I know what you’re saying here and in some academic sense, sure, you’re right.
Back in the real world though, trump voters are explicitly not the kind of people who read, let alone vote based on policy.
They are literally the group of people that people point to in order to say the idea that an economy is actually based on rational actors is one of the most flawed assumptions in the entire field of economics.
I think most voters probably assumed, as has been the case for the entire life of anyone alive today (including during Trump's first term!), that "Republican" meant "good for business" and small-c don't-rock-the-boat conservatism.
There were pre-tremors of this going back decades, but they always seemed far-fetched: surely the business interests in charge of both parties don't wanna fuck up the bag? It turns out that some of them do.
>I think most voters probably assumed, as has been the case for the entire life of anyone alive today (including during Trump's first term!), that "Republican" meant "good for business" and small-c don't-rock-the-boat conservatism.
Were they just not paying attention during Trump's first term? Did they just assume everyone shouting from the rooftops really did just have Trump Derangement Syndrome? Did Trump's conspiracy laden post-electoral twitter rampage or Jan. 6th really not clue anyone in?
I mean, the economy improved under Biden but I guess the meme about egg prices just kind of short circuited people's brains.
The sky didn't fall in during the first term, so why would it during the second?
I didn't vote for him but slightly less than half the voters did (according to best estimates -- one thing MAGA is right about is that our election security is a joke, with a few private voting machine companies and an army of partisan local officials having unauditable sway over a good chunk of elections). In any case, it's not productive to blame voters. The point of a democracy is to court voters. Shaming them and calling them idiots only pushes them away.
In the case of the US, had voting been mandatory, victory of the voters courted would have been so ridiculously one sided that it would blow apart the idea that there are two actual opposing factions of equal desire of the will of the people. This has actually been acknowledged out loud by the current leader of the faction that is running the side that won.
>Shaming them and calling them idiots only pushes them away.
I'm not a representative of any political party, nor am I running for office. I'm just another woke libtard cuck who has to live with the consequences of Trumpist malice. So I'll shame them and call them idiots all I like.
Feel free! I'm just a lone left wing lunatic trying to make common cause with the libs, but it's tough. Hopefully we can at least get together on trying to defeat Trumpism but unfortunately your attitude also persists in the Democratic party apparatus itself.
The big reason the Democrats lost is that they tried to appeal to the right and only alienated their own base which was already disillusioned by Biden. They keep running as the status quo party when neither side wants the status quo.
These people put up a gallows and noose on the Capitol, but ours is the side which has to remain civil? You don't defeat fascism by capitulating to it.
Trump said a million contradictory things on the campaign trail. Even the smartest businessmen who donated money to him didn't think this was coming. After his election, the market didn't expect it at all either.
If you look at polls and read interviews, the #1 reason voters gave for voting for Trump was that he was a businessman who would lower inflation after Biden had raised it. Now he's doing the polar opposite. This is not what Trump supporters voted for.
My coworkers and I have been discussing how to prepare our company for tariffs since last November. I didn't realize that we were smarter than then smartest businessmen. Perhaps that is no great feat.
Trump promised his voters "vengeance"; that is what they voted for.
But yes, you can clearly see from the market that you have been much smarter, if your company was confident enough to take action to spend a lot of money to hedge against this. You'll make out like bandits if the tariffs remain, so congratulations. Truly, anyone who saw this coming and shorted stocks appropriately is now rich. That's how unexpected this was.
But Trump was promising vengeance on cultural issues and immigration. Not on prices. Again -- voters expected him to follow through on his promise to lower prices. Not to raise them massively.
> But Trump was promising vengeance on cultural issues and immigration. Not on prices. Again -- voters expected him to follow through on his promise to lower prices. Not to raise them massively.
This is easy to reason through if you just remember that Trump and his cronies are not smart or competent. They have basically no concept of how to follow through on a promise if there’s any complexity to it.
The kept promises are trivial, while the broken promises include everything that can’t be accomplished by executive diktat. (Such as lower prices, unless he directly puts a price limit on goods in an executive order.)
Basically the only value in reading into his non-trivial promises is in considering “how could he make things worse if he follows through on attempting this?”
> Even the smartest businessmen who donated money to him didn't think this was coming.
At some level being "smart" means having the foresight to predict these things. How smart can you really be if you didn't see this coming? Certainly not amongst the "smartest".
Because it's not like no one predicted it. Yes Trump say contradictory things but it's not at all hard to read the man. People like George Conway have been correctly predicting his moves since 2017, because although Trump is inconsistent in his words, he's actually very consistent in his actions.
> How smart can you really be if you didn't see this coming?
Pretty smart. We judge intelligence as the ability to predict thousands of different things in lots of different scenarios, and nobody ever gets everything right 100%.
The idea that you would define intelligence solely by your prediction on tariffs isn't a definition most people will share.
But when you say things like "Even the smartest businessmen who donated money to him didn't think this was coming", I cannot agree because as I said, plenty of people saw this coming. The smartest businessmen did think it was coming, they were right. They got the signal from the noise. They put the puzzle together.
The ones who didn't think it was coming were not among the smartest. They were fooled by the noise and didn't connect the dots.
But as a percentage of smart people, it's miniscule. And people can get things right for the wrong reasons. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, as they say.
> The smartest businessmen did think it was coming
Prove it. Show us the list of smartest businessmen according to some independent metric in 2024, and then show me how many of them shorted the market because the saw tariffs coming at these levels, because that would be the obvious action to make tons of money.
Unless you can do that, you're retroactively defining "smartest" by this one issue, and hindsight is 20/20 as we all know...
Because the market reaction already proves that the smart money hadn't priced this in. You're the one who needs to demonstrate the contrary here.
> But as a percentage of smart people, it's miniscule.
Yeah, which makes them the smartest. The top is usually small compared to the whole.
> And people can get things right for the wrong reasons. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, as they say.
Except people have a now decade-long track record of calling Trump correctly. I already gave you a name George Conway. You want a list of people who called this before it happened, look into the people he follows and retweets.
> Show us the list of smartest businessmen according to some independent metric in 2024, and then show me how many of them shorted the market because the saw tariffs coming at these levels, because that would be the obvious action to make tons of money.
That evidence would not prove what I said because as you stated, even a broken clock is right twice a day. WSB is making bank on this event as you must know, but I wouldn't put them in the "smartest" category because someone is always on the winning side of these kinds of events and being there doesn't make them smart necessarily.
> Because the market reaction already proves that the smart money hadn't priced this in. You're the one who needs to demonstrate the contrary here.
All it proves is the market is irrational and doesn't understand the nature of Trump.
Because here's what it comes down to: yes, Trump did say a lot of things during the election, and perhaps people heard what they wanted to. But they key realization that anyone has to understand about Trump is that he's not a sane individual. The smartest people understand this and they can accurately predict his moves. Not as smart people refuse to acknowledge this, and they try to ascribe rationality to his motives, which he continually confounds, because.... he's not a rational individual. The smart move would to stop trying to fit a rational peg into an insane hole.
And so you can be the richest business man, with decades of experience, and huge portfolios, but you cannot be the smartest if you continually for a decade, allow this massive blind spot to infect your reasoning w.r.t. Trump.
The exact mistake these investor made was thinking "gee, I made a lot of money his first term, it wasn't that bad. It should be the same this term. He's crazy like a fox, not crazy crazy."
The error is that this line of thinking ignores the giant gaping insurrection that Trump caused, and the massive distorted reality he created to justify it. Trump does not live in a rational world anymore, he lives in a world he made up to soothe his own ego that he lost in 2020. And because these big brain investors with more money than sense had $$$ in their eyes, they forget to recalibrate their expectations from a president checked by rational institutionalists, to a guy who is clearly on a power trip and supported by a compliant Congress and no one to say "no" in the White House.
So at the end of the day, the people who need to prove they're amongst the smartest business people are those who are blindsided, confused, and disoriented while others are clear-eyed, can explain this whole situation from first principles, and are using the current events to validate their model of Donald Trump to better predict him in the future.
> Anyone who voted for him should have known these were coming.
Every time I read a comment like this, it tickles my "someone on the internet is wrong" neuron.
In countries whose political systems have devolved into a 2 party system, this isn't true. The two choices will both be a curates egg - some things they want to vote for, and some they want to vote against.
Someone people will agonise over it, trying to weigh every policy. I suspect that strategy is more common among the HN crowd. It's tilting at windmills. It's a huge multidimensional problem, politicians will change their mind or the fine print, and some outright lie. It isn't solvable in any real sense.
At the other end of the scale people will pick the most important issue and vote on that. The issue is nearly always the same, as it how they measure it: it's the economy stupid, do I feel better off now than I did under the previous guy? Because of inflation triggered by the COVID bazooka the answer for Biden was no, so Trump got elected.
Most countries had a COVID bazooka, all them subsequently suffered from the inflation hangover, those that then had elections did the same thing as the US voters - they threw out the incumbents. It had nothing to do with right or left, as nations flipped both ways.
Personally I used to weigh policy. It took me decades to recognise the futility of it. Now I try to gauge the character of the people I vote for, which seems impossibly nebulous but we humans aren't too bad at reading others. The downside is: it seems a lot of other have done the same thing, which is how we got tribal politics - the other kind of voting hell.
Back in the real world though, trump voters are explicitly not the kind of people who read, let alone vote based on policy.
They are literally the group of people that people point to in order to say the idea that an economy is actually based on rational actors is one of the most flawed assumptions in the entire field of economics.