Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's diary entry on Substack, Letters from an American, for November 8.
Social media has been flooded today with stories of Trump voters who
are shocked to learn that tariffs will raise consumer prices as
reporters are covering that information. Daniel Laguna of LevelUp warned
that Trump’s proposed 60% tariff on Chinese imports could raise the
costs of gaming consoles by 40%, so that a PS5 Pro gaming system would
cost up to $1,000. One of the old justifications for tariffs was that
they would bring factories home, but when the $3 billion shoe company
Steve Madden announced yesterday it would reduce its imports from China
by half to avoid Trump-promised tariffs, it said it will shift
production not to the U.S., but to Cambodia, Vietnam, Mexico, and
Brazil.
There are also stories that voters who chose Trump to
lower household expenses are unhappy to discover that their undocumented
relatives are in danger of deportation. When CNN’s Dana Bash asked
Indiana Republican senator-elect Jim Banks if undocumented immigrants
who had been here for a long time and integrated into the community
would be deported, Banks answered that deportation should include “every
illegal in this country that we can find.” Yesterday a Trump-appointed
federal judge struck down a policy established by the Biden
administration that was designed to create an easier path to citizenship
for about half a million undocumented immigrants who are married to
U.S. citizens.
Later, she says:
Marcotte recalled that Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of the Washington Post
showed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred
Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate
proposed them. An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters
who were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to
vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats.
Many Americans turn for information to social media or to friends and
family who traffic in conspiracy theories. As Angelo Carusone of Media Matters put it: “We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.”
In The New Republic
today, Michael Tomasky reinforced that voters chose Trump in 2024 not
because of the economy or inflation, or anything else, but because of
how they perceived those issues—which is not the same thing. Right-wing
media “fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information
that made it possible for Trump to win,” Tomasky wrote. Right-wing media
has overtaken legacy media to set the country’s political agenda not
only because it’s bigger, but because it speaks with one voice, “and
that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate
you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your
last line of defense against your son coming home from school your
daughter.”
And:
Tomasky noted how the work of Matthew Gertz of Media Matters
shows that nearly all the crazy memes that became central campaign
issues—the pet-eating story, for example, or the idea that the booming
economy was terrible—came from right-wing media. In those circles, Vice
President Kamala Harris was a stupid, crazed extremist who orchestrated a
coup against President Joe Biden and doesn’t care about ordinary
Americans, while Trump is under assault and has been for years, and he’s
“doing it all for you.”
Investigative reporter Miranda
Green outlined how “pink slime” newspapers, which are AI generated from
right-wing sites, turned voters to Trump in key swing state counties.
Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, who studies focus groups, told
NPR, “When I ask voters in focus groups if they think Donald Trump is an
authoritarian, the #1 response by far is, ‘What is an authoritarian?’”
She goes on to tell of an earlier time when the people were flooded with misinformation: the 1850s, when the American South was flooded with pro-slavery misinformation. The result was the election of pro-slavery representatives who started the Civil War, and the beginning of economic repression of southern whites -- except for those already rich, who had been slave owners -- which lasted until FDR's New Deal in the 1930s.
