The notion that white workers elected Trump is a myth that suits the ruling class
Trump didn’t win the working class. The Democrats lost it.
Take the notion that Donald Trump rode into the White House on a great upsurge of support from poor, white working-class voters drawn to the Republican candidate’s “populist” pitch in key Rust Belt states. This conventional “Rust Belt rebellion” wisdom was pronounced on the front page of the nation’s newspaper of record, The New York Times, one day after the election.
The Times proclaimed that Trump’s victory was “a decisive demonstration of power by a largely overlooked coalition of mostly blue-collar white and working-class voters.” Times political writer Nate Cohn decreed that “Donald J. Trump won the presidency by riding an enormous wave of support among working-class whites” (emphasis added). [Read more]
Comments
How a Presidency Ends: Just Wait
Watergate didn’t become Watergate overnight, either.
By Frank Rich | New York Magazine
“Let others wallow in Watergate, we are going to do our job,” said Richard Nixon with typical unearned self-righteousness in July 1973.
By then, more than a year had passed since a slapstick posse of five had been caught in a bungled burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex – by August 1974, it was over.
It had been nine months since Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein reported in the Washington Post that the break-in was part of a “massive campaign of political spying and sabotage” conducted by all the president’s men against most of their political opponents. Now the nation was emerging from two solid months of Senate Watergate hearings, a riveting cavalcade of White House misfits and misdeeds viewed live by 71 percent of the public.
Even so, Nixon had some reason to hope that Americans would heed his admonition to change the channel. That summer, the Times reported that both Democratic and Republican congressmen back home for recess were finding “a certain numbness” about Watergate and no “public mandate for any action as bold as impeachment.”
For all the months of sensational revelations and criminal indictments (including John Mitchell, his campaign manager and former attorney general), a Harris poll found that only 22 percent thought Nixon should leave office.
Gallup put the president’s approval rating in the upper 30s, roughly where our current president stands now — lousy, but not apocalyptic. There had yet to be an impeachment resolution filed in Congress by even Nixon’s most partisan adversaries.
He had defied his political obituaries before, staging comebacks after a slush-fund scandal nearly cost him his vice-presidential perch on the GOP ticket in 1952 and again after his 1962 defeat in the California governor’s race prompted the angry “last press conference” at which he vowed that “you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”
Might Tricky Dick pull off another Houdini? He was capable of it, and, as it happened, it would take another full year of bombshells and firestorms after the televised Senate hearings before a clear majority of Americans (57 percent) finally told pollsters they wanted the president to go home. Only then did he oblige them, in August 1974.
In the decades since, Watergate has become perhaps the most abused term in the American political lexicon. Washington has played host to legions of “-gates,” most unworthy of the name, and the original has blurred in memory, including for those of us who lived through it.
Now, of course, invocations of Watergate are our daily bread, as America contemplates the future of a president who not only openly admires Nixon — he vowed to put a framed Nixon note on display in the Oval Office — but seems intent on emulating his most impeachable behavior.
And among those of us who want Donald Trump gone from Washington yesterday, there’s a fair amount of fear that he, too, could hang on until the end of a four-year term that stank of corruption from the start.
Even if his White House scandals turn out to exceed his predecessor’s — as the former director of national intelligence James Clapper posited in early June — impeachment is a political, not a legal, matter, and his political lock on the presidency would seem secure.
Unlike Nixon, who had to contend with Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, Trump has the shield of a Republican Congress led by craven enablers terrified of crossing their Dear Leader’s fiercely loyal base. That distinction alone is enough to make anti-Trumpers abandon all hope.
I’m here to say don’t do so just yet. There’s a handy antidote to despair: a thorough wallow in Watergate, the actual story as it unfolded, not the expedited highlight reel that most Americans know from a textbook précis or cultural artifacts like the film version of All the President’s Men.
If you look through a sharp Nixonian lens at Trump’s trajectory in office to date, short as it has been, you will discover more of an overlap than you might expect.
You will learn that Democratic control of Congress in 1973 was not a crucial factor in Nixon’s downfall and that Republican control of Congress in 2017 may not be a life preserver for Trump.
You will find reason to hope that the 45th president’s path through scandal may wind up at the same destination as the 37th’s — a premature exit from the White House in disgrace — on a comparable timeline.
[a brilliant and insightful article in the New York Magazine]
How long will President Trump survive? Nobody knows, but everyone’s guessing.
It’s a basic principle of psychology that the defenses we erect to defend our value always end up producing exactly what we are trying to avoid.
In Trump’s case, the relentless insistence that he didn’t do it feeds the case that he did do it. I don’t know what the “it” will turn out to be, but I know Trump well enough to know that there are countless potential “its.”
Related Stories
Frank Rich: Nixon, Trump, and How a Presidency Ends
I believe the end for Trump is much closer than most people imagine. Perhaps that’s wishful thinking, and I recognize I’m not particularly trustworthy. I always feared Trump could win the presidency, but I never truly believed he would.
I do believe Trump will self-immolate. The more convinced Trump becomes that he will be caught, the more desperately he will deny what will turn out to be indisputably true. Is there anyone rational who doesn’t believe he has already obstructed justice several times over?
In the end, I don’t believe Trump will be impeached, or found guilty of a crime. My gut tells me that when the fire gets hot enough, he will make a deal to save himself, resign the presidency, and declare victory. — Tony Schwartz, co-author of The Art of the Deal
After the Democrats went zero for four in special elections, the delusions and fantasies continue. Trump will be re-elected in 2020, and Pence will probably follow him in 2024. The analogue for Trump is Andrew Jackson, NOT Richard Nixon. — Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House
The likeliest outcome is a very weakened presidency that goes a full term, but discredits much of the angry rhetoric and sentiment that got Trump elected — that the problems of average people are a consequence of government overreach.
And that will be a continuing dilemma for Republican members of Congress, who will be caught between the unhappiness with Trump of the electorate at large and the enthusiasm of Republican voters. — Barney Frank, former congressman
I will say this: Trump will survive as long as congressional Republicans lack a conscience. They are too afraid of the right-wing base to speak up for decency, as Howard Baker, Barry Goldwater, and others did during Watergate. — Jill Abramson, senior lecturer, Harvard
It is perhaps naïve to underestimate Donald Trump’s capacity for self-inflicted wounds. But, even so, Trump is likely to weather his scandals because he has advantages that Richard Nixon could never have imagined:
(1) He has an alternative-reality media infrastructure that will provide him air cover and attack his critics, regardless of the facts that emerge. (2) The Republican base remains solidly behind him, regardless of his erratic behavior and reckless rhetoric. Until that base cracks, GOP politicians will be loath to distance themselves from Trump. And, finally, (3) conservatives have allowed themselves to be corrupted by Trumpism, as they jettison long-held principles in the service of what has become a cult of personality on the right.
All of this could change, of course, but until Republicans show even a modest willingness to stand up to the president, it’s hard to see how they would be complicit in bringing him down. — Charlie Sykes, former talk-show host
The great conundrum of the Trump era is that it is almost impossible to imagine this level of public agitation, chaos, law-breaking, and unpopularity sustaining itself for four years.
Yet it is equally difficult to imagine any credible way it ends, at least before 2019.
Clearly one of these premises must be wrong. I’ve struggled to figure out which one it is. My best guess is that Trump is more likely than not to leave office before January 2021.
The number to watch is approval from self-identified Republicans. That number now stands at over 80 percent. It likely needs to fall to 50 percent or below before removal from office becomes credible. — Josh Marshall, editor and publisher, Talking Points Memo
One thing I learned during my time in Obama’s White House:
Never underestimate the cravenness of Mitch McConnell. If all you care about is cutting taxes for the rich and repealing Obamacare in secret, a Watergate-size distraction is a feature rather than a bug.
As long as Trump’s base (and Fox News allies) punish Republicans who push for impeachment, I just don’t see McConnell and his party cutting the president loose.
Until he becomes toxic in the brightest-red states and districts, they’ll be more than happy to use the chaos as cover while they ram through as much regressive policy as possible. — David Litt, former Obama speechwriter
Trump himself hasn’t proved predictions wrong — he is exactly what his critics expected — but the American people and the Republican Party did, by not standing up to Trump’s nationalist demagoguery in time.
The people and other elements of government and civil society are rising to the challenge, but unless the GOP starts putting principles over party, America is headed for more chaos, more division, and a constitutional crisis. Trump cares only for his “brand,” so he’ll look for a way out before impeachment. — Garry Kasparov, chairman of the Human Rights Foundation
Because of the administration’s exhaustive attack on the media, accusing them of constantly reporting fake news, when Trump mysteriously abandons the presidency in August 2019, no one will know why.
All eyes will then turn to Woodward and Bernstein, the only trusted reporters left, for the answer. As they begin to share with us the brilliant Machiavellian coup d’état just staged by the deep state, we all wake up, it’s November 7, 2016, and this was all a horrible dream. Who are we kidding? Trump’s a TWO-TERM president. Enjoy! — Larry Wilmore, host of ‘Black on the Air’ podcast
Today’s guess: I would say he is more likely to be felled by fast food than anything else but, on his current path, he is NO MORE THAN A ONE-TERMER. — Norm Eisen, chairman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington
Assume that Trump manages to avoid stumbling into a major war. (Should that assumption prove false, then all bets are off.) But if our current situation persists — lesser wars that drag on indefinitely — then the current obsession with Trumpian scandals, real or alleged, is likely to intensify.
Trump has shown himself to be astonishingly thin-skinned. HE WILL GROW WEARY OF BEING PURSUED. Before his enemies close in for the kill, he will leave the field. — Andrew J. Bacevich, historian, Boston University
Although beset and besieged at every turn — and gaining an average of ten pounds a year — Trump indeed will make it through his first term.
He’ll choose not to run again in 2020. Mike Pence will run and lose to New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who thus becomes the first female president. (I offer this prediction having been wrong about every bit of political prognosticating I’ve ever been foolish enough to make.) — Margaret Sullivan, media columnist, Washington Post
Whether Trump survives — and I think he will — has nothing to do with the professional pundits and prognosticators who write for this magazine. The media has less credibility and influence today over politics than at any time in modern times.
Instead, his survival is based on maintaining the support he has from the tens of millions of Americans who voted for him. And from what I see and hear — and I have spent more time with Trump voters than just about anyone in America — they’re behind him 100 percent.
These alienated Americans don’t support him because of his economic policies, though they do believe the American workforce has been used and abused by the international economic community. They don’t support him for his foreign policy, though they eagerly embrace his America First clarion call.
They support Trump because of his persona, the in-your-face bravado that is so often condemned because it is so often misunderstood.
His base, about 35 percent of the American electorate, has waited a lifetime for a president to stand up, speak out, and reorder the world order.
It’s been chaotic and messy, but to the average Trump voter, it’s exactly what they wanted — and they are grateful. — Frank Luntz, Republican pollster
*A version of this article appears in the June 26, 2017, issue of New York Magazine.
Trump voters are more reflective of democrats/liberals: much as they spew bile because they, typically, jumped on the wrong gravy train and are now left hungry. There’s no difference between dems and repubs but Trump was not republican in terms of his character. He is your typical vile, ugly, narcissist democrat. The difference is he is wealthy and doesn’t give/doesn’t have to give a fig about appearances. But these hangers-on, sniveling democrats dependent on feeding at the trough off people like Trump are stifled from spewing their true feelings and beliefs because they can’t afford to. Their positions are of the pretentious “bleeding heart liberal” cloak they WERE forced to wrap themselves into to sell hope and change while screwing the masses over – every election in America is based on giving people (no)hope and promising (no)change for the better. But, as can be seen, they quickly discard the cloak when it came down to their survival. Of course they blame voters for cutting off their gravy train because that is EXACTLY what voters did! Sweet! But that is when a person’s true character is openly bared for everyone to see. Funny thing is, they can’t see it while everyone else can! It’s survival time and pretending to even care be damned!
—
Happens all over. Look what the PNC did when the party lost power. Now they are back in power through rigged elections but being uncivilized barbarians, they lack the capacity to practice even a pinch of basic decency. Given the current prison situation along with the PNC covert and overt involvement with the escapees AND their facilitating of the prison break, there should be immediate steps taken for a two-state solution to put an end to humans having to live among these savages.
Obviously, the west isn’t going to do anything because it is to their benefit. Make no mistake, the west is pleased with uncle tom’s performance and those of the junior uncle toms. No need to know the token names they give themselves. Names are for people and things of worth; uncle tom plus a number aptly fits them all – uncle tom 1, uncle tom 2, uncle tom 3, uncle tom 4, uncle tom 5, etc.
Now would be a good time for Guyanese to read up on wikileaks releases on the PNC’s involvement with the Bartica and Lusignan massacres and connect the dots to the escapees involved in the present prison situation. However, the PPP is to be blamed for trying to deal with these savages like humans. Does one send a dove to confront a vulture? Or a baby chick a hyena? Learn this lesson for next time!