I’m feeling thankful for the small things today

What a huge amount of marginal/occasional voters care about more than ethnic cleansing, pronouns, and trans volleyball players is the price of ground beef etc. I’ve got some good news — a gospel if you will — about these people, which is that they are dumb, real dumb, and therefore what they expected Donald Trump to do was to “bring prices down,” which is what they think getting inflation “under control” means. There aren’t enough hand puppets in the world to explain to them why that’s not actually a good aspiration, especially since the explanation sounds like some kind of fancy talk from espresso-sipping East Coast effete elites, who don’t know how to load a side of beef into the back of an F-150.

A fellow Michigan football prevert offers up this analogy:

My hopeful thinking on the imminent fall of Donald Trump:

I’ve posted before about how football coaches with striking and very idiosyncratic character traits have fan bases who eat that shit up when things are going well and get really angry at those same traits when things go south. Charlie Weis’s bravado, Ty Willingham’s stoic demeanor, whatever.

Donald Trump may have finally run into the one thing that will get his followers irritated: inflation. We are starting to see, for maybe the first time ever, a bit of “Stop blaming Biden, you fuckwit. Acknowledge the problem and do something.”

If he continues to insist inflation doesn’t exist, it’s Biden’s fault and the media made it up, as families are seeing the bills for Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas shopping (and travel), he may move that “blame Democrats for everything” personality trait from asset to liability, and that would be catastrophic for him.

I’ve noted before that the psychology of inflation is quite peculiar and not at all rational: paying ten dollars for a cheeseburger feels much more expensive when you’re making $100K than paying for one did 30 years ago, when it cost $4 and you were making $30K, even though maths say that in real terms the latter was more expensive than the former. (I just read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, which is pretty great, and I learned that the Brits say “maths” instead of “math,” which is weird. Also the protagonist keeps saying “do sex” rather than “have sex” but I don’t know if this is a Britishism or his autism talking). Combine this with the fact that a bout of relatively high inflation after many years of low inflation is something that people have a hard time adjusting to in terms of their long-term baseline, and the Ariana Grande cohort is going to be real unhappy during the holidays, what with all the semi-obligatory gift giving and travel and so forth.

I was also going to mention something about the mass internet outage this morning and its relationship to Paul Weller and The Jam but I will leave that for another post.