Do you think they'll be able to observe that prices are higher and their lives are even harder? My greatest concern is that the disaffected voters will be persuaded to go on a "long march," for some sort of "five year plan," that prevents them from reacting to the extreme negative effects.
They're not as dumb as you think. They know tariffs will raise prices. What they think is that tariffs may repatriate manufacturing, leading to more and better jobs and higher wages. Lower prices have resulted from outsourcing, which has resulted in their unemployment and under-employment.
They had a different reaction to price increases under Biden because those were not resulting from pro-American-worker trade policies, or at least were not perceived as such. In reality Biden was doing some things to try to repatriate manufacturing, but these policies were badly communicated if they were telegraphed at all, and they were not enough.
Constantly assuming these people are all just stupid isn't winning back any votes. To be fair: Republicans and MAGA spend a lot of time attacking straw man Democrats and liberals too.
BTW -- I see what they're thinking, but I suspect a lot of repatriated manufacturing will be so heavily automated it will not result in the mass employment gains they're hoping for.
Accepting price increases, agricultural failure and significant hardship because in five years someone might build a factory describes the five-year plan - the real one.
Sure. There are certain similarities between all authoritarian revolutionary movements with populist roots. MAGA shares commonalities with European fascism but also with Leninism and Maoism.
The basic template here is that the people (populism) become so discontented that they see no salvation in any of the existing elites or political movements, so they essentially appoint a dictator or an oligarchy to sweep it all aside in favor of <insert magical thing that will fix all their problems>. The level of naked authoritarianism and brutality varies between these movements -- some are more gloves-on and some more gloves-off -- but they all have an ultimately authoritarian character. The whole thing nearly always backfires into some form of "meet the new boss, worse than the old boss."
