Donald Trump, the Winning Wild Card
For a while the base of the G.O.P. has been far closer to where Trump is on the issues than their leadership. The base of the G.O.P. has never really been true “free-traders,” they’ve always been “fair traders,” the leadership of the party wants to embrace some form of amnesty for illegals, the base of the party does not.
.. Trump is the living, breathing, bellowing personification of all the nasty characteristics Democrats routinely ascribe to Republicans.
.. “You could make a case that the politics of rage has gone from George Wallace, morphed into Nixon and the southern states strategy, then Gingrich and his merry band, into Fox News/Limbaugh/Tea Party Republicans,” Larry O’Brien III (a son of Lawrence Francis “Larry” O’Brien, who was John F. Kennedy’s chief political strategist) wrote me, adding
It’s not quite linear, but is Trump a sea change, a big leap, or merely the next iteration?
.. Trump is simply reflecting what poor voters already know: that they have been sold a bill of goods. They respond to his naked hatred of people of color and women because that is the language and the argument they have known their whole lives, but they also like his apparent attacks on the people who betrayed them.
.. The big question,” Baker writes,
is whether such a politics will be a dead end that tries to set the clock back by being a white people’s populism — treating African Americans, Hispanics, and other ethnic/racial groups as the enemy. Or whether it will be a forward thinking approach that formulates an economic policy designed to reverse the enormous upward redistribution that has been engineered by the leadership of both political parties over the last three and half decades.