Trump’s fruitless search for a goreable ox

mostlysignssomeportents:

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If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/09/cossie-livvie-crissie/#dont-let-your-meat-loaf

I’ve got good news and bad news for Trump. The good news: you can get elected by promising to do something about the cost of living crisis, and the president actually has a lot of ways to improve people’s daily costs. The bad news: everything you could do to fix working people’s cost of living will make an oligarch worse off.

This is the essential conundrum of Trumpismo: to keep his base happy, he needs to make their lives better; but to make their lives better, he’ll have to make oligarchs angry. The oligarchs’ wealth bonanza caused the cost of living crisis. Oligarchs’ pleasure causes our suffering, so alleviating our suffering will reduce their pleasure.

This means that while Trump can promise help with prices, all he can deliver is union-busting, ICE lynchings, and pointless wars, none of which have any hope of materially improving the lives of working people. Indeed, all of this stuff makes working people materially worse off, as wages fall, crops rot in the fields, and gas prices shoot through the roof.

Trump would dearly love to find an ox he can safely gore, but all the good oxen are owned by his oligarch chums. Trump can’t punish Ticketmaster, because the billions Ticketmaster steals from the WWE, F1 and football fans in his base all land in the pocket of oligarchs who own stock in Ticketmaster, and Trump can’t afford to upset those oligarchs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/03/aoi-aoi-oh/#concentrated-gains-vast-diffused-losses

Indeed, I can’t think of a single corrupt racket that Trump can afford to do something about. Not even the only cost of living metric that can approach gas prices in the hierarchy of American electoral salience: grocery prices.

Your grocery bill went up because oligarchs price-gouge you. Eggflation was caused by Cal-Maine, the monopolist that owns every brand of eggs in your grocer’s fridge, who jacked up prices because they knew they could:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/10/demand-and-supply/#keep-cal-maine-and-carry-on

Pepsi and Walmart conspired to force every retailer to jack up the prices of all Pepsi products (including Frito-Lay, Gatorade, Aquafina, etc) at every retailer’s store , so that Walmart could also jack up their prices and still undersell their competition (naturally, Trump let them get away with it):

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/secret-documents-show-pepsi-and-walmart

This stuff isn’t exactly a secret. Grocery store owners hold earnings calls with their investors where they boast about the fact that they can raise their prices far in excess of their increased costs, and blame it on inflation:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

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