I was discussing with some very smart friends the critical question of if Trump’s $6 trillion tax increase in the form of chaotic tariffs might be beyond the power of the rightwing media to spin in favorable terms. Could this event – which likely will precipitate a global economic collapse and massive pain in Americans’ finances – that causes the Trump/MAGA fever to break? Is it something that simply cannot be explained away, blamed on trans kids or DEI?

My short answer is: I’m not sure. I think the rightwing reality popping moment that tested their information ecosystem was Covid and it killing over a million Americans.

The response was “DERP vaccines are the real killer” and arguably a massive acceleration towards Know Nothing anti-science, anti-constitution, election denial insurrection. It undoubtedly took the epistemic schism between right and center news ecosystems and exploded it into a seemingly irreparable rift that threatens the existence of America as a project today.

Maybe total economic destruction challenges that more fundamentally than people’s families dying in ERs while coughing out “but Covid isn’t real” with their final breaths. But maybe it won’t.

Studies late on in the pandemic showed that 54% of Americans knew someone who died of covid. The number shot up to over 70% if you included “or was hospitalised” from Covid. This was an event that affected people directly in the worst possible way and it did not cause the American right to revisit what they thought was true.

A massive recession could be worse, in terms of it directly impacting more people, at a higher level of inconvenience, than Covid did. But I would not underestimate the ability of rightwing media figures and politicians to continue to find ways of misdirecting truth and responsibility from Trump and his flunkies. The MAGA epistemic bubble is large and it is robust. The amount of pain that may have to be felt before it is popped likely is unfortunately large.