If he weren’t the GOP front-runner, the gaps in his game would make it easy to dismiss him. But dismissing him requires dismissing the concerns of the 7.5 million people who have voted for him. That I can’t do.
My gut tells me much of the contempt for Trump reflects contempt for his working-class white support. It is one prejudice gentry liberals and gentry conservatives share.
It is perhaps the last acceptable bigotry, and you can see it expressed on any primetime TV program. The insults don’t all seem good-natured to me. I grew up in central Pennsylvania, surrounded by the kind of people supporting Trump, and I sympathize with their worsening plight.
For generations, they went all in for the American dream. Their families fought the wars, worked in the factories, taught school, coached Little League and built a middle-class culture. Now they are abandoned and know it.
Nobody speaks for them. The left speaks for the unions, the poor and the nonwhite, even shedding tears for illegal immigrants and rioters and looters. The GOP speaks for the Chamber of Commerce, big business and Wall Street.
Trump alone is bringing many of these forgotten Americans into the political system, much as Obama did with millennials and black voters. Trump has done it with full-frontal attacks on lopsided trade deals and a broken immigration system. His message is a potent brew of populism and nationalism that reaches across the partisan divide, and the public response is stirring the country.
In fact, many who despise Trump concede he is right that globalization and the open-border flood of cheap labor, while benefitting many Americans, has hurt many others. But instead of working to fix a broken status quo, many on the left and right echo each other’s venomous attacks against him. One day he is Mussolini, the next he’s Hitler, and he’s routinely accused of hate speech and racism.
What is his great sin? Breaking the taboo about what ails the middle class? Daring to challenge a power system that only pretends to have the consent of the governed?
The shame is that others didn’t beat him to it.
For his chutzpah, tens of millions of dollars are being poured into attack ads against Trump, and the urgent blue-nosed concerns about dark pools of money in politics have vanished. As long as he’s the target, all is fair.
Often, the avalanche of sludge against Trump looks and sounds like a reactionary confederacy fighting to keep its power and privileges. Naturally, the mainstream media is slashing away.
A Washington Post editorial claims that stopping Trump is the only way to “defend our democracy.” In other words, those troublesome voters are the problem.
[Keep reading. . .]
I agree that the white working class has legitimate grievances and has been ignored and condescended to for too long.
Hitler and Mussolini also spoke for the white working class. Recall the name of Hitler’s party: “The National Socialist German Workers’ Party.” The reason many people are seeing the connection between Trump and Mussolini, et al., is his philosophy of big government, plus his economic beliefs (rejecting free markets in favor of protectionism and government-directed economics), plus nationalism, plus rule by strongman, plus “the triumph of the will” (his evident belief that the only policy plan he needs is the strength of his will).
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