackles Are Off’. After contributing big money (at least $4.5 million) to Trump, predatory venture capital billionaire Marc Andreessen is eager to see his candidate work through a billionaire-friendly to-do list he’s drawn up for him, a list that will be extremely harmful to the almost all Trump voters. Andreessen told Lipton that “Every morning I wake up happier than the day before.” And his “excitement is a hint of just how broadly the victory by Trump has resonated with business executives who invested millions of dollars in his candidacy and now stand to profit from his policies. Theirs is a circle of deep-pocketed industry winners that extends far beyond Elon Musk. It is a more diverse group, at least in terms of business interests, than the one that surrounded Trump in his first administration, where executives from the oil, gas and coal industries were particularly dominant. Harold Hamm, the billionaire founder of the Oklahoma-based oil and gas giant Continental Resources, is still in a position to benefit, from regulatory rollbacks that he and an affiliated trade association are already pushing. But the list also includes:

• Joe Lonsdale, a defense technology executive who wants to help the Pentagon revamp the way it fights wars;

• Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twins who were known for their battle with Facebook, then became cryptocurrency investors and now want to shape the industry’s rules;

• Brian Evans, the chief executive of Geo Group, the private prison giant that could benefit i. Trump carries out his promise of large-scale deportations;

• John Paulson, the hedge fund billionaire who could cash out of his investment in the federal government’s housing finance companies, Freddie and Fannie, if they are privatized under Trump.

“‘It will be a billionaires’ ball,’ said Robert Reich, who served as secretary of labor during the Clinton administration and who has long been critical of the income disparity in the United States.”

Andreessen, whose venture capital firm has invested billions of dollars in start-ups that specialize in artificial intelligence tools, also criticized President Biden’s executive order late last year that requires companies to file reports to the government about risks that their A.I. systems could help countries or terrorists make weapons of mass destruction.

Trump, at a rally late last year, vowed to “cancel Biden’s artificial intelligence executive order.” That led Andreessen, after Trump’s victory this month to indicate that the Biden-era rules were effectively dead: “Stick a fork in it, it’s over.”

Andreessen, along with other billionaire backers of Trump’s re-election, including the Winklevosses and Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street financier [and Musk’s pick for Treasury Secretary], has separately pushed for the president-elect and newly elected members of Congress to use a light touch when it comes to regulating the cryptocurrency industry. They want regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission and elsewhere who will be more friendly to the sector. (Lutnick is also a chairman of Trump’s transition team.)

“The shackles are off,” Tyler Winklevoss wrote on Twitter last week.

The price of bitcoin has already surged to record levels in the aftermath of Trump’s election. Even before he was elected, Trump had promised to embrace a pro-crypto agenda, including removing Gary Gensler, who as head of the S.E.C. has repeatedly used the agency’s enforcement powers to crack down on crypto companies.

CNN amplified this Sunday morning as well: The crypto industry plowed tens of millions into the election. Now, it’s looking for a return on that investment. The crypto-criminal cartel didn’t just help secure the White House for Trump, Fairshake and two affiliated super PACs, Defend American Jobs and Protect Progress spent at least $131 million and delivered a Republican Senate by underwriting campaigns against Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester (and Katie Porter, who was beaten by crypto-friendly Democrat, Adam Schiff). Crypto also paid for campaigns for multiple members of the 119th Congress, both corrupt Republicans and corrupt Democrats. 274 pro-crypto candidates had been elected to the House and 20 to the Senate, including Democratic patsies like Ruben Gallego (AZ) and Elissa Slotkin (MI).

The cartel’s top goal has always been to remove the SEC from any kind of oversight and to hand it over to the easily bribed Commodities Futures Trading Commission, which deals with corn and soybeans, not complex financial instruments. And their wish is coming true. Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen: “What the election showed was that the industry is willing to make massive spends to bend politicians in favor of an insecure product that has demonstrated no meaningful economic purpose.”