'Everything's in the shitter': MAGA's most loyal bros turn on Trump
Even Elon Musk came out swinging against Trump's tariffs this weekend, to which White House trade adviser Peter Navarro shot back on live TV: "Elon sells cars." Ope!
Barstool Sports CEO Dave Portnoy has had a long and storied love affair with Donald Trump that now spans a full decade. “I don’t care if he’s a joke,” Portnoy wrote in a blog post back in 2015 announcing his vote for Trump. “I don’t care if he’s racist. I don’t care if he’s sexist. I don’t care about any of it. I hope he stays in the race and I hope he wins. Why? Because I love the fact that he is making other politicians squirm.”
Portnoy, a misogynist manfluencer with 3.6 million followers on X, has been so cozy with Trump for the past 10 years that Trump actually offered him a job last month in the Commerce Department working under Secretary Howard Lutnick, which Portnoy says he didn’t take because he would’ve had to find someone else to run Barstool. Fast forward to this past Friday—two days after “Liberation Day,” when Trump announced his masochistic and nonsensical tariffs that instantly crushed the stock market and sent the world economy into a tailspin—and Portnoy has posted a viral video of himself rage-crying about his net worth as a result of Trump’s trade policies.
"I'm down 7 million bucks in stocks and crypto, and it's tariff city,” an apoplectic Portnoy rants in the clip. “Trump has put his tariffs all over the place. I've been trying to understand them. I don't. Like it's more a trade deficit tariff to me. Like, hey, we get this much shit from you, and you get this much from us. Let's even that up. Let's get some wacky formula, do tariffs. And everything's in the shitter because of it."
I gotta say, nothing about these tariffs feels good; I hate watching hardworking people’s 401(k)s get wiped out, including mine, and I don’t wish financial ruin even on the Trumpiest of Trump voters. I hate the idea that one single narcissistic idiot has the power to erase billions of dollars from the global economy in three days because he took the wrong lesson from an 8th grade economics class about trade policy in the 1800s. But getting to watch Dave Portnoy screech about losing $7 million in crypto and stocks overnight because he helped elect a fascist cartoon dickhead twice does give me a bit of comfort right now, like a grilled cheese and tomato soup when I’m down with a cold.
Meanwhile, the circular firing squad raged on all weekend among Trump’s biggest cheerleaders and enablers. “Conservative intellectual” weenus Ben Shapiro said on his propaganda channel that the tariffs are “probably unconstitutional” and "one of the biggest tax increases on American consumers in the history of America," causing confused X users to brand him a “radical leftist.”
Richard Hanania, a notorious white supremacist and “anti-woke” thought leader, straight up said he regrets voting for Trump. “For those asking: yes, voting for Trump was a mistake,” he posted on X. “I thought we'd get a repeat of the first administration, but we didn't. The signs were there, I just did not take my own ideas about the awfulness of Trump and MAGA seriously enough.” (His “own ideas” that he says he should have taken seriously included the sentence, “I must’ve thought that maybe Jared Kushner would wait til [Trump] fell asleep around noon and then start making all the right calls.” LOL. )
Hanania added on X that “nobody knew how bad” Trump was going to be. Except basically any resistance wine mom who watches any amount of MSNBC, plus all the rest of us who have been saying over and over how bad Trump was going to be based on exactly what Trump was saying he was going to do.
Senator Ted Cruz, who stood by Trump even after Trump called his wife ugly, is also speaking out against Trump’s tariffs, warning that if they push the US into “a recession, particularly a bad recession, 2026 in all likelihood politically would be a bloodbath” for Republicans. “You would face a Democrat House, and you might even face a Democrat Senate,” Cruz said.
Even Trump’s co-president Elon Musk, who lost $12 billion in a day last week due to the stock market drop on top of Tesla’s pre-existing turmoil, has come out swinging against Trump’s trade policies—the first time Musk has broken with Trump on anything in such a big and public way since the inauguration. Europe and the United States should move “to a zero tariff situation, effectively creating a free trade zone between Europe and North America," Musk told "The League Congress" on Saturday, an event hosted by right wing Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini. Musk then took direct aim at Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, on X, responding to a video of Navarro explaining the tariffs with a barb about Navarro’s Ph.D. in Econ from Harvard being “a bad thing, not a good thing.”
In response to someone arguing that Navarro is “correct” in his analysis, Musk wrote back, “He ain’t built shit.”
Navarro responded by going on Fox News to essentially call Musk a car salesman, despite this administration basically entrusting Musk to break into every federal building and fire thousands of essential government employees. “We understand what's going on here,” Navarro said. “Elon sells cars…He's simply protecting his own interests.”
My, how the turns have tabled. One would think that this hemorrhaging of support on the right—along with Trump’s plummeting approval numbers, Elon Musk’s crushing loss in Wisconsin last week, and the 1,400 mass protests of Trump and Musk across the United States on Saturday—might be enough to cause Trump to rethink his deeply unpopular new tariffs. Or at least enough to pressure Republicans in Congress to pass a bill taking back their power of the purse, which they essentially ceded to Trump in the last budget showdown. Alas—it looks like none of that is going to happen in the near future. So all we have to survive on right now, basically, is the schadenfraude of watching men like Portnoy and Shapiro twist in the wind and the enduring hope that elections here will still be a thing by 2026. **prayer hand emoji**
If he comes for their money (and by "their" I mean the wealthy but not broligarch class) and they STILL support him, well....I don't even know where we go from there. Considering the data on Congressional stock ownership, you'd think this would be the last straw.