Blaming everybody

by | Aug 28, 2015 | 2016 Elections, Editor's Blog, National Politics | 14 comments

When asked recently about what they thought about Donald Trump, focus group participants saw him as a leader who “kicks ass and takes names.” They like that he has been successful and that he’s not owned by any special interests. They don’t care that he’s changed positions on a host of issues over the years. He says exactly what they want to hear.

And that’s who Donald Trump is. They’ve mistaken a weathervane for a leader. The only thing he’s been consistent about is his desire for attention and his willingness to say anything to get it. He’s an entertainer, not a politician. He’s got a keen ear for what certain groups of Americans want to hear and he gives it to them. He has no need for money so he’s now just in it for the accolades of adoring fans.

When the birther movement captured the imagination of a segment of the Republican base, Trump became chief birther, or at least the most recognizable one with the biggest megaphone. He probably didn’t believe the birth certificate story but he did believe he could grab the support of those people.

But leader of the birthers wasn’t big enough. He decided to go after a much broader segment of society. He tapped into the cynicism and anger of the working class Americans who have been left out of the recovery and who have lost faith in the system.

He’s tapped into pure emotion on issue after issue and emotions drive people’s votes more than intellect. On immigration, he’s pandering to people who see immigrants from Mexico and Central America as threats to their jobs and undeserving recipients of their tax dollars. There’s no way to round up and deport 12 million people without spending billions of dollars and violating millions of people’s civil rights, but that’s not the point. He beats up politicians for being beholden to special interests because of the money chase that defines modern campaigns and pledges that he won’t take any PAC money but that’s because he’s a billionaire. He defends Social Security and Medicare because he knows the people he’s pandering to need it. On foreign policy, he has no details but he wants America to be full of bluster and cower the world into submission. You know, make America a world leader again.

Trump doesn’t necessarily believe any of the things he’s saying, but he knows he’s saying what a lot of Americans want to hear. And that’s why all of the other politicians should take notice. Republicans are following Trump’s lead on issues like immigration, but it’s not issues that are motivating these people. It’s emotion. They are angry and believe the traditional systems have let them down. The feel left out of the economic system. They feel lied to by the political system. And they they find popular culture alien and offensive.

Really, Americans are looking for a savior and a reformer. The politicians who aren’t Trump should pay attention. They might not need his bravado but they do need to understand the concerns. Bernie Sanders is tapping into people who see corporate America as the cause of middle class economic woes. Trump is tapping into the people who blame everybody for it and he’s reaching a bigger, less ideological audience. 

14 Comments

  1. Radagast

    Sounds like you’re reguritating Fox News,
    And, it sounds like you’re annoyed that the (other than Fox) Main Stream Media’s attempts to destroy Donald Trump are failing miserably. Every time the so called “pundits and experts” pronounce Trump to be “dead in the water”, he goes up in the polls.
    Now, if you think the USA is better off after seven years of Obama’s “Hope ‘N Change”, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you!
    However, I do respect your opinion.
    As Trump says, Hillary won’t even make it to starting gate, and I’m predicting we’ll see a Trump-Carson -vs- Biden-Warren ticket in the election.
    (Hillary having made a deal with Obama to drop out of the race to avoid being indicted, in exchange for a Presidential Pardon).

  2. Radagast

    Donald Trump is hitting a nerve. And not just among Republicans. He is hitting a nerve among black voters (who bought into Obama’s “Hope ‘N Change” false prophesy) and Hispanics (the legal immigrants, that is).
    Americans can see the economy in shambles, the greatest health care system in the world being destroyed by Obamacare, the Illegal Invaders streaming across our southern border, and America’s standing in the world being mocked and degraded.
    Yes, Trump is rough around the edges, politically incorrect, and pisses a lot of people off. But at least, he is a fighter. If someone throws a stone at him, he throws a brick back at them.
    He had the cajones to throw Community Organizer Hor-Gay Ramos out of the room, after the little gerbil tried to disrupt his press conference (as Trump said he would). And, he never “walks it back” and apologizes for “offending” some Mamby-Pamby, he doubles down.
    The “experts and pundits” predicted that Trump would be toast by now. But he keeps rising in the polls, and “they” can’t believe it!
    In the words of ESPN’s Chris Berman: HE COULD GO ALL THE WAY!

    • Frank McGuirt

      Sounds like you’re reguritating Fox News,
      “………economy in shambles, the greatest health care system in the world being destroyed by Obamacare, the Illegal Invaders streaming across our southern border, and America’s standing in the world being mocked and degraded.”–what universe are you living in?

      • Nortley

        That would be the Fox “News” Bubble universe. You know, the one where the President was born in Kenya AND Indonesia, is a Muslim AND a secularist who want to impose sharia law. He’s also a socialist/communist who is JUST like Hitler.

        It is also the universe in which the US actually found WMDs in Iraq, where Iraq had to be invaded because Saddam Huessein was behind 9/11, where climate change is a hoax, where Obamacare has “death panels,” where Muslims have imposed “no go zones” in various cities in Europe, where people go to jail for not having health insurance, and, well you get the idea.

  3. Fran Syptak

    Jesse was more consistent and, dare I say it, more principled than Trump. For better or worse, he was a Religious man. I therefore agreed with him that China was guilty of Human Rights abuses, but hated the fact that he felt perfectly comfortable destroying his political enemies here in America.

    • Nortley

      There were a LOT of countries guilty of human rights abuses — many of them Jesse Helms actively supported. He was not principled. He was a rigid ideologue, not to mention a complete embarrassment to North Carolina.

  4. Frank

    Aren’t Trump supporters very similar to ”
    Ole Jesse” supporters? Appealing to the worst within us?

  5. Bob Geary

    Another good piece, Thomas. But it’s a mistake to call it “Corporate America.” The problem Bernie (and I) identify is multinational corporations financed by multinational banks and investors who have no loyalty to any nation, only to the next quarterly report.

    In a world with surplus labor, they’re doing great, and corporate profits are at all-time highs while the percentage of the adult labor force currently employed in the U.S. and other industrialized nations is dropping like a stone. Wage rates are falling in the U.S. and in every industrialized country as labor is shifted to China, Indonesia, Malaysia and the other countries proposed to be in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. (Partnership, as in “Folks who go to Davos.”)

    The question Bernie keeps asking is whether it’s OK that 100 percent of the economic gains counted in our U.S. GDP go to the wealthiest 0.1% of us — with the lion’s share going to the wealthiest 0.01 percent. That’s not literally true, of course, because “our” gains are shared by investors worldwide, but then, investors here also share in the gains from other countries. As do the rest of us who own a few shares in multinational corporations through our mutual funds — about half the adult population. But saying I own shares and the Koch Brothers own shares is a bit misleading as to who’s making out …

    • Russell Scott Day

      It is these two Maurice Murrary the Third, and Bob here around where I am, as I do equivalents as if Marylyn Manson and Jay Z ought be on the same bill, and how the Democrats take the Black vote for granted while the Republicans take the Redneck vote for granted. The percentage of rednecks that vote and the percentage of Blacks that vote are likely equal, though since there are simply more of one voting block than the other the percentage makes a difference overcome as Obama did, for what he said.
      And the economy was tanking badly.
      If there is anything to be terrified of it is the financial “reforms”, which we would have all rightly felt we voted for.
      Since 1850s England got from “Free Trade” what we’ve gotten, you have to wonder why anyone would buy it again?
      Co-operatives, Socialism, Communism, Photography, the Telegraph.
      Batteries were the beginning then, and will be for the end of it now. Funny aye?

  6. Lan Sluder

    At times like this, it is worthwhile to re-read The Mind of the South by W.J. Cash.

    That dark, convoluted and remarkable work of genius was published about 75 years ago, to good reviews but mediocre sales. About a year after it came out, Cash, only 41 but severely depressed, hanged himself in a Mexico City hotel.

    Cash’s one and only book has remained constantly in print all these years. On the surface, a lot has changed in North Carolina and in South, but much of Cash’s analysis of the South and Southerners remains as insightful now as it was when Cash was living in Shelby, working as a reporter for the old Charlotte News and trying to finish his peculiar masterpiece.

    Cash accurately predicted how the Republican and Democratic parties would change in the South. You could even say he at least partly explained the appeal to Southerners of a demagogue from Queens.

  7. Randolph Voller

    Trump has coalesced disparate elements across the political spectrum under his banner, which is fueled in part by his natavist rhetoric. Of course this is not the first time in history a Trump-like figure has played these sour note to strike a chord in the heartland; however it is unusual that an oligarch is the primary actor, producer and funder of the enterprise.

  8. Maurice Murray III

    Millions of Americans feel left out of the recovery and the economic system because they have been. In North Carolina, 17.5% live below the Federal poverty level, and middle class wages have remained stagnant for years while those who finance campaigns have experienced exponential growth. Republicans’ conservative policies, such as their tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, are the problem, not the solution.

  9. Chris Telesca

    I understand how Trump can be reaching a bigger audience, because MSM isn’t covering Bernie but covering the side show freak that is Donald Trump. How many times has he gone bankrupt? So in a way, aren’t his billions the ultimate form of public campaign financing?

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