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Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here's why

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D-FENS

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Mar 12, 2016, 11:51:51 PM3/12/16
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This is an excellent piece on Donald Trump supporters, of whom I am one
of them. -- Steve


theguardian.com
Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here's why | Thomas
Frank

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald-trump-why-americans-support

Let us now address the greatest American mystery at the moment: what
motivates the supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump?

I call it a “mystery” because the working-class white people who make up
the bulk of Trump’s fan base show up in amazing numbers for the
candidate, filling stadiums and airport hangars, but their views, by and
large, do not appear in our prestige newspapers. On their opinion pages,
these publications take care to represent demographic categories of
nearly every kind, but “blue-collar” is one they persistently overlook.
The views of working-class people are so foreign to that universe that
when New York Times columnist Nick Kristof wanted to “engage” a Trump
supporter last week, he made one up, along with this imaginary person’s
responses to his questions.

Got a minute? The doctor backs the Donald ... Rubio camp says vote
Kasich (!) … Trump aide hit with criminal complaint ... and everything
else you need to know today on the campaign trail. By Tom McCarthy

When members of the professional class wish to understand the
working-class Other, they traditionally consult experts on the subject.
And when these authorities are asked to explain the Trump movement, they
always seem to zero in on one main accusation: bigotry. Only racism,
they tell us, is capable of powering a movement like Trump’s, which is
blowing through the inherited structure of the Republican party like a
tornado through a cluster of McMansions.

Trump himself provides rather excellent evidence for this finding. The
man is an insult clown who has systematically gone down the list of
American ethnic groups and offended them each in turn. He wants to
deport millions upon millions of undocumented immigrants. He wants to
bar Muslims from visiting the United States. He admires various foreign
strongmen and dictators, and has even retweeted a quote from Mussolini.
This gold-plated buffoon has in turn drawn the enthusiastic endorsement
of leading racists from across the spectrum of intolerance, a gorgeous
mosaic of haters, each of them quivering excitedly at the prospect of
getting a real, honest-to-god bigot in the White House.

All this stuff is so insane, so wildly outrageous, that the commentariat
has deemed it to be the entirety of the Trump campaign. Trump appears to
be a racist, so racism must be what motivates his armies of followers.
And so, on Saturday, New York Times columnist Timothy Egan blamed none
other than “the people” for Trump’s racism: “Donald Trump’s supporters
know exactly what he stands for: hatred of immigrants, racial
superiority, a sneering disregard of the basic civility that binds a
society.”

Stories marveling at the stupidity of Trump voters are published nearly
every day. Articles that accuse Trump’s followers of being bigots have
appeared by the hundreds, if not the thousands. Conservatives have
written them; liberals have written them; impartial professionals have
written them. The headline of a recent Huffington Post column announced,
bluntly, that “Trump Won Super Tuesday Because America is Racist.” A New
York Times reporter proved that Trump’s followers were bigots by
coordinating a map of Trump support with a map of racist Google
searches. Everyone knows it: Trump’s followers’ passions are nothing
more than the ignorant blurtings of the white American id, driven to
madness by the presence of a black man in the White House. The Trump
movement is a one-note phenomenon, a vast surge of race-hate. Its
partisans are not only incomprehensible, they are not really worth
comprehending.
* * *

Or so we’re told. Last week, I decided to watch several hours of Trump
speeches for myself. I saw the man ramble and boast and threaten and
even seem to gloat when protesters were ejected from the arenas in which
he spoke. I was disgusted by these things, as I have been disgusted by
Trump for 20 years. But I also noticed something surprising. In each of
the speeches I watched, Trump spent a good part of his time talking
about an entirely legitimate issue, one that could even be called leftwing.

Yes, Donald Trump talked about trade. In fact, to judge by how much time
he spent talking about it, trade may be his single biggest concern – not
white supremacy. Not even his plan to build a wall along the Mexican
border, the issue that first won him political fame. He did it again
during the debate on 3 March: asked about his political excommunication
by Mitt Romney, he chose to pivot and talk about … trade.

It seems to obsess him: the destructive free-trade deals our leaders
have made, the many companies that have moved their production
facilities to other lands, the phone calls he will make to those
companies’ CEOs in order to threaten them with steep tariffs unless they
move back to the US.

Trump embellished this vision with another favorite leftwing idea: under
his leadership, the government would “start competitive bidding in the
drug industry”. (“We don’t competitively bid!” he marveled – another
true fact, a legendary boondoggle brought to you by the George W Bush
administration.) Trump extended the critique to the military-industrial
complex, describing how the government is forced to buy lousy but
expensive airplanes thanks to the power of industry lobbyists.

Thus did he hint at his curious selling proposition: because he is
personally so wealthy, a fact about which he loves to boast, Trump
himself is unaffected by business lobbyists and donations. And because
he is free from the corrupting power of modern campaign finance, famous
deal-maker Trump can make deals on our behalf that are “good” instead of
“bad”. The chance that he will actually do so, of course, is small. He
appears to be a hypocrite on this issue as well as so many other things.
But at least Trump is saying this stuff.

All this surprised me because, for all the articles about Trump I had
read in recent months, I didn’t recall trade coming up very often. Trump
is supposed to be on a one-note crusade for whiteness. Could it be that
all this trade stuff is a key to understanding the Trump phenomenon?
* * *

Trade is an issue that polarizes Americans by socio-economic status. To
the professional class, which encompasses the vast majority of our media
figures, economists, Washington officials and Democratic powerbrokers,
what they call “free trade” is something so obviously good and noble it
doesn’t require explanation or inquiry or even thought. Republican and
Democratic leaders alike agree on this, and no amount of facts can move
them from their Econ 101 dream.

To the remaining 80 or 90% of America, trade means something very
different. There’s a video going around on the internet these days that
shows a room full of workers at a Carrier air conditioning plant in
Indiana being told by an officer of the company that the factory is
being moved to Monterrey, Mexico, and that they’re all going to lose
their jobs.

As I watched it, I thought of all the arguments over trade that we’ve
had in this country since the early 1990s, all the sweet words from our
economists about the scientifically proven benevolence of free trade,
all the ways in which our newspapers mock people who say that treaties
like the North American Free Trade Agreement allow companies to move
jobs to Mexico.

Well, here is a video of a company moving its jobs to Mexico, courtesy
of Nafta. This is what it looks like. The Carrier executive talks in
that familiar and highly professional HR language about the need to
“stay competitive” and “the extremely price-sensitive marketplace”. A
worker shouts “Fuck you!” at the executive. The executive asks people to
please be quiet so he can “share” his “information”. His information
about all of them losing their jobs.
* * *

Now, I have no special reason to doubt the suspicion that Donald Trump
is a racist. Either he is one, or (as the comedian John Oliver puts it)
he is pretending to be one, which amounts to the same thing.

But there is another way to interpret the Trump phenomenon. A map of his
support may coordinate with racist Google searches, but it coordinates
even better with deindustrialization and despair, with the zones of
economic misery that 30 years of Washington’s free-market consensus have
brought the rest of America.

It is worth noting that Trump is making a point of assailing that
Indiana air conditioning company from the video in his speeches. What
this suggests is that he’s telling a tale as much about economic outrage
as it is tale of racism on the march. Many of Trump’s followers are
bigots, no doubt, but many more are probably excited by the prospect of
a president who seems to mean it when he denounces our trade agreements
and promises to bring the hammer down on the CEO that fired you and
wrecked your town, unlike Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Here is the most salient supporting fact: when people talk to white,
working-class Trump supporters, instead of simply imagining what they
might say, they find that what most concerns these people is the economy
and their place in it. I am referring to a study just published by
Working America, a political-action auxiliary of the AFL-CIO, which
interviewed some 1,600 white working-class voters in the suburbs of
Cleveland and Pittsburgh in December and January.

Support for Donald Trump, the group found, ran strong among these
people, even among self-identified Democrats, but not because they are
all pining for a racist in the White House. Their favorite aspect of
Trump was his “attitude”, the blunt and forthright way he talks. As far
as issues are concerned, “immigration” placed third among the matters
such voters care about, far behind their number one concern: “good jobs
/ the economy”.

“People are much more frightened than they are bigoted,” is how the
findings were described to me by Karen Nussbaum, the executive director
of Working America. The survey “confirmed what we heard all the time:
people are fed up, people are hurting, they are very distressed about
the fact that their kids don’t have a future” and that “there still
hasn’t been a recovery from the recession, that every family still
suffers from it in one way or another.”

Tom Lewandowski, the president of the Northeast Indiana Central Labor
Council in Fort Wayne, puts it even more bluntly when I asked him about
working-class Trump fans. “These people aren’t racist, not any more than
anybody else is,” he says of Trump supporters he knows. “When Trump
talks about trade, we think about the Clinton administration, first with
Nafta and then with [Permanent Normal Trade Relations] China, and here
in Northeast Indiana, we hemorrhaged jobs.”

“They look at that, and here’s Trump talking about trade, in a
ham-handed way, but at least he’s representing emotionally. We’ve had
all the political establishment standing behind every trade deal, and we
endorsed some of these people, and then we’ve had to fight them to get
them to represent us.”

Now, let us stop and smell the perversity. Left parties the world over
were founded to advance the fortunes of working people. But our left
party in America – one of our two monopoly parties – chose long ago to
turn its back on these people’s concerns, making itself instead into the
tribune of the enlightened professional class, a “creative class” that
makes innovative things like derivative securities and smartphone apps.
The working people that the party used to care about, Democrats figured,
had nowhere else to go, in the famous Clinton-era expression. The party
just didn’t need to listen to them any longer.

What Lewandowski and Nussbaum are saying, then, should be obvious to
anyone who’s dipped a toe outside the prosperous enclaves on the two
coasts. Ill-considered trade deals and generous bank bailouts and
guaranteed profits for insurance companies but no recovery for average
people, ever – these policies have taken their toll. As Trump says, “we
have rebuilt China and yet our country is falling apart. Our
infrastructure is falling apart … Our airports are, like, Third World.”

Trump’s words articulate the populist backlash against liberalism that
has been building slowly for decades and may very well occupy the White
House itself, whereupon the entire world will be required to take
seriously its demented ideas.

Yet still we cannot bring ourselves to look the thing in the eyes. We
cannot admit that we liberals bear some of the blame for its emergence,
for the frustration of the working-class millions, for their blighted
cities and their downward spiraling lives. So much easier to scold them
for their twisted racist souls, to close our eyes to the obvious reality
of which Trumpism is just a crude and ugly expression: that
neoliberalism has well and truly failed.

Thomas Frank is the author of Listen, Liberal or Whatever Happened to
the Party of the People, published 15 March by Metropolitan Books

This article was amended on 9 March 2016 to reflect the fact that
Nafta stands for the North American Free Trade Agreement. An earlier
version of this article referred to it as North Atlantic Free Trade
Agreement.




--

That which men capable of independent thought understood intellectually
decades ago, men less so well endowed, finally, understand viscerally.

They have woken up and smelled the agenda: the ship has an iceberg
embedded in the hull; and it was Political Correctness – or Cultural
Marxism – which put it there.


www.globalgulag.us

news16

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Mar 13, 2016, 9:44:19 AM3/13/16
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On Sat, 12 Mar 2016 21:51:50 -0700, D-FENS wrote:

> This is an excellent piece on Donald Trump supporters, of whom I am one
> of them. -- Steve

Not surprising.

> I call it a “mystery” because the working-class white people who make up
> the bulk of Trump’s fan base show up in amazing numbers for the
> candidate, filling stadiums and airport hangars, but their views, by and
> large, do not appear in our prestige newspapers.

But not enough to give him a significant lead in Republican delegates.

Jack G.

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Mar 13, 2016, 10:15:14 AM3/13/16
to
.
.
.
Stop using liberal math.
.
.
.


news16

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Mar 13, 2016, 8:43:51 PM3/13/16
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On Sun, 13 Mar 2016 07:15:13 -0700, Jack G. wrote:


>> But not enough to give him a significant lead in Republican delegates.
> .
> .
> Stop using liberal math.

Lol, that is what matters.
He sure will boost Hillary's vote

news16

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Mar 13, 2016, 8:46:08 PM3/13/16
to
On Sun, 13 Mar 2016 15:23:41 -0700, Winston_Smith wrote:
> He's 9% ahead of the other candidate the RNC hates. He's 30% ahead of
> the RNC's fair haired boy. Define "significant".

It only counts if he can score 50%+ on the first vote of the Repub
convention or whatever, otherwise, all votes are off and people can
change their vote for selection.
>

PaxPerPoten

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Mar 13, 2016, 11:56:29 PM3/13/16
to
Yes..We are all voting to send her criminal ass to Prison.
>


--
It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard
the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all
ages who mean to govern well, but *They mean to govern*. They promise to
be good masters, *but they mean to be masters*. Daniel Webster

bob haller

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Mar 14, 2016, 12:58:12 AM3/14/16
to
hillary is our next president, she has been investigated forever, and despite a vocal minority spouting off she is going to prison, theres nothing to it.

now trump appears to be a racist, and it appears 20% of americans are, while he will be the republican nominee in the general election he wouldnt win against hillary..

now the elephant in the room. technology , aartifical intelligence, and roobotics will be replacing about half of all human workers in the next 10 years.

so outsourcing of jobs, will be replaced by robots replacing workers....

the elephant is how will the masses of people earn a living?

even those still working will have such a over supply of workers it will depress salaries of the remaining workers.......

rbowman

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Mar 14, 2016, 1:10:17 AM3/14/16
to
On 03/13/2016 10:58 PM, bob haller wrote:
> hillary is our next president, she has been investigated forever, and despite a vocal minority spouting off she is going to prison, theres nothing to it.

There are not many public figures that have been subject to as many
investigations as Clinton. She may be teflon coated but why does she
keep showing up on witness stands?

PaxPerPoten

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Mar 14, 2016, 1:39:14 AM3/14/16
to
On 3/13/2016 11:58 PM, bob haller wrote:
> hillary is our next president, she has been investigated forever, and despite a vocal minority spouting off she is going to prison, theres nothing to it.
>

Well that opinion alone tells me that you don't care what kind of
Criminal sits in our Capital. I am devastated that your inbred ignorant
kind infests so much of the Democratic Communist party.

> now trump appears to be a racist, and it appears 20% of americans are, while he will be the republican nominee in the general election he wouldnt win against hillary..

For one thing, Moron American is spelled with a capital letter.

> now the elephant in the room. technology , aartifical intelligence, and roobotics will be replacing about half of all human workers in the next 10 years.
>
> so outsourcing of jobs, will be replaced by robots replacing workers....
>
> the elephant is how will the masses of people earn a living?
>
> even those still working will have such a over supply of workers it will depress salaries of the remaining workers.......
>


PaxPerPoten

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Mar 14, 2016, 1:49:16 AM3/14/16
to
On 3/13/2016 11:58 PM, bob haller wrote:
> hillary is our next president, she has been investigated forever, and
> despite a vocal minority spouting off she is going to prison, theres
> nothing to it.

She is a criminal that put all of our nations security at great risk..
We already know some of the people she got killed... How many more will
suffer for her crimes?
>
> now trump appears to be a racist, and it appears 20% of americans
> are, while he will be the republican nominee in the general election
> he wouldnt win against hillary..

For one thing, Moron...American is spelled with a capital letter as are
peoples first names. America cannot take another shellacking from the
Democrats and survive as America.

>
> now the elephant in the room. technology , aartifical intelligence,
> and roobotics will be replacing about half of all human workers in
> the next 10 years.

That was said in 1967. It takes a lot of people to keep those machines
going..They do wear out. Your spelling is atrocious. I would guess with
your limited education..that you would be one of the first to be
replaced by a dumb Robotic Machine. Maybe you could be Cannon Fodder for
the many wars that Democrats
like to get us into.

>
> so outsourcing of jobs, will be replaced by robots replacing
> workers....
>
> the elephant is how will the masses of people earn a living?

If people cannot purchase products made by machines...There will be no
machines.
>
> even those still working will have such a over supply of workers it
> will depress salaries of the remaining workers.......

Again..If money is not available to purchase products ..There will be no
machines.


Maybe the Warlord system of Afghanistan would interest you?

Don

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Mar 14, 2016, 2:55:16 AM3/14/16
to
On Sun, 13 Mar 2016 23:10:13 -0600, rbowman <bow...@montana.com>
wrote:
In small rooms, she knows how to use lawyer skills and can speak
modestly from authority about how she may have made small errors of
judgment, but neither intended any damage or did any.

None of the current administration are going to bring her down. Obama
will probably rule that she is wavered from any conviction.

As I see it, Hillary goes down as a result of her staged performances
as speaker before larger crowds, because we see her phony use of big
smiles and hand waves as she works the room. By now, the public knows
she is performing and notices age and health issues show through.

I particularly dislike how she makes the same plucking movements with
her fingers high in the air, short hand jabs, etc..

Don

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Mar 14, 2016, 5:36:53 AM3/14/16
to
On Mon, 14 Mar 2016 00:13:47 -0700, Winston_Smith
<inv...@butterfly.net> wrote:
>True. And answer to the largest part of their rank and file voter base
>why they did that.
>
>The DNC has super delegates, all elected officials. In 2012 they were
>solidly behind Hillary until this guy, 0bama I think his name was,
>came out of no where. In the end all those Hillary votes magically
>turned into 0bama votes.
>
>The RNC doesn't have super delegates but almost all the regular
>delegates are elected to some public office. A lot of them will have
>an up-hill slog explaining to the sheeple why their votes didn't count
>at the convention. They are going to have to explain why they did
>everything they could to undercut the number two candidate, Curz, too.

Yeah, it's really funny that Cruz has been anti-establishment and
disliked by other Republican senators and the RNC. And he's the one
so anti-Obama that he'll take down Obamacare and all his presidential
mandates. He's the one who fought against the Gang of 8 on the
Amnesty issue.

Funny image of all these Republican "talking heads" with their heads
exploding.

Gunner Asch

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Mar 14, 2016, 6:40:26 AM3/14/16
to
On Sun, 13 Mar 2016 21:58:11 -0700 (PDT), bob haller <hal...@aol.com>
wrote:

>hillary is our next president, she has been investigated forever, and despite a vocal minority spouting off she is going to prison, theres nothing to it.
>
>now trump appears to be a racist, and it appears 20% of americans are, while he will be the republican nominee in the general election he wouldnt win against hillary..


ROFLMAO!!! Oh look at the widdle lefty trying to appear all
reasonable and broad minded...or the poor bastard is simply
insane..but given that he is a Democrat...thats pretty much a given.

Snicker...the screams, sobs and sounds of Lefties jumping out of
windows come November 9, 2016...will be music to the ears of normal
Americans

Don

unread,
Mar 14, 2016, 4:47:54 PM3/14/16
to
On Mon, 14 Mar 2016 11:34:45 -0700, Winston_Smith
<inv...@butterfly.net> wrote:

>On Sun, 13 Mar 2016 21:58:11 -0700 (PDT), bob haller wrote:
>
>>now trump appears to be a racist, and it appears 20% of americans are,
>>while he will be the republican nominee in the general election he
>>wouldnt win against hillary..
>
>That "appearance" is a product of the D propaganda and that of his
>campaign rivals. Don't get sucked in unless you are a died in the wool
>D looking for a talking point.
>
>It appears you didn't read the article that started this thread. The
>charge of racism is bogus. Some key points:
>
>http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald-trump-why-americans-support
><quote> A map of his support may coordinate with racist Google
>searches, but it coordinates even better with deindustrialization and
>despair, with the zones of economic misery that 30 years of
>Washington’s free-market consensus have brought the rest of America.
>...
>Here is the most salient supporting fact: when people talk to white,
>working-class Trump supporters, instead of simply imagining what they
>might say, they find that what most concerns these people is the
>economy and their place in it.
>...
>"People are much more frightened than they are bigoted," is how the
>findings were described to me by Karen Nussbaum, the executive
>director of Working America. The survey “confirmed what we heard all
>the time: people are fed up, people are hurting, they are very
>distressed about the fact that their kids don’t have a future” and
>that "there still hasn’t been a recovery from the recession, that
>every family still suffers from it in one way or another."
><end quote>
>
>
>You nailed the "why" of the above being true in your observations
>below - which are spot on. I've been preaching that here for years. We
>have three choices. Message-ID:
><2daedbt91jrgvu0s6...@4ax.com>
>
>>now the elephant in the room. technology , aartifical intelligence,
>>and roobotics will be replacing about half of all human workers in the
>>next 10 years.
>>
>>so outsourcing of jobs, will be replaced by robots replacing workers....
>>
>>the elephant is how will the masses of people earn a living?
>>
>>even those still working will have such a over supply of workers it will
>>depress salaries of the remaining workers.......

With everyone on Food Stamps and getting FREE college tuition,
state subsidized health care, and social security, obviously society
is dependent on government now and will continue to be. Recognizing
the formula this way no doubt leads to state socialism and more Bernie
Sanders.

Don

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Mar 14, 2016, 11:19:30 PM3/14/16
to
On Mon, 14 Mar 2016 15:43:06 -0700, Winston_Smith
<inv...@butterfly.net> wrote:

>On Mon, 14 Mar 2016 12:47:53 -0800, Don wrote:
>The problem is it's a circle. The masses are indeed becoming dependent
>on government. But government is dependent on the masses to elect them
>and to pay the taxes to make the show go.
>
>The government has no powers the people didn't give it; it has no
>money that didn't come from some form of tax on people in general.
>
>It turns out, in the end, people are dependent on themselves. Adding a
>middle man can't make anything better but it sure can make it worse.

Your description seems to come close to that in Huxley's novels, where
the state has started eliminating objectors, and only a few get out
and exist in a separate society. Irony to me is that maybe it's
always been like that?
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