Something that Sarah Hoyt posted over at Instapundit struck a chord with me this morning: "DOES THIS NATION NOT REALIZE THE RISK OF SATISFIED CONSUMERS? Trump Derangement Syndrome: Leftist Is Alarmed Prices at Costco Are Coming Down."
The link posted goes to an Amy Curtis piece at Townhall. Amy points to a post on Reddit. (My spell checker is complaining bitterly, but I’ve left the typos from the original Reddit post alone.)
Costco is quietly slashing prices. This feels wrong.
I go to costco every week. it’s probably the only thing i do consistently. i’ve been doing it for years, i know how the prices move. lately? everything’s discounted. i’m not talking promo tags or little manufacturer markdowns — i mean whole shelves of items dropped 20–40%. across categories. not seasonal either.this isn’t normal. prices are supposed to be going up with tariffs, inflation, shipping costs, whatever. instead they’re dumping inventory. aggressively. either demand is collapsing or something upstream is forcing their hand.
it just doesn’t make sense. it feels off. maybe i’m overreacting, but i’ve never seen price drops like this since i started going. if this is what it looks like at costco — the most stable, boring, buy-in-bulk fortress of consumerism — then i don’t really want to know what’s coming next.
maybe it’s nothing. but probably not.
Amy responds in a somewhat bemused fashion:
So there are forces at work here that absolutely explain Costco's lower prices. But Reddit users, driven by Trump Derangement Syndrome, look at lower costs as a bad thing. It's incredibly revealing.
Oh, indeed it is, Amy.
For nearly a year now, I’ve seen conservatives bombarded with questions from the usual suspects about how grocery prices have not fallen, and asking what happened to the promises of Donald Trump. In other words, a large part of the left’s narrative has been that Trump’s promises are meaningless. They have yet to bring themselves to admit, even among themselves, that they alone are responsible for the shellacking they took last November, but they are at least alert enough to recognize that the policies of Trump are working, and working well. They recognize this as a huge impediment to their ever regaining political power, any time in their lifetimes.
Here, as elsewhere, we have a leftist Reddit user who is reacting in fear. He knows that a huge danger to the Democrats, indeed the largest danger, is voters who are satisfied with Trump’s performance in office, removing what they believe the left believes to be their strongest arguments for voting Democrat: that the left has the sole answer to the economic issues facing Joe and Jane Average. That argument is now broken, and leftists know it.
Put another way, Democrats are not worried that Trump will fail in his stated goals; they’re not worried that his policies will not work. Their biggest fear is that his policies will, in fact, work, thus making their winning in at least the next few election cycles, nigh on impossible. Their biggest hope now is for Trump to fail, and congressional Democrats, by way of this shutdown, are doing their damnedest to make sure that happens. The Tampa Free Press recently confirmed this, incidental to the arguments over DOGE having access to Treasury data:
Democratic lawmakers held a rally Tuesday outside the Treasury Department to protest Elon Musk’s access to that agency’s data. That operative, Julian Epstein, said on “The Evening Edit” that the rally looked like a bad “Saturday Night Live” skit. Epstein went on to say that the real fear for Democrats is the potential loss of their core political offerings — big government and identity politics.
“What the Democrats and caterwauling really fear is that Trump is going to be successful in cutting out waste and unpopular policies like DEI from the federal government and is gonna have public support for it,” Epstein told Elizabeth MacDonald. “Why are they so scared about that? Because if big government and the sort of, you know, neo-Marxist ideas like the DEI and race preferences, if those things fall with public support then Democrats have nothing to sell to the public. That’s what they’re really scared about.”
This is what it looks like when your biggest fear is that your country will be successful without your leftist policies in place. The thing is, it’s already happening, and that’s being reflected in the fear-filled commentary on social media and in Democrat pressers.
Politico, just after the 2024 election, recognized this, and I'm betting they wish this prophetic piece hadn't seen the light of day:
The Democratic Party has faced crises before, most recently after Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016. But that year, many Democrats — and some Republicans — dismissed Trump’s victory as lacking a popular mandate. This year, his election by even wider margins made that impossible, coming after two impeachments, the riot at the Capitol and his felony convictions. The party now is less in disbelief than in a tailspin — and with an emerging consensus that its image is not just damaged, but broken.
It’s not helping — after all, free healthcare for illegals is still front and center on the Democrat agenda. (Which, by the way, is exactly what the shutdown has always been about. That's a topic for another column.)
I make no claims to clairvoyance. I am by no means a great sage, sitting on a mountain top awaiting pilgrims to come up to hear my wisdom. But even for me, it’s not hard to make the prediction that the desperation I mentioned a few weeks ago will become even more strident and more viciously ridiculous, as we approach the midterms.
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