If you want a dog to stop barking, give him something to eat [1]

There is a hope that red constituencies will eventually oppose Trump’s rule because they will lose from his economic policies[2], that such opposition will be strong enough for the Democrats to win the 2026 House elections, and that such opposition will join with a Mao-like blue wind to drive Trump from office in 2028. Policies that are expected to damage the US economy are: (1) tariffs on imports of finished goods (electronics and machinery from China); (2) duties on intermediate inputs (petroleum, car parts) from Canada and Mexico; (3) the indirect effects of retaliation (Canadian tariffs on orange juice and bourbon); (4) cuts in farm and other subsidies, notably green ones; (5) rips in the social safety nets (Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, SNAP); and (6) destruction of credentialled federal jobs (regulation of finance and business, taxation, defense, management of national parks and forests).

I do think that the red states will lose, initially, from Trump’s policies and that there will be shock and anger[3]. But I predict that red constituencies will be soon compensated to such an extent that they will never seriously oppose Trump. The design of compensation will make red constituents more likely to support Trump for economic reasons. An accompanying agitprop campaign on right-wing media will generate cultural support (« Tonight at 6: you won’t believe how the libtards were spending your hard-earned money»). Purges and show trials of blue academics will deter intellectual opposition in general. The prospect of more federal grant money will encourage even the honest red state scientists to work on safe topics that are then sold as being “common sense“ results for the hard-working taxpayers of this state, usw.

Compensation of the red constituencies will be economic and cultural and will involve:

1) Using obscure rules in budget reconciliation to overpay the red states for the harm that policy has caused them and to underpay blue states for the harm they have suffered.

2) Harassing Social Security and Medicare to destroy their popular support and to comfort the white nationalist fantasy that “those people” are getting more than they deserve. Social Security and Medicare are generally popular and have a solid constituency into which involuntary recruitment is inevitable, so the attack on them will begin with fake cases of « fraud, waste, and abuse » in the blue states. The attack will continue to concoct bogus allegations against women providers and providers of color, allegations designed not to recover public money but to drive people out of their professions, along the lines of how Obama flunkie Carmen Ortiz prosecuted Aaron Schwartz. The agitprop campaign against Social Security and Medicare as ‘nests of espiders’ will seek to discredit the national compact that such benefits are earned and thereby to explain the erosion of benefits in real terms while excusing delays and other implementation problems as the result of sabotage.

3) Maintaining the SALT laws that penalize states with higher income taxes, allowing even greater transfers from blue to red.

4) Targeting Medicaid cuts to blue states through executive orders to tighten blue eligibility requirements while leaving red ones alone and to make downward adjustments in blue state benefits through corruption of the reimbursement formulas.

5) Lying about how student loan cancellations were caused by Democrat deficits and claiming that the gains from cancellation only went to elites majoring in gender studies or in vegan livestock breeding.

6) Increasing farm subsidies to the red states and divorcing them from any actions by the recipients.

7) Channeling FEMA assistance to Texas and Florida and away from California and other blue states through opaque changes in FEMA rules.

8) Targeting federal job cuts--notably those jobs that protect natural resources against raiders like Doug Burgum--to blue states.

9) Re-orienting federal education aid to religious and private schools in red states by imposing unacceptable conditions (abortion bans, open carry laws) on blue states.

10) Feeding red state scientists (UT, Purdue, Birmingham) with money (NIH, Dept of Agriculture, Dept of Energy) stolen from blue state researchers (Berkeley, MIT, NYU), thereby allowing scrofulous politicians like Cornyn and Britt to take credit for having defended their states' interests.

11) Forcing stricter NDAs on recipients of federal money and imposing crueler punishments on whistleblowers and other enemies of the state.

12) Demonizing federal spending on things that few people understand or care about. This is the cultural compensation derived from destroying USAID (the now imfanous US$57,000 in Sri Lanka).

13) Financing private surveillance agents as we already see in the Texas abortion bounties.

14)Blaming disasters, such as the now almost inevitable outbreak of avian flu into the general population and the continuing catastrophe of long Covid, on diseased immigrants sneaking into the US to live on welfare in the blue states; and using such lies as pretexts to block funding to blue states on the grounds that “it’s their fault anyway”.

15) Associating fossil fuels with strength, manliness, self-reliance, and other frontier virtues, while depicting renewable energy as weak, feminine, fussy and unreliable, as part of an economic campaign to give even more money to Big Carbon and a cultural campaign to discredit the green transition as flaky Euro-Brazilian talk.

The objective function is well-defined, the Muskrats are busy on the input-output tables, and if a few losers don’t know their place in the matrix, well then fire them. It is now a simple matter of making the code work without too many of the glitches that have inconvenienced Skylar Harden. It is not inevitable that the code will work well enough to crash a US opposition coalition, but the Strawberry Fields, Forever attitude[4] of the Democrats is making it so.

[1] Attributed to Paul Biya, the President of Cameroon, in speaking of his political opposition. Biya has ruled for 44 years, so maybe he is onto something.

[2] This delusional hope evidently comforts the lethargy of Kamala Harris, Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, the blue state governors, and the DNC faced with the infestation of fascist insects from which the country is already suffering.

[3] Many have seen the Tik Tok of Missouri farmer Skylar Harden. I am not criticizing Harden, who apparently has a legit contract which the feds are not respecting, though I do recommend Francesca Leigh on Tik Tok on the cultural justice of Harden’s complaint.

[4] “Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about”.