I find myself often asking the perplexing question, “How can half the voting population of the United States in 2024 vote for Trump?” The polls say that this will likely happen, and that the election remains a tossup. We now know what Trump is like—narcissist, braggart, egotist, perpetual liar, and one who like Biden is wrestling with nagging intellectual frailties of old age. His term as president was saved from complete disaster by having at least some competent advisers who provided guardrails that kept him—and our country—from plunging over the cliff. Another term will not have such advisers, and Project 2025 lays out in excruciating detail how our country could become closer to a dictatorship if Trump is reelected in November. If he wins, there will be no excuse for arguing that the country was not forewarned. A second presidency of Donald J Trump could mean the end of the world’s oldest continuing democracy.
The reason I have trouble understanding why Trump remains popular with half the country is because I do not believe half of us Americans are “bad people.” Half the voters in our country can’t be “nuts.” And a huge majority of evangelicals—who are among Trump’s most ardent MAGA followers—can’t all be crazy. What is going on?
What is going on is this: Trump is a symbol rather than a cause of “America’s Great Discontent.” When he ran and unexpectedly won in 2016, Trump sensed the anger and anxiety that many Americans felt and exploited that. He sensed that many people were struggling to get by and were resentful of others who seemed to have had it easy and who they believed looked down on them. The most vocal supporters of Trump then and now are white men with no college degree, many working in blue collar jobs. For many of these people Trump is their hero because he is a thorn in the flesh of America’s elite—intellectuals, professionals, academics, scientists, business people, and anyone who is of a liberal bent.
Make no mistake: Many of these grievances are legitimate. They are the cause of the basic grievance fueling old fashioned populism—the little guys versus the big guys. The irony in this case is that Trump’s policies in his presidency provided tax cuts for the ultra-rich and large corporations and did not address class and income disparities. Rather, they exacerbated them. And Trump’s contempt for programs like Obamacare, Child Tax Credits, and supportive services that have helped the working class and lower income people prove that he is a “faux populist.” In other words what he has done is less important than what he has said. If he calls out the “liberal elite” as enemies of his base, this is enough for him to hold on to his supporters. As the saying goes, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” He is the symbol of grievance and has said so himself: “I will be your retribution!”
This is not to say that the white working class and evangelical MAGA supporters are the only ones who will vote for Trump on November 5. There are lots of others, many of whom are wealthy people who have benefitted from Trump’s tax cuts in 2017 that benefitted the wealthy and large corporations. Those cuts are responsible for more than $1.5 trillion of the deficits our country has experienced over the past eight years and are due to expire early 2025. Many who have benefitted from the tax cuts will hold their nose and vote for Trump anyway both to preserve the cuts they have benefitted from for the last eight years and the additional cuts that Trump has promised. And surely there are many more who have their own reasons, many of whom are part of Trump’s cult of personality. It is hard to deny that the powerful persona of Donald Trump casts an ominous shadow over election day 2024 and the actions that will follow.
Whether Trump gets reelected or not, this should be wakeup call that there is something wrong in our country which needs to be addressed. Besides the income and social class disparities, there are three other controversial issues where Tump’s proclamations carry weight with his followers—race, immigration and abortion. I do not believe that Trump himself really cares about any of these issues. He only cares about himself. What he looks for, however, is an issue which divides Americans and then calculates which side of the issue will help him win votes. His white, working class followers have opposed progressive initiatives like “Black Lives Matter,” “DEI,” and a woman’s right to choose. Reading the tea leaves, Trump has sided with those who oppose these progressive initiatives. And top on the list, of course, is immigration, which many in his base believe has threatened their jobs and their fragile position in our society. Trump has made immigration his centerpiece policy initiative and has pledged to close the border and expel millions of immigrants. His ranting and raving on this issue keeps the fire going among his base, even though what he proposes to do would make America seem more like Nazi Germany than the country we now know.
So, yes, I am apprehensive and fearful. I am a big fan of Harris and Walz and pray they will eke out a win, but if they do win, that also raises the issue of another rebellion like January 6, this time on steroids.
Oh, I have not mentioned foreign policy. The good news is that Trump would likely keep us out of a nuclear war with Russia. The casualty, of course, would be Ukraine, which he would abandon, probably along with NATO and perhaps even the United Nations.
This is certainly the most consequential election in my lifetime. The stakes have never been higher. But the other takeaway is that these issues–income and social class disparities, lingering racism, abortion, and immigration–are issues which will continue to haunt the United States regardless of who gets elected. We Americans must address these challenges and make our country kinder, gentler, and fairer. If not, another faux populist is likely to take Trump’s place four years from now, if not sooner.
Joe, I like and read all of your posts. I agree in this one about why Trump is popular with half of the country, except you omitted one of the major reasons, I believe. Racism.
On both issues with African-American residents and immigrants, Trump has characterized Black and immigrants as the ‘other,’ explicitly with immigrants (‘poisoning the blood of America’) and implicitly, by praising Nazi and racist supporters, with regard to African-American citizens.
This is a major reason, IMO, Trump has received much of his support.
Dan Dozier
You are exactly right, Dan. I should have given this more emphasis. And thanks for following…
Joe
You have pretty much nailed it, Joe. I would add another variable: Israel. Netanyahu is likely to benefit from the a Trump win and so Trump will draw the votes of the Jewish population of the US. ???
Thank you Joe – you have great insight into these issues, having written about them since the 1960s!
Have you read this new book? The author spoke here last week. She spent seven years on the ground in the poorest county in Kentucky. It reminded me so much of your work. And my sense is she pretty much agrees with your analysis above.
https://thenewpress.com/books/stolen-pride
The irony, of course, is that Trump is has done little for the people who’ve supported him. But he is a skilled manipulator, and has a lifetime of experience shamelessly denying and pushing back on detractors.
Thanks, Jim. Will order…
Great! MSNBC had the author on this morning:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_EClU4IreQ
Look forward to seeing your book review!
Thomas Edsall just summarized (NYT 9-25-24) academic work on “why Trump?”.
Trump has remained a powerful, if not dominant, political figure by weaving together a tapestry of resentment and victimhood. He has tapped into a bloc of voters for whom truth is irrelevant. The Trump coalition is driven to some extent by white males suffering status decline, but the real glue holding his coalition together is arguably racial animus and general resentment toward minorities.
The political scientists Lilliana Mason, Julie Wronski and John V. Kane captured this phenomenon in their June 2021 paper, “Activating Animus: the Uniquely Social Roots of Trump Support.”
Trump’s support, they wrote, is “tied to animus toward minority groups,” specifically “toward four Democratic-aligned social groups: African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims and gays and lesbians.”
Thanks for sharing. Seems to be on target to me. I mentioned race as an issue though agree with Edsall and others that it is also a main driver of the “Great American Discontent”. However, I also believe that it is more complicated and nuanced than we often assume. My book,”Hard Living on Clay Street,” I think deals with this thorny issue. The basic question is why do people feel this way.
As Joe Klein wrote Jul 29, 2024, It’s the culture, stupid. The Democrats, led by their arrogant, elitist academic wing, have pursued a disastrous course for decades, emphasizing identity over unity, equity over equality of opportunity, and playing annoying, euphemistic, dilettante word games, using terms like socialism, gender-affirmation, white privilege, people of color, unhoused, intersectionality (whatever that is), Latinx and pronoun-imprecision—all guaranteed, indeed intended, to kick sand in the face of the bourgeoisie.
And it was Obama in 2014, pressured by his lefty advisors, who changed the definition of ‘asylum’ from escaping government tyranny to fearing for a life of poverty. In 2021, it was Biden who opened the southern border that Trump had closed, letting in about 10M asylum seekers, who’ve disappeared. [Note: I’m all for controlled immigration, but against open borders.]
Then there are the two executive orders that (professed centerist ) Biden signed his first week in office. The first, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/01/20/executive-order-advancing-racial-equity-and-support-for-underserved-communities-through-the-federal-government/ committed the Federal government to enforce what anti-liberal critical theorists call “equity.” That explicitly replaces the idea of ‘equality of opportunity’ in favor of ‘equality of outcomes.’ What a smack in the face for traditional liberals, who by the time Obama was elected in 2008, supported laws that protect minorities from discrimination, so that every American can have equality of opportunity, without their own talents being held back by prejudice.
The second, signed the same week was (read it yourself), https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2022/06/15/executive-order-on-advancing-equality-for-lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-queer-and-intersex-individuals/ Please don’t use biology or common sense to distinguish male from female or complain that pre-teens shouldn’t be able to choose their own sex, or the DOJ will get after you.
And how did you miss this nonsense? Perhaps you are a daily absorber of the main stream media, that for the most part not only promotes the Democratic Party but ignores complaints about it. For years, anyone who watch Biden speak could see his stumbles, mumbles and brain freezes. But what did the press say when Fox or others would remind the nation that the Dems put a dangerously declining figure in the White House and tried to hide him from the public? They ignored it. And remember — Biden would be accepting his party’s renomination this week instead of saying goodbye had he put on even a halfway decent debate performance against Donald Trump.
In 2017, Democrat Mark Lilla wrote “The Once and Future Liberal,” an impassioned, tough-minded, and stinging look at the failure of American liberalism over the past two generations. Not enough of you read it.
Great to hear from a contrarian. Thanks for presenting the other side. And I think you are right that I missed the culture wars. Shame on me. While a bleeding heart liberal like me does not concede that you are correct on all points, the culture war argument explains a lot.
I agree with the comments that race (or more broadly, diversity in our society) is the primary driver. I believe that political scientists will look back on the Trump era and view it as, primarily, a reaction against the Obama presidency. Secondary, and related factors are diversity in general (for example increased rights for LGBTQ individuals and racial minorities),and what I would call “sexual politics”, or the perceived diminshed role of white males in our society. But first and foremost it’s the fact that our nation elected (twice) a Black president.
I disagree. None of the Trump suppports I know care a bit that a black man was elected president. They were annoyed at many of his progressive policies and more so on the Uber-progressive policies of his successor. Just look up Biden’s executive orders his first week in office. Furthermore, most the kids and grandkids of my Trumpie friends are in mixed-raced marriages and have mix-raced grandkids. I think you have racial issues backwards: it the foisting of racial issues on society, by our government and universities and the Democrats, that annoys them.