As dumb as it is, Trump ran on these policies and is delivering.
(Also, Trump did not run on these policies -- he's implementing policies he explicitly repudiated when he lied about not being affiliated with the Project 2025 manifesto.)
I don't want to let the voters off the hook, but continuous, ongoing responsibility for this unfolding economic and political disaster lies with the people who hold institutional authority, and are refusing to use it to comply with the law as it stands.
I also agree that Congress is self-serving and corrupt.
The part I disgreed with in my earlier comment was specifically the link between Congress's corruption and their inaction.
For 8+ years the left has been putting forward comments like "if only republican voters knew ..." This far in, I think the simpler explanation is that they do know, and approve of Trump doing it.
Where do you think Project 2025 came from? Trump may not have run on the specific, enumerated list of items in the Project 2025 agenda, but everything in that agenda falls in line with Trumpist goals and right-wing Republican ideals, and it had deep connections with the Republican Party establishment and Trump's own network. It was published by the same group that selected Trump's Supreme Court nominees. It didn't simply emerge from the aether.
The narrative that "this isn't what Trump voters voted for" is being pushed hard right now for understandable reasons. That may be true in some cases, but it's also true that this is exactly what a lot of Trump voters voted for. At worst, they simply didn't expect the consequences of their actions to affect them, but they knew what they wanted to happen to everyone else.
Do we think for one second he has any grand vision about governing? Hahaha. Nope. That he outsourced to the heritage foundation. TikTok? He was originally saying it’s a Chinese spy app and it should be sold to US interests or banned. Then he gets tens of millions (hundreds?) in campaign contributions and thinks it’s benign.
He can be bought. And that’s bad. Because many of our enemies have deep pockets. And many of his voters are willfully ignorant to all his and his administration’s flaws.
90% of the voting public pays little attention to policy (not saying this is a good thing).
A good portion of people that voted for Trump voted for him because he promised to hurt Those People. And just like Trump 1.0, it's going to end up hurting them as well (per /r/LeopardsAteMyFace):
> “I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
* https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/flo...
