Do you know this widely cited meme, introduced in a 2015 tweet?
“I never thought leopards would eat MY face,” sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.
It’s hard to explain why this is perfect, but it is. If Donald Trump wins, there will eventually be a lot of sobbing among people who voted for him.
Some of this will involve the frightening reality of authoritarianism; if you think you’ll be unaffected by a second Trump presidency because you aren’t undocumented or Puerto Rican or a Democratic politician, I encourage you to reassess. But I’ll get to that next week. Today I want to talk about more prosaic economic issues.
Many analysts have pointed out that Trump’s proposed tariffs would hurt most Americans, with only high-income individuals gaining enough from his tax cuts to make up the difference. Trump, of course, insists that taxes on imports — which are, essentially, a sales tax — won’t hurt American consumers. But, as The Washington Post reports, corporations are already getting ready to raise prices.
The inflationary impact of tariffs will, however, probably be only the beginning of the pain for millions of Americans if Trump wins. Over the past few days, two people who will very likely have a lot of policy influence if Republicans prevail have let the leopard out of the bag on what else we should expect from a Trump administration.
Perhaps most notably, Elon Musk — who Trump promises to appoint as the head of a government efficiency commission — says he could cut “at least $2 trillion” in federal spending, around 30% of the budget, declaring that it would be relatively easy given the amount of government waste, although he recently acknowledged that doing so “necessarily involves some temporary hardship.”
Those remarks alone tell you two things. First, that Musk doesn’t understand federal spending. Second, a new Trump administration would probably inflict a lot of hardship on millions of Americans, and it’s unlikely that it would be temporary.
Does the government waste money? Of course it does; so does every large organization — do you believe that every dollar Tesla disburses is well spent? But anyone asserting that waste accounts for a large fraction of federal spending really has no idea what the government does.
The federal government is best thought of as an insurance company with an army. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, military spending, plus veterans’ benefits and interest payments on the debt account for about three-quarters of overall spending. Much of the rest involves essential functions of government, from operating the courts to providing air traffic control.
So any attempt at spending reductions on the scale Musk is talking about would necessarily involve savage cuts in programs millions of people depend on. Trump has said that he won’t cut Social Security or Medicare, but his tax proposals would undermine their finances, and he conspicuously hasn’t exempted Medicaid, which covers around 70 million people.
Musk-style spending cuts, then, would almost certainly result in hardship for many Americans.
Meanwhile, House Speaker Mike Johnson is promising “massive reform” of the Affordable Care Act — “no Obamacare,” he declared. We don’t need to speculate about what that would mean. In 2017, Trump and his congressional allies almost passed a health care “reform” that the Congressional Budget Office estimated would have increased, by 2026, the number of Americans without health insurance by 23 million; those losing coverage would disproportionately be Americans with preexisting conditions, who need insurance most.
Many potential Trump voters are probably unaware of what’s in store and imagine that Trump would just snap his fingers and “fix” what he insists is a terrible economy. The reality, however, is that America’s economic performance under the Biden-Harris administration has been very good, especially compared with that of other countries. We’ve grown much faster than any other major wealthy nation, and we’ve substantially outperformed projections, both those made before COVID-19 struck and those made at the beginning of the Biden administration.
This achievement, says The Wall Street Journal, is “remarkable”; The Economist calls it “glorious.” Neither is what you’d call a left-wing rag.
It’s true that we had a burst of inflation in 2021 and 2022. But that was a global phenomenon; other nations had similar bursts. Furthermore, inflation has come way down, and although many remain upset, understandably, about the higher level of prices, most workers, especially the lowest paid, have seen wages outpace inflation since the start of the pandemic.
By the way: When Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign proclaimed “It’s morning again in America,” both unemployment and inflation were substantially higher than they are now.
Would Trump do even better than Biden? Or better than Kamala Harris? There’s an unusual consensus among economists that Trump would preside over a worse economy, especially higher inflation, than Harris.
If he wins, many Trump voters are likely to experience buyer’s remorse.
Will they express their disappointment at the ballot box in 2028? They will if they can. But that assumes a free and fair election. Trump has given us plenty of reason to believe that if he wins, 2024 may be the last time America has anything resembling that.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
