Donald Trump’s Supporters Will Bear the Cost of His Economic Chaos

Millions of voters this election will cast ballots for Donald Trump on the promise that he will exact “retribution” against Washington elites he says have sold out the American public to enrich themselves. But the real casualty of a Trump revolution wouldn’t be the elites; it would be everyday Americans, including many of his own supporters, who would bear the brunt of his second term.

Lurking beneath all the noise coming out of the former president’s 2024 campaign, the pitch he and running mate JD Vance have put forth goes something like this: Democrats are taking what is rightfully yours and using it to buy the support of undeserving outsiders—but we have a plan to restore it. “TRUMP WILL FIX IT!” as one of his rally signs goes. But that populism is merely a trojan horse for an agenda that is anything but: a policy program that would benefit Trump’s friends and wealthiest supporters at the expense of the middle and working classes.

On Tuesday, Elon Musk—the richest man on the planet and one of Trump’s most enthusiastic backers—told supporters in a telephone town hall that a MAGA win in November would bring about “temporary hardship” for the country, as the administration seeks to “reduce spending to live within our means.” It’s an unusual closing campaign message, and Musk seemed to try to soften it by implying that the hardship would only be felt by “people who are taking advantage of the government.” But he directly acknowledged, in a post Tuesday on X, that Trump’s promise of “mass deportations” and government cuts would result in an immediate “severe overreaction in the economy” and that “markets would tumble” before a “rapid recovery,” as a supporter predicted. “Sounds about right,” Musk agreed.

The idea of destroying the economy with a vague promise of building something better in its place may not be much of a gamble for a billionaire like Musk, who stands to take on an influential position in a second Trump administration. But it’s a lot to ask of the average taxpayer, who can ill afford the recession or depression economists say Trump’s tariff proposals would cause—let alone the kind of full-scale collapse Musk, a key Trump economic adviser, is actively cheering for.

Speaking of: The sweeping tariffs Trump said he’d impose—and which would be passed on to American consumers already feeling the pain of inflation—are a key part of his plan to pay for the tax cuts that, like the one he instituted in his first term, will go to the wealthy, not the middle class. Trump has insisted, bizarrely, that “tariff” is a “beautiful word.” But in his proposal, it would act as a perverse kind of welfare—using Americans’ pocketbooks to subsidize tax breaks for his “rich as hell” allies. “We’re gonna give you tax cuts,” Trump promised donors at Mar-a-Lago late last year.

Those remarks came during a private event, and President Joe Biden said they showed what Trump “says when he thinks you’re not watching.” But, of course, Trump and the Republicans sometimes make little secret of what they’re up to even when the public is watching. At a campaign event on Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson pledged to help Trump kill the Affordable Care Act—Barack Obama’s landmark package that nearly 50 million Americans have relied on for healthcare.

“No Obamacare?” an attendee at the Pennsylvania event asked Johnson.

“No Obamacare,” Johnson replied.

Johnson claimed Republicans have “a lot of ideas” for reform. But if a plan exists now that didn’t when Trump tried to repeal the ACA the first time—failing only because the late John McCain gave it the thumbs-down—they’re keeping it a secret. All Johnson would say Tuesday, to assuage anyone concerned that they’d lose their healthcare under a second Trump administration, is that the GOP would “take government bureaucrats out of the healthcare equation.”

“We want to take a blowtorch to the regulatory state,” Johnson said.

The “regulatory state,” as it were, is also a preoccupation of Musk—unsurprising, given the antagonistic relationship between his companies and the federal agencies that conduct oversight over them. Musk has called for the creation of a Department of Government Efficiency—or DOGE, a reference to a meme (and cryptocurrency) the 53-year-old finds irresistibly funny—and Trump has indicated he would tap him to run it. “We need to do it,” Trump said at the Economic Club of New York in September.

This wholesale gutting of the federal government is, of course, a major tenet of Project 2025, the blueprint of a second Trump administration. “The larger government gets, the less individual freedom you have,” Musk said at a recent rally. But Trump’s plan to dismantle the administrative state wouldn’t just target the D.C. bureaucrats he casts as the “deep state”—it could hurt a federal workforce that spans the nation, and that includes not just pencil-pushing regulators but Americans in all sorts of jobs, about 30 percent of which are held by veterans. Trump frames such an overhaul as “draining the swamp.” But the cuts would be felt by workers—and communities—far from Washington.

Republicans have long found success in getting their blue-collar supporters to vote against their own interests, branding themselves “working class” heroes while hollowing out the systems and institutions that once allowed the middle and working classes to thrive. But that dynamic has grown even more stark in the Trump era, as he and his MAGA allies tap into the resulting disillusionment to push culture-war grievance.

“For those who have been wrong and betrayed,” he said at the onset of his 2024 campaign, “I am your retribution.”

But Trump isn’t fighting for anyone but himself, and the division he sows along the way will only “help those at the very top and hurt everyone else,” as Kamala Harris put it in her compelling closing campaign message Tuesday.

Trump is “asking you to give him another four years in the Oval Office—not to focus on your problems, but to focus on his,” Harris said in her address Tuesday at the Ellipse, where this “petty tyrant” instigated a violent attack on democracy in 2021. “I offer a different path.”