Late last month, as part of a much longer piece on the “NO RAGRETS” Trump voters, the Chicago Tribune checked in with Woodstock, Illinois paper straw manufacturer Gaetano “Guy” Spinelli, previously profiled by the Washington Post in early March after his business, Boss Straw, suddenly became collateral damage in the Orange Ayatollah’s jihad on eco-friendly alternatives to plastic straws out of mere personal distaste. Spinelli had spent his life savings developing and standing up a factory – obviously based in the United States and ostensibly employing American citizens in cranking out the straws. He did not at any point have federal supply contracts, yet his buyers for reasons opaque took the fat bastard’s executive order banning government purchases of paper straws as a sign that the public’s preferences were headed in the same direction, canceling their orders and decimating Spinelli’s business as they apparently switched back to plastic.
The Tribune writes that Spinelli – who in 2023 received free advertising and a rave review of his product from Fox News douchebro Jesse Watters – has sent five letters and a dozen emails to the White House urging the convicted felon president to try it and see for himself. “I even sent him a box of straws,” Spinelli said. You’re smart and you already guessed what response he received.
“He’s put me from a profitable picture to a nonprofitable company,” Spinelli told the Tribune. “And my product is a strong product. I’ve got a paper straw that lasts two weeks in any drink, hot or cold,” without affecting the taste of the beverage one is consuming out of a Boss Straw.
Yeah, you also already guessed what the 75 year-old Spinelli, who had poured $2 million of his life savings accumulated during a long career in the paper business into launching his company, said when asked if he’d had any regrets voting for the fat fuck, even if it was already spelled out in the headline and lede: “Outside of what he did to me, I think he’s doing a pretty good job.”
The other previously National Zero famous Trump voter quoted in the Tribune’s story is Faye Nemer, the CEO of the Dearborn, Michigan Middle East and North African-American Chamber of Commerce, a Lebanese immigrant who in late February responded less than favorably to the indescribably fucking monkeyshit insane “Trump Gaza” AI slop video above that the fat bastard posted, with Nemer telling NPR the orange slob must immediately issue a “reconciliatory statement” and take down the video for being “offensive and counterproductive to peace talks,” lol.
Weeks later Nemer spoke with the New York Times, who wrote that the association CEO “still supports Mr Trump’s domestic policies, but is aghast at his handling of the Middle East and smarting from the backlash she and other Trump supporters are receiving.” Nemer said she’d been “receiving a lot of hate mail,” yet remained defiant even as “anyone who demonstrated any support for President Trump is completely ostracized” from the Detroit metro Arab/Muslim community.
Fast forward another month and it would seem the pressure’s at least starting to get to Nemer, who appears to be entering the “they’re both equally bad” stage of MAGA “ragret” that so many sank into during the darkest days of the COVID pandemic. “Our freedom of expression, freedom of demonstration and just overall liberties are at stake,” Nemer tells the Tribune of the numerous foreign students at US colleges finding their futures uncertain even if the Trump Reich has backed down from the mass purge, for now. Even with all that, the Tribune writes that “Nemer doesn’t think she could have voted differently,” quoting her saying “We weren’t getting that empathy from the Democratic Party, unfortunately. But Republicans are almost making the same mistake now.”
“Almost.” Seriously fuck you, lady. Nemer’s is a special vintage of pants-pissing fucking abjection, where that Michigan Muslim still refuses to say what the fuck they actually thought Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were supposed to do to stop what Trump hasn’t stopped and unquestionably allowed to get worse. Like just say Biden should’ve ordered the Navy SEALs to go Neptune Spear on Benjamin Netanyahu in his residence, at least that’d be something to agitate for rather than weakly trying to blame the people for their own failure to imagine that Trump might have actually kind of been lying to them about ending the horrific suffering in Gaza. That they got played and now their family, friends, and fellow Muslims are starving to death at the whims of the genocidal tyrant.
It’s a similar tune that gay Latino Chicagoan J Marcos Peterson who, in the days after the election, sang in an op-ed printed by the Tribune, writing that “Seeing my undocumented family members, who have been in the US for more than 20 years, work, pay taxes and buy their own homes with zero benefits, then watching millions of new migrants skip the line with government funded help, only enflamed me and other Latinos like me,” was his cue to vote MAGA and holy shit that sentence alone needs a full team of psychiatric PhDs working around the clock for years to crack the code of what the fuck is wrong with this guy. He actually wrote that to major newspaper and was serious.
“Everything he promised to do, he’s doing,” Peterson said in a follow-up call with the Tribune, who did not describe his speech as slurred or hearing the sounds of baby animals being tortured in the background. Asked what he thought of the situation in the area’s Latino community, understood by most observers to be one of a state of perpetual terror for the past three months that has translated nationally to a fairly steep decline in sales for Modelo Especial, Peterson dismissed the fear of ICE raids as being “stoked by the left,” adding “What was the whole campaign for Kamala Harris? The constitution, the whole republic of America is going to end with Donald Trump and you’re going to not be able to live your life. Everything was fear, because they didn’t have any policies to bring up.”
Not even going to bother with that last sentence other than to say it’s hinting at more or less the same shit about voters not having any agency or responsibility to read a fucking real newspaper instead of listening to Joe Rogan bring in an “expert” to entertain theories on whether Mesopotamia had nuclear weapons or hear some interesting new “evidence” of unicorns in the fossil record.
Chicago-area restauranteur Sam Sanchez described he and his fellow Latinos’ support for El Coño Naranjo as the “voto de castigo,” or “vote of punishment” over what he says was frustration at the Biden Administration’s granting of expedited work permits to newly-arrived Venezuelan refugees at the perceived expense of undocumented immigrants who had been in the country much longer.
“Sanchez and other Latino leaders shifted their support to Trump, with a focus on border security and bipartisan immigration reform, citing Democratic inaction on both fronts,” the Tribune writes, then quoting Sanchez as declaring “We’re asking for work visas — like Biden did, he found a way to do it — for long-term (undocumented workers).” Lolololololol, seriously what a cunt.
To #SecureAmericasWorkforce we need work permits and Green Cards for essential workers and citizenship for Dreamers.
In D.C. meeting with legislators to discuss common-sense immigration solutions that could add $1.5 trillion to our GDP over the next decade, protect businesses,… pic.twitter.com/KEKBntcBFv
— Sam Sanchez (@samsamco) March 26, 2025
Set aside for a minute whether that’s ever going to happen (spoiler: it isn’t), and just marvel at the monumental ignorance and illogic of this stupid asshole (who 100 percent just confirmed he employs illegal immigrants at his restaurants): Sanchez thinks it was legally possible for Joe Biden to sign an order giving work permits to people who do not, on paper, exist as far as the federal government is concerned unless they’re on an ICE target list. The Venezuelan migrants, who came to the border and claimed asylum were then logged in a national database and granted work permits under temporary protected status – status that Trump is currently trying to remove and have them deported – and Biden, for reasons unexplained, chose not to, despite the obvious political incentive.
Anyone with the most cursory understanding of immigration politics in the United States over the last decade and a half knows that a grand bargain in which Democrats get a mass amnesty with a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants while Republicans get a wall and a bunch of other shit is not happening anytime soon as it requires Congress to agree on it. Republicans have chosen not to engage and will not for the foreseeable future. There was no other way for a Venezuelan or other foreign asylum claimant – definitionally not an illegal immigrant – to have obtained protected status and a work permit if they had not arrived during the Biden Administration.
But you need not to go into even that basic summary to spot the flaw in Sanchez’s take: If Biden could have, with the stroke of a pen, granted work permits to Sanchez’s employees then Trump could too, anytime he wants. “Democratic inaction” doesn’t mean shit now. The discretion to wield this non-existent power is on Trump, who has thus far chosen not to do so. Sanchez seems dimly aware of this from within the confines of his fictional universe, warning that “It’s up to the Republicans to maintain” the Latino vote “and grow it, or it’s up to the Democrats to gain it.”
Ughhhhh…
Ukrainian immigrant Alik Kasman was equally self-defeating and stupid over the Orange Allah’s failure to end the conflict in his home country within the first 24 hours, telling the Tribune that Trump “doesn’t understand this war. He’s trying to view it as a civil dispute between two parties where each can agree to some concessions and meet in the middle and settle for whatever both can agree to,” said Kasman, adding that Putin’s aggression won’t stop with Ukraine. Kasman isn’t happy with Trump. But also doesn’t believe Kamala Harris would’ve been better. “As an advocate for Ukraine, it is much easier to deal with Trump because I can go to DC and I can contradict his point of view. Whereas with Biden, that was a much more difficult task. I had to go and explain why I believe Biden is saying one thing and doing something else,” whatever the hell Kasman thinks that means.
Quoted last in the Tribune’s article is Kevin Coyne, chairman of the DuPage County GOP, who has zero choice in whether he can continue to publicly support the fat fuck if he wants to keep his position. Choosing his words somewhat carefully, Coyne opined on what it means going forward after suburban Republican mayors and legislators/council members, some of whom had been in office for decades, suffered an absolute wipeout in last month’s municipal elections. “What I’ve said is that Trump is certainly a very controversial figure here in DuPage County and I think he certainly added an issue for Republicans to work through in DuPage. So I think, politically, he has been somewhat of a problem from time to time for Republicans,” Coyne said,
Still he remains in awe of the powers of the Orange Pharaoh’s unrivaled powers of media manipulation and bullshit. “Trump, whether you hate him or love him, he’s the best showman we’ve seen in politics for a very, very long time. He does these things endlessly that he knows are going to be grabbed and circulated on every media outlet in the world, which gives him ubiquitous political presence and makes him extremely formidable,” Coyne said, immediately after having admitted that Trump had powered grievous losses for his party’s local candidates.
Illinois GOP suffered major election losses in suburbs that are critical for its rebuilding effort https://t.co/EJZsjgwz3h
— Chicago Tribune Politics (@ChiTribCloutSt) April 3, 2025
The question isn’t whether these sad sacks and the untold millions of others like them are going to ever admit to themselves and others they fucked up, simply because it will most likely never again actually matter if they continue to “support Trump” or not. All of them, save for the Michigander Nemer, are in Illinois and probably live in safe D to very safe D Congressional districts. But for similarly facially-disfigured leopard attack victims in swingier states and districts no doubt wavering after only 100 days, what does their heavy use of “but” in their affirmations of support for Trump tell you about how the midterms are going to go? We can’t just be happy with a 2018-level blue wave, we need 2006-level savagery against the feckless twats of the GOP. Is the Tribune’s article a wellspring of “fuck you, you deserved it” or is it a harbinger of electoral doom for MAGAmerica?