OpEd: MAGA Is Already Eating Its Own -- Pass the Popcorn

More from the OpEd ...

... I did not, however, expect a MAGA civil war weeks before Trump had even taken office. But in retrospect I should have seen it coming. ...

What's different about MAGA is that I'm pretty sure that almost all of the movement's activists (as opposed to the low-information voters who put Trump over the top) knew that he was a con man, without even concepts of a plan to reduce prices. But each faction believed that he was their con man, putting something over on everyone else.

But now the two most important factions -- what we might call original MAGA, motivated largely by hostility to immigrants, and tech bro MAGA, seeking a free hand for scams low taxes and deregulation -- have gone to war, each apparently fearing that they may themselves have been marks rather than in on the con. ...

The OpEd (imo, worth a read for all the examples it cites) goes on ...

...
News reports on this dispute get the facts right, but you don't get a proper sense of the emotions and the character of the participants unless you read some of the posts on Elon Musk's X, formerly Twitter " a toxic site these days, not to be entered without personal protection equipment, but still useful to get the pulse of the people taking over America. Here, for example, is an exchange between Musk and Steve Bannon: ...

Wow, interesting citations.

Including a tweet (or whatever an X post is called nowadays), by Mr Musk that tells people to take a step back and F--k yourself in the face (which may not be biologically possible).

Links are in the article.

OK, that aside ...

More from the OpEd...

... So where is Trump coming down on all this? It has always been clear that he shares the tech bros' contempt for ordinary Americans, but is he willing to openly sell out his MAGA base? Why, yes:

"I have many H-1B visas on my properties. ..."

Trump is, of course, lying -- the workers on his properties are mainly on a different kind of visa, and he's rewriting his own history of hostility to H-1B.

But the main point is that after Elon Musk told Trump loyalists to f--k themselves in the face, Trump sided with ... Musk. ...

So, Pres-elect Trump sides with Billionaire Musk and not the workers who supported him last November?

@#3 ... Good op-ed. ...

Yup. One of the good ones, imo.

But, sadly ...

OpEd: My Last Column: Finding Hope in an Age of Resentment
www.nytimes.com

... This is my final column for The New York Times, where I began publishing my opinions in January 2000. I'm retiring from The Times, not the world, so I'll still be expressing my views in other places. But this does seem like a good occasion to reflect on what has changed over these past 25 years.

What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment. And I'm not just talking about members of the working class who feel betrayed by elites; some of the angriest, most resentful people in America right now " people who seem very likely to have a lot of influence with the incoming Trump administration " are billionaires who don't feel sufficiently admired.

It's hard to convey just how good most Americans were feeling in 1999 and early 2000. Polls showed a level of satisfaction with the direction of the country that looks surreal by today's standards. My sense of what happened in the 2000 election was that many Americans took peace and prosperity for granted, so they voted for the guy who seemed as if he'd be more fun to hang out with.

In Europe, too, things seemed to be going well. In particular, the introduction of the euro in 1999 was widely hailed as a step toward closer political as well as economic integration " toward a United States of Europe, if you like. Some of us ugly Americans had misgivings, but initially they weren't widely shared.

Of course, it wasn't all puppies and rainbows. There was, for example, already a fair bit of proto-QAnon-type conspiracy theorizing and even instances of domestic terrorism in America during the Clinton years. There were financial crises in Asia, which some of us saw as a potential harbinger of things to come; I published a 1999 book titled "The Return of Depression Economics," arguing that similar things could happen here; I put out a revised edition a decade later, when they did.

Still, people were feeling pretty good about the future when I began writing for this paper. ...