Trump continues to make his own voters suffer

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Trump continues to make his own voters suffer
The president’s policies are hurting his working-class MAGA followers. But will they ever leave him?

By Chauncey DeVega
Senior Writer
Published February 20, 2026 6:30AM (EST)


(Salon) Donald Trump continues to hurt his own voters, and it has gotten much worse since his return to power. There is a temptation to gloat, laugh at and mock them, but that may be a trap which could further imperil American democracy.

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Behind this great destruction are real people, and many of them are Trump’s own voters. There are Hispanic Trump voters who thought, ”We are the good ones — Trump wouldn’t hurt people like us.” Black Trumpists who ignored his overt racism. White working-class Americans who assumed they would be unaffected by his attacks on the Affordable Care Act and SNAP benefits. Business owners who didn’t think their companies would be impacted by his mass deportation campaign. They have all been proven wrong.

Many of the president’s voters supported him because he promised to break the rules and punish groups they dislike and even hate — Democrats, liberals, Black and brown people, immigrants, the LGBTQ community, feminists and others. Now the same policies they supported have boomeranged on them.

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In a recent essay, political psychologist Stephen Ducat explained why Trump’s MAGA followers remain tethered to him.

“When it comes to autocratic power in government, there is no ‘safe word,’ only obedience or obliteration,” he said. “But naked coercion makes political control brittle and unstable. And it can provoke rebellion. Much better to induce what psychologists call identity fusion, a state of mind in which, through imagined merger with the group and its leader, submission is reframed as vicarious domination.” .....................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/02/20/trump-continues-to-make-his-own-voters-suffer/