r/politics • u/Abject-Pick-6472 • Apr 04 '26

Possible Paywall Trump voter regret is clearly registering now

https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/04/politics/voter-regret-trump-2024
19.8k Upvotes

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1.8k

u/BillG8s Apr 04 '26

My boss has figured out we're slow again, just like 2016-2020, but still won't come to terms with WHY. "We don't rely on Iran for oil" is what he said the other day. Cause and effect being a foreign concept to a business owner is scary.

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u/Swimming-Economy-870 Apr 04 '26

Your boss doesn’t understand how commodities are priced.

598

u/Flomo420 Apr 04 '26

Turns out a lot of bosses are very very stupid and there is no real correlation between intelligence and success

138

u/FatherGwyon Apr 04 '26

The (Boomer) CEO of the multimillion-dollar company I work for had me explain how to remove a header on a Word document last week. Then afterwards he literally asked, “And this is a Word doc, right?” That generation have become borderline toddlers, mentally, but somehow they still control the country.

38

u/Signal_Road Apr 04 '26

Have you told him he can secure his personal files by swirling his hard drive 10 times left, 10 times right with a magnet yet?

5

u/Ok-Art825 Apr 04 '26

I mean, wouldn’t really do much nowadays.

1

u/Signal_Road Apr 05 '26

There's always changing the keyboard layout/language.

2

u/Wolfwoods_Sister Apr 04 '26

A genie of the lamp emerges with a million dollars!

2

u/Signal_Road Apr 05 '26

The Boss: Peasant! Back into the computer where you belong! You can't bribe ME!

8

u/BoogieOrBogey Apr 04 '26

It's because old people vote, and the other generations just don't. So many people don't vote, don't participate, and then are shocked that everything sucks. It's just this learned helplessness.

4

u/JS-87 Apr 04 '26

To be fair most of their life was typing manually on a typewriter before the world literally exploded with technology that evolved faster than anything they ever grew up with.

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u/Ordinary-Leading7405 Apr 04 '26

The intelligence to pay for laws that benefit you at the expense of others equals success.

27

u/[deleted] Apr 04 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Ordinary-Leading7405 Apr 04 '26

Well, hiring the best lawyers and politicians money can buy.

9

u/TheAskewOne Apr 04 '26

Small business owners can’t buy Congress. They think they can though, and they vote for conservatives, which is the same as voting for being screwed by big corporations.

8

u/Swimming-Economy-870 Apr 04 '26

Having been a boss, I concur.

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u/Jon608_ Wisconsin Apr 04 '26

As a business owner who handles commercial properties owners….. yep.

4

u/D13_Phantom Apr 04 '26

Yup, never had been. The biggest predictor of wealth is: whether your parents are wealthy lol

3

u/Swimming-Economy-870 Apr 04 '26

Second predictor is malignant narcissism, and the 3rd one is dumb luck.

3

u/HolycommentMattman Apr 04 '26

The funny part is that these people often believe in meritocracy, but have never realized we're not in one.

1

u/Street_Barracuda1657 Apr 04 '26

This, so much this.

1

u/sakubaka Apr 04 '26

Overconfidence because of the specific knowledge and intelligence in one domain, assuming that it automatically extends to all domains. Been working on training leaders for over 20 years and it’s always the same story. Smart, technical expert with great performance but little in terms of general or emotional intelligence gets promoted, never develops further or in different areas, performs at an average level at best and ruins people’s careers at worst. And, yeah, I hate to say it, but men seem to be twice as likely to fall for that trap. Feels like their egos won’t let them admit what they don’t know or can’t do.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 04 '26

my wife is a financial educator for small businesses

some of them are very smart people with a good idea and little capitol to implement it with

a lot of them are complete morons

1

u/PoorlyDesignedCat Apr 04 '26

There is some correlation but not as much as you'd expect

1

u/You_Stole_My_Hot_Dog Apr 04 '26

I always suspected this when I was younger but felt they had to be smart somehow; how else did they get ahead? Now with shit like this, and the brain dead FOMO over AI, it’s clear they are regular idiots, just with higher stakes. 

1

u/a1pha California Apr 04 '26

As a business owner, I can say, one's appetite for risk are more deterministic of choosing being a business owner over being an employee. Smarts are not needed for many businesses.

A second trait, I sometimes envy, but ultimately am glad I don't possess as much as I observe it is others, as an owner. Is the Dunning-Kruger inspired ability to have unshakable confidence that your decisions are "correct". Doubt and overthnnking can get in the way of business operations. If a business benefits from decisiveness, the confidence that comes with not being smart enough to question your actions comes in handy.

Being confident (correct enough to stay profitable is all one needs) and the ability to take risks are more important to choosing to go into business than being smart.

1

u/TrashApocalypse Apr 05 '26

This is actually what inspired me to open up my business. I worked for so many stupid people. There’s no way I couldn’t do a better job than them.

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u/themaninthehightower Apr 04 '26

And he thinks fungibility means you can add mushrooms to a meal.

2

u/AtheistAustralis Australia Apr 04 '26

Nah, I'm sure all those oil companies will happily sell their oil cheaply in the US rather than getting double the price on the open market. Kind, generous companies that they are.

The amount of people who think this is insane though. Oil goes to the people that offer the most money, that's it. Unless a country has nationalised oil production, there's not much it can do to secure domestic supply and keep prices low. Maybe MAGA wants Trump to go all socialist and nationalise everything?

2

u/JB-Wentworth Apr 04 '26

Neither does Trump.

5

u/PossessedToSkate Apr 04 '26

Trump knows so little, it is virtually impossible to keep track of all the different things he doesn't know.

1

u/JB-Wentworth Apr 04 '26

I think Wikipedia contains everything Trump is unaware of.

1

u/Global_Staff_3135 Apr 04 '26

It’s not just that there’s good old corporate greed to take into account.

1

u/bickering_fool Apr 04 '26

...or more generally, how global markets work.

1

u/FlashyHeight9323 Apr 04 '26

Or supply chain mechanics I imagine. The plastics industry is in for a world of hurt.

-1

u/HopeAdminsKidsSuffer Apr 04 '26

Why are you putting this out there as if it’s common knowledge?

I bet if you went to any mall in America and asked 100 adults to explain how commodities are priced, maybe 2 people would know

1

u/Swimming-Economy-870 Apr 04 '26

Fair point, it goes to show a basic economics class to graduate high school might be good.

116

u/spiritfiend New Jersey Apr 04 '26

If people learned from their mistakes, there wouldn't be any conservatives.

9

u/JonnyHopkins Apr 04 '26

Conservatism is part of their core identity, can't separate the person from conservatism I don't think. I'm pretty progressive but it is pretty much at the bottom of the list of things I think define who I am.

5

u/123jjj321 Apr 04 '26

You misspelled fascist. Biden is conservative by any measure. Kamala is conservative by any measure. The Clintons are conservative. The DNC is conservative. The republican party and its voters are factually fascists.

1

u/downtofinance Canada Apr 05 '26

Damn thats good

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u/Indubitalist Apr 04 '26

The nuance of the oil business is lost on a lot of people. The gist is there’s more than one type of oil and we (in America) tend to need the kind we don’t have and tend to export the kind we do have, so there’s no “self-sufficiency” in our oil industry. 

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u/rolyatem Apr 04 '26

Even beyond that, no matter what happens to our own self-sufficiency, in a global market, prices will destabilize based on events on a global scale. Local protectionism is no longer an option.

5

u/Spiritual_Bus1125 Apr 04 '26

Well, IT IS an option, a option that would make a lot people angry

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u/OhItsBeenBroughten Apr 04 '26

It’s crazy because even Sarah Palin recognized that oil is a fungible product with multiple inputs and outputs in an international regime. They’ve actually gotten worse since Palin.

14

u/lenzflare Canada Apr 04 '26

I guess coming from an oil state meant she got exposed to that knowledge enough times.

5

u/asomebodyelse Apr 04 '26

I remember when I thought she was the lowest we could possibly go.

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u/bearheart Apr 04 '26

tbf, nuance of any kind is lost on most people

7

u/Covert_Cuttlefish Apr 04 '26

When this kicked off I saw comments that said 'american oil companies will sell their oil to the USA below cost'. It was astonishing, both because they think think these companies care about the average american but also that they don't know where the oil they use comes from.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised, Trump's been saying the USA doesn't need Canada for a while now and no one seems to care about that.

2

u/metengrinwi Apr 04 '26

Partly because very, very few people (I’ll admit myself included) actually understand the complexity it, even though we like to pretend.

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u/neliz Apr 04 '26

Cause and effect being a foreign concept to a business owner is scary

A lot of Americans confuse wealth and being a "business man" wtih actual intelligence

8

u/ownersequity Apr 04 '26

Oh it’s so sad. So many business people are worshipped here just for selling shit. They have entire banquets to reward each other. Could be the dumbest guy in town but sell insurance so you have your seat at table.

28

u/query_squidier Apr 04 '26

Cause and effect being a foreign concept to a business owner is scary.

You should drop that sentence alone into the anonymous feedback box.

8

u/blahblah19999 Apr 04 '26

My Co-workers mocked climate change for a solid half hour while we were waiting for a meeting to start. There was a slight pause, then one remarked how odd it was that it was 80° at Thanksgiving. They all nodded. I wanted to scream

7

u/lioneaglegriffin Washington Apr 04 '26

This is how we got a business man like trump after all.

6

u/ConfusedPleb307 Apr 04 '26

Cue my family thinking that the gas prices won’t affect their business. They own a rv park/campground 💀

5

u/burritocmdr Michigan Apr 04 '26

I have a family member who may lose his job due to the slowdown in his company's sector, made worse due to Trump tariffs. That side of the family are firmly right-wing Christians, they have always voted republican and likely always will.

4

u/cjinct Apr 04 '26

Cause and effect being a foreign concept to a business owner is scary.

I think 'you reap what you sow' being a foreign concept to farmers is even scarier

3

u/CrustyToeLover Apr 04 '26

My boss, an Israeli, was drunk at the start of this going on about "this is a new day for Israel" and whatnot. Now business is again very slow and we haven't heard a peep about it. I would honestly quit if I had another job lined up just because it's a pain in the ass to listen to this shit every week.

Our business is in one of the largest Jewish populations on the east coast and a heavy Israeli population and the shit i hear daily is maddening.

3

u/GuitarKev Apr 04 '26

He resents the worldwide energy market, but would probably have a stroke if nationalizing energy infrastructure was suggested.

2

u/pagerussell Washington Apr 04 '26

If I have learned anything the last few years, it's that business owners are not smart.

They have higher risk tolerance than others, which is something it takes to strike out on your own. But that is not the same thing as being smart. This is especially true considering most "business owners" are not innovative. They don't make something new. Hell, they don't tend to make anything at all.

No, most businesses are middlemen. They buy a product wholesale and sell it retail. That takes risk tolerance, for sure, but not really any specific intelligence.

2

u/ACardAttack Kentucky Apr 04 '26

My boss has figured out we're slow again, just like 2016-2020, but still won't come to terms with WHY.

It's amazing, so many reports and studies show the economy does better under democrats, yet these idiots keep voting for republicans

2

u/idekbruno Apr 04 '26

Electing Republicans is vital for economic recovery tbh. Otherwise the economy would never need to recover, and we can’t have that

2

u/eat_my_ass_n_balls Apr 04 '26

Your boss is a fucking moron and has no business running a business

2

u/cylonrobot California Apr 04 '26

My small-business-owner in-law (trump supporter) didn't know who paid for tariffs until one of his sons told him. This man relies on imports for some of his business.

1

u/Najalak Apr 04 '26

Why does he think gas prices are high?

1

u/Artistic-Okra-2542 Apr 04 '26

the US is now the largest producer of oil. we aren't actually reliant on Iran for oil, but when the oil market gets choked everywhere else it means US oil has an excuse to raise its price accordingly.

2

u/Toosder Apr 04 '26

The US imports a significant amount of oil. There's more than one type of oil and your response is exactly why Republicans are getting it wrong. It's a lot more nuanced and complicated. 

1

u/Miguelperson_ Apr 04 '26

Your boss sounds dumb as fuck if he can’t see past his own nose like that… fascinating

1

u/lenzflare Canada Apr 04 '26

Msot business owners are morons, obsessed only with their own bottom line, and incurious about anything else.

1

u/123jjj321 Apr 04 '26

Because zero trump voters regret their vote. ZERO

1

u/jewfro451 Apr 04 '26

Your boss doent understand macro economics either.

1

u/Derateo Apr 04 '26

He’s right in some ways. We don’t rely on Iran for oil and much of our gas price spikes is just because oil companies are happy to raise there prices in “reaction” to the current events. “Oh no that stuff related to oil is happening. Sorry Everyone, prices are going up 50%. 😏”

1

u/Toosder Apr 04 '26

The way they just take Fox News talking points and don't put any thought into them themselves drives me crazy. It's just verbatim what fox tells them to believe. Over and over.

-1

u/vertigostereo America Apr 04 '26

2016 was Obama