It's Always Festivus for Trump

The airing of grievances is the right's national pastime

Programming Note: There is so much breaking news on the Ukraine/Russia front that

Olga Lautman

and I are doing another Substack Live chat at 12:30 PM ET today to break it all down. Thank you to everyone who joined us on Tuesday night. We’ll see you again in a few hours.

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After our car salesman-in-chief turned the White House lawn into a Tesla dealership this week, I did a routine hit on MSNBC where I had the temerity to drop some facts to the Trump faithful about who buys Teslas. You can watch the clip below but the part that kicked off World War III in the MAGAverse was when I said this:

”I don’t know who he thinks is buying Teslas but they’re out of reach, many of them, for the average Trump voter.”

Can you imagine better catnip for the grievance party than someone daring to say that the average Trump voter may not be in the market for Donald Trump’s favorite new car? (The version the president ostensibly purchased starts at around $80,000, which is more than the average salary of the average Trump voter. Also, LOL. Does anyone actually believe that Trump spent a dime of his own money on a Tesla Cybertruck for his granddaughter, as he claimed?)

Predictably, the MAGAites took to Elon Musk’s social media site to complain that I called them poor or unworthy or whatever grievance they felt like peddling to gin each other up. (I am actually being nice about how erudite they were. Many of the tweets included the C-word and instructions to do things to myself that I am not flexible enough to do.)

Libs of TikTok, which I understand is an extremist feed run by a right-wing influencer who decided to monetize hate, got in on the action:

It’s fucking Festivus every day on the right. If they didn’t have a daily airing of grievances, they would not know what to do with themselves. These little snowflakes practically melt when someone brings facts to a debate or exposes them for what they are — people who have so internalized and professionalized whining that they will never, ever be happy, even when they get everything they have ever wanted. (Like, you know, their hero in the White House, their party controlling Congress and their true-believer warriors on the federal bench.)

Here are some cold, hard facts for those of us who live in the reality-based world and who prefer to arm themselves with information, rather than grievance. The average Tesla owner is a white, 48-year-old California male making $148,000. About one-third have a post-graduate degree. Kamala Harris outperformed Joe Biden among white voters with college degrees. She won California handily and also beat Trump among voters making over $100,000. Trump won voters earning less than $100,000. It’s not elitist to point that out. It’s just a fact .

In other words, the average Tesla consumer did not vote for Trump. And it’s no wonder. Here is what Trump told his supporters about Musk just a few years ago:

“When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it’s electric cars that don’t drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he’d be worthless, and telling me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, ‘drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it.”

Trump has also consistently gone after electric vehicles, which he said “are good if you have a towing company.” In 2023, he said, “They don’t go far. They cost a fortune.”

But now that Trump is pro-Tesla, so is the MAGA mob. What hypocrites. What cultists.

Now, if I were a typical Congressional Democrat and the right came at me like this, I would put out a clarifying statement apologizing to anyone I may have offended and promising to do better. That’s the kind of feckless, gutless, terrified “leadership” that has gotten the Senate Democratic caucus to the point where they actually might provide Republicans with the votes to avert a MAGA government shutdown.

This week, the Republican-led House passed a stopgap budget measure that would fund the government through September 30, sent it over to the Senate and then promptly went home. The Republican-led Senate now has one of two options: pass this hyper-partisan bill that would allow Trump to gut and run roughshod over the federal workforce and unilaterally impose tariffs on our allies without Congressional approval or shut the government down on Saturday.

The key phrase here is “Republican-led.” As in, the Republicans are in charge of the federal government. In the normal world, Pottery Rule would apply: you break it, you own it.

But for the Festivus Party, this only provides an opportunity to air more grievances against a Democratic party with virtually no power and to gaslight the nation into believing that it is the Democrats who will be at fault for not providing the votes to bail them out. Mind you, Republicans in both the House and Senate can’t even get every single one of their members to vote for this shit sandwich. And yet, it is somehow the Democrats’ fault if the government shuts down.

Senate Democrats are, as is their wont, in a state of panic, even though Republicans have never paid any price for shutting down the federal government in previous years. Republican Rep. Tim Burchett admitted as much on CNN a few days ago, saying that there would not be a political penalty if the government shuts down. “It doesn’t show up at the polls,” he conceded.

He’s right. It doesn’t. And it won’t now if Democrats actually get a backbone and figure out how to message effectively, rather than cowering at the first sign of Republican grievance-airing. For those who say that Democrats are acting like responsible adults in keeping the government open, I ask you: who says the American people voted for responsible adults to govern them? Last I checked, MAGA got rewarded last November for promising to burn it all down. Democrats should not stand in the way of Trump and his minions giving the voters what they asked for.

Maybe once the American people see the actual horror of MAGA government at play, they will vote to deliver two open House seats to Democrats in Florida’s special elections next month. Maybe it will take longer for the effects of Trump’s policies to be felt across the country. But if Congressional Democrats keep bailing Republicans out, I know one thing for sure: Republicans will blame Democrats for the ill-effects of their own policies and Democrats will have no one to blame but themselves.