The Trump Supporters Who Didn’t Take Him at His Word

By David A. Graham

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

 

Ask Trump supporters why they like the president, and chances are good you’ll hear something like: He tells it like it is and says what he means. The question, then, is why so many of them refused to take him at his word. Over the first three weeks of the second Trump presidency, a recurrent motif is that Trump does exactly what he said he would, and then people who backed him react with shock and dismay.

 

If you’re surprised, you weren’t paying attention—and judging from recent examples, many people weren’t. When Trump announced his plan (I’m using the word generously) to occupy the Gaza Strip and convert it into an international real-estate development, the chairman of Arab Americans for Trump, which formed to back him during the election, expressed shock and betrayal, and announced that the group would rename itself Arab Americans for Peace. Some Arab American voters may have felt compelled to lodge a protest vote against Joe Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza, even if it meant contributing to Trump’s win, but no one should have been surprised that a guy who used Palestinian as an insult during the campaign was not a sincere champion for the people of Gaza.

 

Some Venezuelan Americans in Florida are feeling similar outrage. Trump continued to make gains with Hispanic voters in 2024, but this month he ended Temporary Protected Status, a designation that allows noncitizens to stay in the country, for about 300,000 Venezuelans, with more TPS designees likely to lose their status later. “They used us,” the Venezuelan activist Adelys Ferro told NPR. “During the campaign, the elected officials from the Republican Party, they actually told us that he was not going to touch the documented people. They said, ‘No, it is with undocumented people.’” In fact, both Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance said they wanted to deport people legally allowed in the country, such as Haitians in Springfield, Ohio. Some voters just convinced themselves that their own groups wouldn’t become targets.

 

They’re not alone. Some Kentucky educators who voted for Trump are aghast that his administration is trying to cut off federal funding that they need to keep their schools functioning, despite his campaign-trail promises to abolish the Department of Education. “I did not vote for that,” one principal told CNN. “I voted for President Trump to make America first again and to improve our lives.” The Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest police union, endorsed Trump for president, then decried Trump’s decision to pardon January 6 rioters who attacked police officers—never mind that he had promised pardons while campaigning. CEOs and bankers who decided they liked Trump better because he favors low taxes and less regulation are suddenly chagrined to learn that he was serious about tariffs. A Missouri farmer who voted for Trump is horrified that the administration is freezing federal funding for conservation programs, even though Trump promised to eliminate environmental programs and slash government spending.

 

All of this was foreseeable. In a 2015 tweet that remains depressingly relevant a decade later, Adrian Bott joked: “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.” But I don’t want to single out ordinary citizens. Even Republican members of Congress are doing the same dance—cheering on Trump cuts in general but scrambling to protect their own states from losing any federal money. They ran for office with the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party, but they never expected the leopards to eat their faces too.

 

Other Trump promises were pretty dubious if you listened to the rest of his plans. “Starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again,” he said. But Trump’s signature campaign ideas were large tariffs and mass deportation. Both of these are inflationary: Tariffs raise the price of goods, and mass deportation makes labor scarcer, raising salaries, which in turn drives prices higher. Today, the Federal Reserve released the first Consumer Price Index update of Trump’s term, finding 3 percent inflation. That’s a hair above economists’ expectations but in line with last month’s figures. Persistent inflation shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, and not only because of the sharp rise in egg prices, driven by bird flu, that my colleague Lora Kelley covered last week.

 

You don’t need an economics degree to predict this. You just had to heed the many warnings about it, which even Fox News covered. Or you could just listen to what Trump said, as when he suggested that tariffs would pay for child care or that Biden’s encouragement of wind power was responsible for inflation. These aren’t just the kinds of comforting nonsense all politicians sometimes peddle; they’re incoherent. Since winning the election, he has downplayed his inflation promises and announced a set of tariffs that, although not fully felt yet, may already be edging prices higher. Now Trump wants the Fed to drop interest rates, which would stimulate the economy—and likely increase inflation.

 

When Trump ran for president in 2016, uncertainty about his seriousness was understandable. He was a legendary merchant of hyperbole, and no one was sure where his persona ended and his real political intentions began. No such excuse applies anymore—as I pointed out in September, Trump was president once, and he tried to keep most of his big promises, albeit often ineffectively. This time around, Trump said he was going to do these things—and hey, he tells it like it is.