So, we launch 2025 and begin another year. The last few months have been very eventful and this year looks like it will be even more interesting. That refers to the Chinese proverb, “May you live in interesting times.” This is, of course, more of a curse than a blessing.
Accordingly, I have an update to two of 2024’s posts before getting to the bi-monthly roundup. It has to do with two posts I wrote on Buyer’s Remorse.
Update on Buyer’s Remorse
Those two posts discussed groups of Americans who voted for Donald Trump only to find themselves regretting that choice due to subsequent events. The early list of people and organizations with buyer’s remorse has already grown, even before the first convicted felon to ever be elected president has been inaugurated.
Previously, I mentioned:
- Small-business owners who have (finally) learned that tariffs will force them to raise their prices. This will, in turn, affect both their customers and their profits.
- Arab-American voters in Michigan who made protest votes against President Biden’s support for Israel—only to grasp that the Trump administration will be even more supportive of Israel.
- Latino immigrants who are nervously reassuring themselves that only criminals will be deported, not their own relatives.
Firefighters and First Responders
To these three groups with buyer’s remorse, I now add firefighters’ unions and their supporters—people who endorsed, recommended, and voted for Donald Trump for president. After the election came the budget negotiations needed to keep the government open.
In the final bill, Congressional Republican failed to secure the funding for the 9/11 victims’ healthcare program. The three-month stopgap measure to keep the government open did not include funding for 9/11 first responders. This outcome disappointed New York. City firefighters, who called the decision “unfathomable.”
Farmers of All Kinds
At the same time, farmers of all kinds are looking at a new reality in which undocumented immigrants, who make up a large portion of the workforce on which they depend, just may get deported. Panic ensues.
Reuters reports that, “U.S. farm industry groups want President-elect Donald Trump to spare their sector from his promise of mass deportations, which could upend a food supply chain heavily dependent on immigrants in the United States illegally.”
The U.S. Departments of Labor and Agriculture estimate that nearly half of the nation’s approximately two million farm workers lack legal status, along with many dairy and meatpacking workers. Data from the National Center for Farmworker Health indicates that more than 60% of all agricultural workers in the U.S. are from Mexico.
Buyer’s Remorse and Contradictory Promises
“The country’s largest agricultural constituency backed Trump in November, bucking California’s deep-blue electorate over his campaign promises to “open the faucet” and deliver more water to the state’s parched, conservative-leaning Central Valley. But now it’s reckoning with an uncomfortable contradiction: Trump also campaigned on mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, who make up at least half of the state’s agricultural workforce.”
As reality sets in, we read dour predictions of crops going unharvested, cows left un-milked and fruit rotting on the trees. Did the farmers not consider this in November?
Magical Thinking and Fortunate Beliefs
What I find unfathomable is how many people persuaded themselves that bad things would be okay as long as they happened to other people—but never to them. And those mental gymnastics took place despite the candidate’s clear statements to the contrary.
This magical thinking led a lot of Americans to vote against their own best interests, secure in the belief that others might suffer but they would be just fine. Which also means it’s just fine if bad things happen to other people, as long as they don’t happen to you. Think about that.
Now reality begins to intrude. And reality bites.
