Okay, MAGA Voters, How Do You Like It Now?

In the wake of the November election, to say that working-class Trump voters were gloating is an understatement. For them, the revolution had arrived! The first Trump term, they gleefully spouted, was just the prelude. Now those liberal elites and city dwellers would get what was coming to them. DEI was dead! Woke was put to sleep! The country would be returned to the good old rural, Jeffersonian (white) paradise that had been stolen away.

Revenge would be sweet.

But it was not just the pickup-driving, beard-wearing denizens of places like West Texas, the Louisiana bayou, and the Big Sky country in Montana who were breathlessly awaiting the Trump resurrection. A bevy of neo-MAGAs, which included an unprecedented number of Latino, Black, and Arab American voters, disproportionately male, also bought into Trump’s promises to lower prices while raising wages, restore traditional values, and get rid of that army of illegal immigrants who were siphoning off government resources and destroying the socio-economic fabric of the nation while providing nothing in return except crime, drug smuggling, rape, and the ingestion of household pets.

How they could believe such absurd rot is a question other, frankly saner, Americans of both parties have been asking since the gob smacking results in November. Now they have been joined by a surprising number of MAGAs who have discovered that they may have bought Fool’s Orange, uh, Gold.

Much of the action has been in town halls. When Kansas Senator Roger Marshall spoke on March 1 before a crowd in Oakley, a town in the western part of the state that would fit Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood description of “out there,” he fully expected to be lauded by what promised to be an adoring and grateful crowd. Still, to be cautious, he required questions be submitted in advance and in writing, so he could pick and choose. Which he did.

About a half-hour in, attendees whose questions had been ignored began to shout them out. Soon, Marshall was barraged by accusations that Trump, Musk…and he…were betraying the voters with the draconian cuts to government services, especially for veterans. As dissatisfaction spread through the crowd, Marshall responded by calling the audience rude and, then, citing other commitments, he got up and walked out.

The crowd booed…loudly. Some called, “We’ll vote you out.”

A video of the event went viral. Days later, Marshall defended himself by claiming that he could confirm that many of the attendees had been paid to be there. When asked for proof a couple of days after that, he was forced to walk back the accusation, because there was none.

Another recipient of conservative wrath is Wyoming congresswoman Harriet Hageman, who her state’s voters were ordered by Trump to install so the nation could be rid of that arch-left-winger, Liz Cheney. Hageman has been verbally assaulted in a series of town halls, most recently in Laramie at which she “faced a torrent of heckles and boos” from a crowd that jeered “throughout her comments on issues including cuts to the federal government spearheaded by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency.”

Disillusionment is not restricted to MAGA voters in deep red states. In New York’s Hudson Valley, two-term Republican Congressman Mike Lawler, who was elected in a district once safely Democratic, was faced with a Musk-generated closing of the only Social Security Hearing office in the district, despite a backlog of more than 2,000 cases. Those hearings will now require residents, all of whom are (obviously) elderly, to travel to New York City to appear in person. Lawler called it a “slap in the face” to his constituents. Some predicted the slap may come to him in the next election.

There are many other instances of Republican voters not at all thrilled with the new reality, but it is the neo-MAGA, previously Democratic stalwart, voters who are facing the rudest awakening.

To cater to his new constituency of Black men, Trump not only fired Air Force General Charles Q. Brown as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but also instructed his Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, to have, among others, Jackie Robinson’s and Colin Powell’s pages removed from the Defense Department’s website. (Hegseth was forced to rescind that one, undoubtedly with reluctance.) The website for Arlington National Cemetery removed educational materials and pages highlighting African American, Latino, and women veterans, leaving only white men.

A white supremacist? Not Trump.

For Latinos, there is ICE, which is now detaining people simply because they speak Spanish, holding them sometimes for days, until proof of their citizenship or legal residency can be established. There is no doubt that some legitimate residents and even citizens have been caught up in the net and are now buried in the legal system, incarcerated in unknown locations.

But Trump is the Latino community’s best friend, right?

Then there are the Arab Americans, who bought into the promise to end the war in Gaza. I’ll give this to Trump—that one was true. The war in Gaza will likely end—either with most of the area in rubble and an Israeli occupying force controlling the lives of those who live there or, if Trump has his way, two million Palestinians deported, their homes and businesses replaced by a series of resorts, golf courses, and casinos.

There are dozens of other examples where a president described as “transactional,” which means you don’t give a hoot about the people affected by your decisions, has damaged the lives of friend and foe alike, all while pursuing an economic agenda that seems somewhere between wrong-headed and catastrophic. Congress seems unwilling to stop him and courts may be powerless to.

With some significant justification, the phrase “buyer’s remorse” has been applied to both old line and neo-MAGAs. But make no mistake. The majority of them still support him. Rather than admit they might have made a mistake, they prefer to insist that after the pain, they will travel to what George Orwell in Animal Farm referred to as Sugarcandy Mountain. (Of course, Orwell was referring to where the animals will go after they’re dead, which only adds to the parallel.)

And hey, MAGA voters, we’re only barely in month three.

As Trump so often promises, the best is yet to come.