Unreality

 The reason why I feel "confident" that we will have a recession sooner rather than later is that unreality has a way of crashing down around us, when we apply it to economic issues. The housing bubble of 2005-8 was unreality. People willed themselves to believe something that was not true, because they wanted it to be true.

Richardson runs through a litany of untruths that the Trumpist GOP has embraced just in the past 48 hours. Trump is looting taxpayer money for his new Air Force One; he's slandering other people to distract from the Epstein mess; Markwayne Mullin refuses to admit to the concept of linear time. Meanwhile, Krugman notes that the "deal" we made with the EU is not a very good deal at all. It is substantially worse than the status quo he disrupted.

Reports are that businesses have indeed been eating some of the tariffs in the short run because Trump Always Chickens Out. However, once these tariffs reach a more permanent status, they will have to pass those increased costs on to consumers or else go out of business. Once that does happen, what is already disapproval of tariffs will skyrocket and become more intense. The political lesson of the last four years has been that people in advanced economies are not at all OK with inflation.

One of the things I've learned from Trump's rise is that people are not making sophisticated, reasoned decisions when it comes to political support. It's vibes all the way down.

A good example of this was when Biden pulled us out of Afghanistan. Super majorities of Americans wanted our commitment there ended. It had been 20 years. Yet, perhaps unavoidably, the withdrawal immediately became regime collapse and chaos. After that, Biden's approval rating fell - not just the overall one or the foreign policy one - but all of them. The "vibes" curdled after Kabul fell and he never really recovered.

It used to not be that stark, but here we are. Trump's meanness, his racist and sexist bullshit, his self-dealing - all of this has begun to stick in the public's mind. Maybe not at a specific level, but there's a ton of buyer's regret, especially from younger voters. When you drop the Epstein shit in there, you suddenly have an accumulation of bad vibes that extend to everything. Think of it as the same as when a restaurant gives you fries instead of a side salad and you slam them on Yelp across the board. 

You will likely never sever the link between Trump and MAGA, but the broad swath of Americans are not MAGA. 

Yes, at some point Democrats need to up their game, but it's tough when you have no single spokesperson, and when there is no looming election to focus voters' attention. 

If we get a crypto crash - a prime example of unreality - before the midterms, I could see Democrats having a very good election.