Discouraging yes but completely expected. People have difficulty admitting they did something stupid.
Plus, MAGAts tend to always find a way to blame Democrats/liberals/Biden/Pelosi/Obama when faced with bad things being done by DJT.
‘Hold my beer covfefe! 19th century? HERE WE COME!!!’ ~ DJT
Another take on it (2016 - another quick read):
I mean, honestly, it’s even stupider than that. Here’s the poll, hopefully I was able to put it on the right page - 49% who didn’t vote don’t regret that, 12% wish they’d voted for Kamala, and…7% wish they’d voted, and voted for Trump.
People are dumb.
You jest, but Trump does want to put steam power back on aircraft carriers (this goes back to his first term):
Experts: Navy Would Spend Billions to Answer Trump’s Call to Return Carriers to Steam Catapults
President Donald Trump again called to install steam catapults on future aircraft carriers, in a move experts say would cost billions of dollars and reduce the capital ships’ capabilities.
Trump, who has been critical of the Ford-class carriers’ new electromagnetic aircraft launch system (EMALS) system, said he prefers the steam-powered catapults found on the older Nimitz-class CVNs. He again called on the Navy to revert back to the old technology while speaking to naval forces in Japan over the Memorial Day weekend.
…
“We’re spending all that money on electric, and nobody knows what it’s going to be like in bad conditions,” Trump said in his speech. “I’m going to just put out an order, we’re going to use steam.”
Maybe we can swap out those sciencey nuclear reactors and put good ol’ coal-fired turbines back in, too!
I for one am well aware of this. It’s remarkable how much it’s ignored. I think it’s ignored because nobody, Republican or Democrat, wants to tell the millions of workers pining for the good old days of factory jobs, that they just aren’t needed any more.
Every unit of steel produced in the US today requires 1/5 the labor it did in 1980.
I know I’m repeating myself, but auto factories at one time could employ more than 100,000 in a single facility. Today it’s more like 5,000
I love this movie of Chevrolet manufacturing in the 30s. Look at how many jobs any layman could imagine automating today. Look at around 6:28 where they show casting into sand molds, and how many people are needed for the thousands of parts in a car. All automated today. How many machinists can be replaced by one CNC machine?
A lot of rural areas are very pretty. I’m sure the necessary staff would relocate if there was more, newer, better housing and such. Of course that would drive costs up for the current inhabitants, and they’ll probably complain that these ‘outsiders’ are driving them into bankruptcy. But if they want the factories in their towns, and don’t want to achieve the necessary education to staff them, waddya gonna do?
My experience has been that importing college-educated workers from places like Boston and Dallas into Idaho doesn’t work. Partly because while everyone loves the beauty of them, not enough are willing to give up the amenities of the population centers, especially young people. You also have the problem that fewer than 300 people in the entire state of Idaho are employed as chemists. So when you move there and your company has layoffs, you’re screwed.
How old are those stats about the number of chemists in Idaho?
Yep - a friend’s son is a chemical engineer. Was working in Kentucky. The company he worked for was bought and the new company closed down that factory. Ended up moving to Connecticut because that’s where he could find a job.
Exactly this. I would also suspect that many of them are politically and culturally moderate-to-liberal, and would be very hesitant to move to a deep-red state.
There is probably a subset of those skilled workers (engineers, chemists, etc.) who would be happy (or at least willing) to move to a smaller, more rural market, for cost-of-living reasons, as well as if they specifically are looking to get out of a bigger city. But, I suspect that many of them would be on the older side.
I see the same thing as a doctor. Recruiters are constantly trying to get me to go live in East Buttplug, Idaho, where salaries are huge and jobs still can’t be filled, because nobody who’s been to college wants to live in Idaho.
I think I’ve posted this elsewhere:
Applications for (becoming a physician) residencies are down in the US, but they are down at TWICE the rate in states that are imposing post-Dobbs restrictions on abortion.
These doctors will NOT be able to access a family planning rotation in those states, limiting both their practice of medicine and in which states they could practice medicine.
Red states: first, let’s trash public schools; next, remove all firearm regulations; then, let’s create health care deserts. What could possibly go wrong?
2021 I think.
I first came to that number when I was still working for the company I mentioned, and I left there in late 2021, so this is not likely the place I originally got the stat. But the Idaho Dept of Labor is still saying 300 (I’m pretty sure when I looked it up at the time I found it was about 290)
Consider this: One large university in the Boston area probably graduates more chemists in a year than are currently employed as such in Idaho.
You forgot Soros. I’m still waiting on my $100 for standing around nearly two weeks ago with a No Kings sign.
I almost posted that. Apparently, Soros is the one paying all those disruptive plants in Republican town halls.
He was probably thinking something like “the second Trump administration is going to be a lot like the first Trump administration.”
But it’s not.
The first time around, Trump had no idea what he needed to do to staff an administration, so he took what the institutional Republican party gave him for literally hundreds if not thousands of policy-making positions. Those folks were dedicated to the Republican party, but not so much personally loyal to Donald Trump, a fact he came to regret in the weeks and months after the 2020 election.
Lots of people were putting sand in the gears of the first Trump administration, because they didn’t want to go around breaking laws on his say-so or being part of whatever cockamamie schemes his id could dream up, or because they had an agenda of their own and wanted to have the power needed to put it into place. Jeff Sessions wouldn’t run interference with Trump on the Russia probe. Bill Barr didn’t support Trumps election lies. (Not that either of these were “good guys”, by any means, but neither had a loyaltry to Trump that superseded all other considerations.) Heck, there were rerports from the first Trump administration that underlings in the White House were literally stealing drafted executive orders waiting on his signature off of his desk so that he couldn’t act on them.
But Trump 2.0 had plenty of opportunity to find the folks who were going to be loyal to Trump to the end, whether from personal slavishness, ideological conformity or simple opportunism. Plus, the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity and his near miss assassination survival both gave him a feeling of invincibility.
So now he’s up for any exercise of presidential power and he has a government around him that is fully responsive to his wishes. Anyone could have easily foreseen these things, but too many people - especially too many voters - figured it would just be the same ol’, same ol’ the second time around. For the specific example of your manufacturing guy, he probably figured that Trump threatened huge tariffs the first time, and they didn’t happen, so what damage could he do the second time around? But they dynamic had shifted, and now his face is the meal that he didn’t expect would get eaten, like the first time around.
An American citizen from New Hampshire who voted for President Donald Trump “almost died” in the custody of border agents, his attorney told Newsweek.
Real estate attorney Bachir Atallah and his wife, Jessica Fakhri, were returning from a family trip to Canada when they were stopped by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in Vermont on Sunday.
Atallah has been a U.S. citizen for 10 years.
I’m having a hard time mustering any sympathy for him.
He knew who he was voting for but everyone will crash with him. 
He’d most likely again hold his nose and vote for Trump again.