CSotD: Aftermath is Hard

Christopher Downes offers some laughs as the Trump administration begins to take shape, but his exaggerations are well grounded.

Trump truly is advancing Christian nationalism despite having no real sense of what’s in the Bible.

He went to church as a kid, but the Trumps were congregants of Norman Vincent Peale, who wrote The Power of Positive Thinking, preached the gospel of prosperity and was criticized by other religious leaders who called his church a cult and accused him of misrepresenting the Christian message.

Apparently, Peale’s message sank in. That Wikipedia piece quotes one critic as doubting Peale’s citing of unnamed, unspecified people:

There is a continuing recurring episode in his books that goes like this: Peale meets Great Man; Peale humbly asks Great Man for his secret (his formula, technique); Great Man tells Peale his strikingly Peale-like secret (formula, technique)….

It sure sounds like a reverse of those unnamed, unspecified people who keep coming up to Trump with grateful tears in their eyes and calling him “Sir,” doesn’t it?

The idea of a Tesla Air Force One is funny, but the influence of Elon Musk is not. Certainly, other presidents have had rich supporters, but they’ve stayed largely in the background. Even Nixon didn’t give Bebe Rebozo and Robert Abplanalp cabinet positions, though their influence and their extravagant gifts were controversial.

As for eggs, I like the overall idea that Trump’s promises won’t hold up, and the picture gets a smile, but I’ve seen enough cartoons about egg prices.

My preference would be have cartoonists work on other topics, and then to revisit it after he’s been in office and had a chance to work his magic on grocery prices.

As Matt Pritchett suggests, we’ve got more price increases looming, and we’re hearing warnings from a variety of sources that if Trump goes through with his economic plans, prices will skyrocket and the deficit will soar.

Businesses are reportedly planning to go on buying sprees to get foreign components into their warehouses before the tariffs hit, and, as Matt suggests, Christmas shopping this year may be a lot more affordable than general shopping will be a few weeks later.

As noted here before, the positive side is that, assuming Trump follows through with his economic plans, people will feel the pinch in time to react in the 2026 midterms.

That won’t necessarily be the case with his other ventures.

Clay Jones, for example, expects that the Latinos who voted for Trump are going to be shocked and surprised to find out that his promise to deport immigrants is not limited to those arrested for other crimes and, in fact, may include the American-born children of undocumented migrants and could involve stripping naturalized immigrants of their citizenship.

Leopards may not eat their faces, but the Deporting Latinos Party is, indeed, intent on deporting Latinos.

Who knew?

I mean, besides Lalo Alcaraz (AMS) and those deported veterans.

Gary Huck poses the opening lines of “Tale of Two Cities” as a question about the election, but the duality Dickens set up referred to status: It was a very good time to be rich and a very bad time to be poor. You didn’t get to choose.

Probably worth pointing out that, while in the novel the hero sacrifices himself for a nobleman, the Reign of Terror was about the poor rising up and going way overboard in their quest for vengeance.

Or retribution or whatever.

Clay Bennett (CTFP) declares Trump’s inauguration as the end of democracy in America, and I’ve seen other cartoons similarly draw the curtains.

It seems awfully final, given that we haven’t seen how much of the autocratic policies are actually going to happen.

His first few proposed appointments are a mix of loyalists and hardcore activists, and the confirmation process may tell us more about the new Senate than about the nominees themselves.

It would be surprising if any of Trump’s choices were rejected, but it would be nice to see some signs of advising amid all the predictable consenting.

Still, even if he gets everything he’s said he wants, he didn’t win in a landslide, and those among his supporters who didn’t expect leopards to actually eat their faces will figure things out at some point.

The overpowering issue, however, is that Trump’s triumph was brought about not by debating political positions but by promoting social division.

If Trump and his cohorts were swept from power tomorrow, the deep hostility they’ve sown would remain.

Chip Bok (Creators) cites the forgiveness of student loans as a reason people voted against Biden, and he’s right that it set a tone in which the elite were seen to be exploiting the plain folks.

A reasonable person would point out that loan forgiveness was more a bookkeeping issue than a budgetary one, and that, in many cases, loan recipients had long since repaid the principle and were trapped in interest payments.

But a reasonable person could also point out that the economy is booming, inflation is way down, that Haitians don’t eat pets and that nobody is having unauthorized surgery in schools. Facts were never part of the 2024 elections, and the benefit of telling 30,000 lies is that people no longer even try to sort truth from fiction.

College graduates were getting some kind of benefit. It didn’t matter what it actually cost anyone, and it didn’t even matter that a lot of those college graduates were the children of working class parents.

Somebody was getting something that I wasn’t and it’s not goddam fair!

Juxtaposition of the Day

Lisa Benson — Counterpoint

Mike Beckom — Counterpoint

Chip Bok takes a stab at explaining Trump’s win, but Benson and Beckom have no interest in any sort of political analysis.

They offer a less complex message: Our side won, your side lost, and we hate your guts.

This is not the sort of division that can be patched up with compromises and policy shifts.

Joe Heller offers an interesting thought, though it assumes that a re-elected Trump would have retained the guardrails of his first administration.

Perhaps there is some comfort in realizing that time wounds all heels, and that Marat, Danton and Robespierre fell before the mob they had summoned.

But hold your confetti: The fellow who next emerged was Napoleon.