I think a big factor for a lot of people is the belief that Trump is sticking up for people who feel they have been treated with contempt. Going all the back to 2008 with Obama’s infamous “they cling to guns or religion” line (at a fund-raiser in San Francisco, no less), there has been a tangible sense that this president cares more about virtually anyone else than he does about working-class people, who have been absolutely hammered by the recession.
A psychologist once told me that most human conflict stems from poorly concealed contempt. Research shows that contempt is the best predictor of divorce. And I think it is part of what has sparked the Trump movement.
.. That sense of contempt had been brewing for a long time, but it didn’t have much of a formal platform because the leading Democrat was still Bill Clinton, who isn’t a contemptuous sort of person and has working-class roots. But a cultural cold war was in the works and that turned it hot.
.. Sad as it makes me, I have to acknowledge your chortling rights. Mrs. Clinton has a long list of accomplishments and talents that make her an excellent candidate. But she knew when she left the State Department that she’d be running for president and the fact that she took millions and millions of dollars in speaking fees from hedge funds and investment banks is incomprehensible.
Poverty, Pride, and Prejudice
I remembered that A.T.M. in Venice when, in May, Kansas state legislators voted to impose nationally unprecedented and sharply punitive A.T.M. withdrawal limits on welfare recipients. A family of four can receive a maximum of four hundred and ninety-seven dollars per month from state assistance in Kansas, and perhaps a comparable amount in “food stamp” funds. The money is electronically credited to a state-issued debit card. The pending A.T.M. cap, of twenty-five dollars a day, would increase the number of withdrawals required to obtain the same amount of money, with each transaction siphoning fees—one dollar to the state’s electronic-benefits contractor, in addition to a given machine’s standard fee—from public money into private bank coffers. (Even the cash-back option for point-of-sale transactions in Kansas comes with a forty-cent fee after the first two each month.) Compounding the pinch, the limit would effectively be twenty dollars, because few A.T.M.s dispense five-dollar bills.
.. Should a withdrawal cap pass muster with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the state’s electronic-benefits processor, Fidelity National Information Services—which has received incentives to keep a divisional headquarters in Kansas, and presumably has benefited handsomely from the state’s business-tax cuts—stands ready to collect the additional fees. It is hard to think of a more twisted irony than a corporate-welfare recipient being paid by a state government to oversee a single mother’s access to public-assistance funds.
.. As James Baldwin wrote (and as much research being published during this moment of historic wealth inequality demonstrates), it is expensive to be poor.