Those people voted for Trump by a large margin in 2024.
As Paul Waldman wrote today in his newsletter:
Trump’s net approval has dropped since he took office among all groups, but by a remarkable 33 points among those who don’t pay attention to news.
This is a reversal of what happened in the 2024 election, when he performed best among those who pay the least attention to political news. Those are also people whose political attachments are less firm; they’re more likely to shift their views on the president based on what’s happening in the world or their own lives. If you’re a political junkie, an economic downturn is not going to change your view of Trump, nor will an economic boom. But if you never think about politics, it might. And that’s an important fact to keep in mind about those low-information voters: They may have been hoodwinked by him at one time or another, but they can change their minds again.
What Trump is trying to do now is similar to what Democrats were lectured over and over about supposedly doing in 2024. Every time they spoke about the economy, Joe Biden and his allies would say “We know prices have gone up, and we’ve been through some hard times, but we’ve made a lot of progress and things are getting better.” It was 100% true — inflation had come down, unemployment was low, there was more job creation than in any single presidential term in history — and they were never anything but apologetic about the economy. Yet they were scolded nevertheless for even suggesting that Biden’s policies had a salutary effect, with one pundit after another responding, “How dare you deny the reality of people’s lives? You can’t tell them their suffering isn’t real! Curse you, curse you I say!”
The Trump argument today is that we’re going through a wee period of adjustment as his brilliantly designed and executed tariffs are implemented, and what awaits us on the other side is prosperity such as none of us has ever seen. If you bought that, you’d believe that tariffs are a good idea, and you might even be willing to endure some short-term pain. But that’s not how Americans are reacting. In fact, Trump’s approval on the economy is about the worst it’s ever been. Here’s another poll:
Basically, Trump is saying “you can believe me or you can believe your eyes” and people are believing their eyes. Or maybe they’re just accepting what they already knew and didn’t want to admit.
As Waldman points out, Trump ran on the big message that he was going to lower the cost of living because of his tariffs, “the most beautiful word in the English language.” Now he’s saying that everyone’s going to have to buy less, pay higher prices and suck it up because the tariffs are important in order to …. what? Make America great again? Payback the world for ripping us off? Put everyone in factory jobs?
Nobody understand what the point of all this is. HGis cult doesn’t care because they believe Dear Leader knows best.But a whole lot of others who weren’t paying close attention and voted for him because they had some hagiographic memory of his first term (why that is, is another question) are seeing very clearly that he’s full of shit.