Do you know this widely cited meme, introduced in a 2015 tweet?

“I never thought leopards would eat MY face,” sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.

It’s hard to explain why this is perfect, but it is. If Donald Trump wins, there will eventually be a lot of sobbing among people who voted for him.

Some of this will involve the frightening reality of authoritarianism; if you think you’ll be unaffected by a second Trump presidency because you aren’t undocumented or Puerto Rican or a Democratic politician, I encourage you to reassess. But I’ll get to that next week. Today I want to talk about more prosaic economic issues.

Many analysts have pointed out that Trump’s proposed tariffs would hurt most Americans, with only high-income individuals gaining enough from his tax cuts to make up the difference. Trump, of course, insists that taxes on imports — which are, essentially, a sales tax — won’t hurt American consumers. But, as The Washington Post reports, corporations are already getting ready to raise prices.

The inflationary impact of tariffs will, however, probably be only the beginning of the pain for millions of Americans if Trump wins. Over the past few days, two people who will very likely have a lot of policy influence if Republicans prevail have let the leopard out of the bag on what else we should expect from a Trump administration.

Perhaps most notably, Elon Musk — who Trump promises to appoint as the head of a government efficiency commission — says he could cut “at least $2 trillion” in federal spending, around 30 percent of the budget, declaring that it would be relatively easy given the amount of government waste, although he recently acknowledged that doing so “necessarily involves some temporary hardship.”

Those remarks alone tell you two things. First, that Musk doesn’t understand federal spending. Second, a new Trump administration would probably inflict a lot of hardship on millions of Americans, and it’s unlikely that it would be temporary.

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