Two Americas: Why Donald Trump Still has a lot of Support
“How can Hillary Clinton be losing to a mentally unstable megalomaniac and sexual predator who doesn’t pay income taxes?”
.. George Packer wrote tellingly about last week in the magazine: an America bitterly divided along class, racial, and cultural lines.
To quote Benjamin Disraeli, the nineteenth-century British statesman, we now have “Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets.”
.. Whatever their views of him as an individual, they like what he stands for: nationalism, nativism, and hostility toward what they consider a self-serving élite that looks down on them.
.. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has accused Clinton of operating a fraudulent business that bilked tens of thousands of dollars from people on modest incomes, stiffing trades people on a routine basis, making a mockery of the tax laws and not paying a cent of income tax for twenty years, boasting about charitable giving while not donating any of his own cash, or sexually assaulting women.
.. During the Republican primaries, some outlets, particularly on television, indulged Trump shamefully, while using him as a ratings booster.
.. it hasn’t done enough to exploit his other vulnerabilities, to paint the Republican candidate as a con man whose schemes have victimized many ordinary, hard-working Americans.
.. they should be ramming home every day the message that Trump is a serial chiseler of the little guy, not his savior. Why isn’t Clinton regularly appearing alongside some of the people who lost their savings to Trump University? Where are the ads featuring tradesmen and suppliers and charities that Trump has stiffed?
.. If you tune into conservative talk radio, as many Trump supporters do, you will hear a constant discourse of resentment, conspiracy theories, and alienation from the institutions of economic and political power—including the Republican Party establishment.
.. The Trump movement, like the Tea Party movement it supplanted, is a reaction to the socially liberal, polyglot America that is rapidly emerging in the twenty-first century. Representing an older, whiter, and more embattled tradition, it is constantly evoking what it sees as a lost Valhalla—a place of plentiful jobs, rising living standards, conservative social values, fewer immigrants, and minorities who knew their place.
.. And if, in the coming years, robots and algorithms provide another big shock to the economy, destroying tens of millions more decent-paying jobs, how many former truck drivers and displaced white-collar workers will be receptive listeners to a future Trump?