While culture-war hysteria around transgender people and immigrants drove much of Trump’s support, his promise to lower prices “on Day 1” clearly resonated with economically desperate voters. Exit polls back this up. He won 76 percent of those who had faced “severe hardship” from inflation in the previous year, and 52 percent of those who’d faced “moderate hardship.” Meanwhile, Harris dominated among those who said they’d faced “no hardship,” winning 78 percent of them.

As former Daily Kos reporter Kerry Eleveld once said in our old podcast, “Democrats are the party of voters who don’t have to look at prices when grocery shopping.”

That’s why we see so many variations of “this isn’t what we voted for” in all these “Leopards Ate Faces” stories. Yes, we could scream, “IT WAS ALL THERE IN PROJECT 2025!” But let’s be honest: Most voters aren’t policy wonks. For those doing price math in the grocery aisle, politics isn’t a priority. Trump’s promise may have been absurd, but it was simple and seductive.

But falling for those lies has a cost. On the economic front, Trump and the Republican Party are governing like they always have—for the ultrawealthy, connected, and powerful, at the direct expense of their own voters. As I’ve written repeatedly, it’s like Trump is trying to hurt his base.

Early Thursday morning, House Republicans voted to gut Medicaid, which disproportionately helps rural Americans. Their tax cuts for billionaires effectively raise taxes on low-income voters—i.e., their core voters in last year’s election. MarketWatch, reporting on a University of Pennsylvania analysis of a close-to-final draft of the GOP tax bill, noted:

• The top 0.1 percent of households would rake in over $390,000 in after-tax income.
• The top 1 percent would gain $44,190.
• Households making $51,000 to $92,999 a year would get an additional $815.
• The lowest-income households, though, will see their after-tax income shrink by $940.

Yes, that voter making under $50,000, they get to deal with Trump’s price-raising tariffs and a tax hike.

On Reddit’s r/conservative subreddit, the reactions to the House passing the bill were surprisingly muted.

Some echoed traditional deficit concerns, such as the commenter who noted, “Conservatives are supposed to want less government spending and less debt. This bill will add trillions of dollars of debt over the next 10 years. We're not even kind of moving in the right direction.”

But a surprising number took umbrage at the gutting of Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps.

One top commenter the subreddit—i.e., not a troll—wrote, “I'm all for cutting waste fraud and abuse on Medicaid and SNAP, but … I think if the medicaid/SNAP changes go through as is, GOP will get mauled in the mid-terms.”

Another top commenter noted, “[I]t's not that I like high taxes, it's that I think high taxes on the lower, middle, and upper-middle-class are much more damaging than high taxes on the ultra-rich. It's both about keeping taxes low on most people, and about preventing the concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny number of people. It's also frustrating because Trump has repeatedly spoken out in favor of such tax hikes on the richest taxpayers as a way of making budgets and tax breaks work.”

This commenter also called the Medicaid provisions “cruel,” and on SNAP, they said, “[I]t's going to deny benefits to some people we would probably prefer have them. for example the people who are going to be hit hardest are the people who live in areas where jobs are scarce, who have difficult lives with a lot of barriers to getting anything done, and who have other life responsibilities like caring for family members or doing something else important in their community that they don't get paid for.”

If only there was a party that worked to protect such people …

All over social media, Trump voters are realizing they’re the ones being labeled as “fraud and waste.” Like this gem on Threads:

Again, we can point to Project 2025—the Heritage Foundation’s agenda for a second Trump administration—and note how it promised to gut SNAP and Medicaid. Yes, we warned them. But pointing fingers now isn’t useful.

What is useful? Turning this betrayal into motivation.

No, we won’t win over all Trump voters. Many are too far gone. It’s a cult.

But we don’t need all of them. We don’t even need most. We just need a small shift.

In Pennsylvania, Trump won last year by 120,266 votes. In Michigan, it was 80,103. And in Wisconsin, 29,397. Altogether, that makes for just 229,766 votes in an election where 155,512,532 were cast—or just 0.15 percent of all ballots. That’s how small of a shift we’re talking about, though obviously, the bigger the better.

I can’t recall ever seeing a party so eagerly swing a baseball bat at its own voters—many of them new to the Republican coalition.

The pain is real. And yes, most of us are impacted in some way. But if we can turn that pain into political clarity for even a slice of those voters, we can begin to reverse the damage—and take back our future.