Four Additions to My List of Stupid Political Stuff to Stop Saying in 2025

#s 14, 15, 16 & 17

There will almost certainly be more coming in future posts….

See this (up yesterday) for my original thirteen.

14. “Trump’s base is the working class, driven by economic insecurity and anxiety.” Not really. See the left political scientist Anthony DiMaggio’s empirical demolition of this class reductionist Trumpenelft and Republican narrative here for 2016 and here for 2020. DiMaggio has shown that Trump’s voting base in the previous two presidential elections wasn’t particularly working-class and was driven by racist, sexist, nativist and authoritarian –- fascist –- values far more significantly and fundementally than by economic woes and fears. As DiMaggio and Henry Giroux point out in their book Fascism on Trial, “the thesis that support for Trump, white supremacy, and fascism are the result of mass economic and financial insecurity and desperation…is weak, and the evidence for it exaggerated, despite the GOP propaganda about Trumpism as a working-class phenomenon that permeates mass discourse.”

What about 2024? To be sure, world-wide post-Covid inflation was a boon for Trump and other non-incumbent candidates around the planet. It certainly helped his electoral margins. Trump won voters who said their family’s economic situation was worse than it was four years ago by 64 points — 81% to 17%. He won those who said that inflation has caused their households severe hardship by 50 points – 74% to 24%. He won those who said that “the economy” was their top issue by 61 points – 80% to 19%. Still, we should be skeptical of exit poll data showing concerns about “the economy” on the part of Trump voters. Partisan politics has broken and polluted economic perceptions for many years now. We have folks telling pollsters that “the economy” is terrible regardless of how “the economy” is actually performing when the party they dislike (and often even hate) holds the White House. Many Trumpists who are making out great with their salary or business will say that “the economy” sucks[1] and inflation is killing him as long as an Obama or a Biden is in the White House. If Trump gets in and “the economy” (including the Trumpists’s own economic situation) goes south while inflation rises (as seems likely if Trump’s wild tariff pledges are enacted), the Trumpist will tell a pollster that “the economy” is just peachy. (The same dynamic is in play for the famous polling question “how do you feel about the direction of the country right now? Is it on the right or the wrong track?”)

At the same time, the exit polls show that the Trump vote was evenly split between those on both sides of standard measures of affluence vs. poverty (with cut offs at $50,000 and $100,000 in annual family income) but heavily weighted towards those who identified as follows: deniers of the fascist Trump’s “extremism” (94% for Trump), Republican (94% for Trump), believers in the centrist capitalist Kamala Harris’s supposedly “radical” left “extremism” (92% for Trump), opponents of abortion rights (91% for Trump), anti-immigration (90% for Trump), “conservative” (90%), pro-mass deportations (87%), fans of the Christian Fascist US Supreme Court (83%), white evangelical (82% for Trump), pro-US-Israel genocide in Gaza (82%), white evangelical Protestant (72%), white male without college degree (69%), white without college degree (66%), Protestant (63%), white male (60%), and Catholic (58%). By contrast, Trump beat Harris with those in voting households with total family incomes under $50,000 by just three points (50% to 47%) and with total family incomes under $100,000 by just four percentage points (50% to 46%). Harris beat Trump by five points with union households.

But what if it was mainly working class votes behind Trump? (it isn’t). So what, then? There’s no legitimate justification for backing a transparently malignant hate-mongering fascist! I agree with the revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian, who wrote this eleven days after Trump’s re-election:

“Fascism, as represented by Donald Trump, is a white supremacist, male supremacist, anti-LGBT, immigrant-hating, aggressively environment-destroying, anti-scientific, religious fundamentalist fanaticism, determined to use the power of the government to forcibly compel obedience to its dangerous and destructive lunacy, and to viciously persecute those who oppose or resist… in the face of this fascism and those who are its supporters, there should be no defensiveness, but instead a firm stand of defiantly opposing everything they are about, and everything they do in moving to carry out this fascism….As for people who voted for and back Trump: regardless of the reason, or rationalization, they give for doing this, the fact is that they are supporting fascism, with everything that means. And it is necessary and crucial to consistently and actively take the offensive against this.”

15. “Trump is too stupid and venal to be a real fascist menace." Seriously? A US president needs to be smart and beyond economic selfishness to be a fascist menace? That’s a stupid thing to think! Fascism has always involved a good measure of corruption and gangster capitalism. Neither at its top levels nor in its base has fascism ever been accused of genius! It is deeply suspicious of intellectuals and smarts. At the same time, Trump is smarter than many of his detractors know; he appears to have read the degraded room of US media and political life pretty damn smartly. He has around him a team of Republifascist operatives and wonks who are quite adept in the manipulation of words, numbers, images, and algorithms to advance their evil and revanchist cause.

16. "Calm down: the Republicans will implode and collapse the Trump threat." Really? There are some divisions within the GOP, of course, primarily between a rump of Freedom Caucus “deficit hawks” and the rest of the party. But there is little basis for thinking that the big Dear Leader Trump machine can’t continue to master its own party. Republicans who get on the wrong side of the MAGA king don’t do very well. Oh look…this just in from The New York Times:

“Live Updates: Johnson Wins Re-election as House Speaker. Three of Mike Johnson’s fellow Republicans voted against their party’s nominee to lead the House, despite an endorsement from President-elect Donald J. Trump. Two changed their votes after a delay on the House floor, securing his victory.”

The deficit hawks in the House Freedom Caucus say they voted for Mike Johnson “because of our steadfast support of President Trump and to ensure the timely certification of his electors.”

17. “You have Trump Derangement System.” Even now, I get emails accusing me of “TDS,” Trump Derangement Syndrome. They come from people who have Denial of Trump’s Fascist Derangement and the Menace it Poses Syndrome (DOTFDATMIPS). Anybody who still doesn’t get the malignant fascist insanity concentrated in the historical character Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump in 2025 is living in pathetic political ignorance, delusion, and denial. It would be one thing if this Hitler-channeling sociopath was mouthing off and shit-posting online and on Fatherland/FOX News while facing federal trials for trying to overthrow the government in 2020-21 and for ripping off classified federal documents and obstructing efforts to retrieve them. But no, this lethal maniac, “the most dangerous criminal in human history” (according to Noam Chomsky on the very eve of the covid pandemic that Trump mass-murderously helped fan across the nation), is about to re-take the most dangerous office on the planet. He is doing so with his cult party in charge of all three branches of the federal government and half the states. And to repeat what I wrote in my last PSR, he is doing so just half a year after the Trump-crafted Christian Fascist Supreme Court granted him open-ended arch-authoritarian legal immunity for any past or future crimes he has committed or will commit as part of his real or supposed “official duties” as president. Call it the US Supreme Court’’s Reichstag Fire Ruling.[2]

Notes

+1. This is not to argue that “the economy” doesn’t suck. The capitalist system is literally sucking the life out of livable ecology, oppressing billions of people, and even helping put us on a path to nuclear war among other terrible things. My point is that popular responses to the standard polling questions on “the economy” are badly tainted by partisan identification when it comes to telling us why people voted Republi-fascist or Dem-imperialist.)

+2. A reader named “Greg,” afflicted by DOTFDATMIPS, recently wrote to accuse me of TDS. He’s off base. Trump Derangement Syndrome is where you give Trump all kinds of evil superpowers and blame everything on him (which he of course narcissistically loves). I don’t do that. I see Trump as the product of an imperialist class rule system: accuse me of capitalism derangement syndrome (CDS) instead. A recent USA Today Op-Ed is titled “2024 Was a Bad Year for Basic Decency in America; You Can Thank Trump for That” (emphasis added). The title conveys some understandable horror and disgust but it misses the mark: we can thank capitalism-imperialism for the horror and sickness that is Trump and Trumpism. The Orange Assface of American Fascism (OAAF) and his deranged backers are the product of an imperial exploitation and oppression system that needs to be taken down and replaced with a revolutionary socialist republic. Let’s make our ruling class and its parasitic, imperialist, and eco-cidal profit system own the coming atrocities of the Trump-Vance regime in 2025. Then let’s rise up in the thousands and then the tens of thousands and then the hundreds of thousands and then the millions and then the tens of millions against that regime and its allies and against the system that vomited these new Amerikan fascists up. They and the capitalist order that created them are profound menaces to humanity and other living things. Best slogan I heard in 2024 came from the Revcoms: “No Fascist Trump, No Genocide Joe, the Whole Damn System's Got to Go!” All this said, it's a shame more Germans didn't get Hitler Derangement Syndrome in the 1930s. .Just watch the shit that goes down if we don’t rise up against Trump and Trumpism.