Trump Supporters Already Feeling Regrets
It’s only day four of the Trump presidency and the regrets are already beginning for some Trump voters as they realize they have been conned just like everyone who took a Trump University course or actually contracts to do work on his hotels. Pity poor Melody Forbes, a young 25 year old from Arizona who voted for Trump in the mistaken belief that he would only focus on the issues he supposedly campaigned on, “creating jobs, making health care more affordable, and making our country great again. I voted for him because I trust him to get our economy moving again.” I guess Melody really thought Trump would replace Obamacare with a program that would be just as good or better but cost far less. She never believed that he would rubber stamp the worst aspects of Republican policy, like cutting funding for Planned Parenthood. “Just like one in five women across the country, I went to Planned Parenthood here in Arizona in my 20s for health care. I was newly divorced, unemployed and uninsured, and I needed health services I could not otherwise afford”, says Melody. She continues, “It doesn’t make any sense for Trump, who said he would defend the American people from politics as usual, to sign a bill like this. Millions of mostly low-income people who rely on Planned Parenthood for essential health care — such as birth control, cancer screenings, STI testing and treatment, well-woman exams and more — would no longer have access within their communities. And people who already face outsized barriers to getting care, especially people of color and people in rural communities, would face additional hurdles.” Melody will be happy to know that Trump will probably lower the cost of health insurance though, just as he pledged. The latest GOP plan seems to put the burden of covering as many, if not more, people that Obamacare did squarely on the states. The states could use their own discretion as to whether they would stay in the ACA or not and would continue to receive federal subsidies if they did so. Here’s the rub, however. States could also opt out of the ACA and at that point the federal insurance standards of the ACA would no longer apply. I’m guessing Arizona would be opting out and that would give Melody the wonderful opportunity to buy health insurance for far less than she is probably paying now. It would cover the first $5,000 or so in health expenses but, after that, Melody would be on her own. One serious medical illness and it would be off to medical bankruptcy. But Trump would have delivered on his promise to make health care more affordable while at the same time denying them access by cutting funding for Planned Parenthood. As Melody says, “My vote for Trump was not a vote against Planned Parenthood.” But that’s what Melody is going to get. Now, she might have realized that a candidate who had fought her whole life to help and improve the lives of women and children would be better at protecting her health care than a serial sexual abuser. She might have realized that a candidate who was actually going to put more money in her pocket would help move the economy along and that expanding Medicare to those as young as 55 and increasing Obamacare subsidies would have brought the cost of health insurance down. But that candidate may not have been part of her tribe, or was just going to make America better instead of great again, or maybe it was something about emails that somehow persuaded Melody not to vote for her.
But Melody isn’t the only one having second thoughts about supporting Trump and the Republicans. Companies that rely on trade with Mexico are also beginning to see the folly of their ways. Take the Kansas City Southern (KSU) railway company. During the 2016 campaign, the company’s PAC sent over 85% of its donations to Republicans. I’m not quite sure why. Perhaps it really is the business executives’ bias that Republicans are always good for business and Democrats are bad, despite what the candidates are actually saying. KSU operates an extensive railway line that extends deep into Mexico to ports on the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico and winds its way through Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Oklahoma before winding up at home base in Kansas City. The company actually calls this railway network, “the NAFTA railway”. Like Melody, I guess KSU didn’t really believe that Trump was going to renegotiate NAFTA, impose tariffs on goods coming from Mexico, and build that beautiful border wall. In any case, Trump just signed an executive order today to begin the process of renegotiating NAFTA. But perhaps all those contributions to GOP candidates will actually help in blunting these proposed actions by Trump or inoculating KSU from some of the worst aspects. On the other hand, the markets seem pretty sure that doing business in Mexico is going to be more difficult under a Trump administration. The company recently reported flat earning compared to last year and didn’t offer much encouragement for the coming year, saying, “Looking ahead to 2017, the Company is aware of both economic and political uncertainty”. (Do you remember the days when the GOP spent months accusing Obama of ruining business by creating “uncertainty”. I’m pretty sure KSU would love to have those days back again.) The company’s stock has fallen over 15% since Trump’s election and the collapse of the Mexican peso, which is also related to Trump’s election victory, has also badly hurt its bottom line as that is the currency in which a large part of its profits are made. As the Slate article nicely summarizes, “If your business model depended on the existence of NAFTA and a stable Mexico, enlightened self interest would have dictated supporting a centrist, free-trading Democrat for president and supporting pro-free trade Republicans and Democrats for Congress in equal measure. That’s not what the business community did in 2016. That’s not what Kansas City Southern did. And now it appears the NAFTA train is leaving the station.”
As Trump and the GOP take a wrecking ball to the social safety net here in the US and destroy the international norms that have governed for decades, I think we will find more and more Trump supporters who find that they are on the short end of those changes and their regrets will grow. But it will probably be too late to prevent lots of damage before they get another chance to change what they have wrought. Trump is a salesman and a con artist so it is not surprising that he fooled some of his supporters and you have to feel sorry for them. But there were plenty of others who knew better but blindly believed he would only do what they wanted him to do and that the rest was just “rhetoric”. It’s hard to really feel sorry for those people.