Donald Trump’s policies aren’t what won him a majority of voters in the most recent election, or a majority of electoral votes in 2016. More realistically, it was Donald Trump who won the presidency both times. Opinion pieces continue to gloss over this.
Take a recent piece by the great Kathleen Parker at the Washington Post. Writing about Hannah Arendt and her discovery of the “lonely” and “needy” Germans who fell for Hitler, Parker saw the past in the present. In her words, “There’s no denying similarities between this description [Arendt’s] and Trump’s understanding of Americans who felt disenfranchised by globalization, angered by our porous southern border, and the contempt they felt from the media (absolutely justified).” Parker could be persuaded otherwise?
Starting with contempt from the media, which media? Would it be the New York Times, Parker’s Washington Post, CNN, or perhaps MSNBC? Parker might agree that it’s hard enough these days to find elites reading either of the newspapers mentioned, let alone the Trump voter in the allegedly forgotten parts of America. As someone who reads both, along with the Wall Street Journal every day, it’s nightmarish when traveling to find any of those newspapers, and this increasingly includes the airport hubs that elites fly through.
CNN and MSNBC? Assuming what’s likely, that there was lots of Trump and Trump voter contempt at both, how many of the Trump voters were getting their news from either news organization? Assuming news consumption, hopefully it’s not viewed as contemptuous to suggest that Trump’s crowd was Fox all the way.
What about the “porous southern border”? If we ignore that the border would never be the point of entry from people south of it if work were legalized, and if we similarly ignore that the optics of the southern border were the clear and bitter fruits of the central planning of a market phenomenon, we can’t ignore that the elite media’s search for the exotics who voted for Trump rarely took them to border towns. Lest readers forget, what flipped the U.S. electorally to Trump were states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and other states far from the border.
From there, the surge of people at the southern border was plainly a market signal of lots of work stateside, but not enough workers. The previous truth would be obvious to media types trying to understand the Trump voter if and when they ever spoke to employers of the unwashed masses from down south. To say that the typical Trump voter almost never applied for the jobs filled by people south of the border insults understatement.
Which brings us to globalization. Supposedly Trump voters loathed it, but all it took to see the absurdity of such analysis was a visit to a Walmart, Target, and any other national chain catering to the low-cost desires of voters who don’t live where media members do. In other words, plenty from China, Vietnam and other formerly poor nations didn’t just end up in the U.S. only to overwhelm economically desperate Trumpists; rather the plenty arrived from the other side of the world precisely because the Trumpists weren’t economically desperate, and they weren’t thanks to globalization that loves workers more than any concept ever conceived by humankind. Products always and everywhere buy products. Get it?
In time, the first and second drafts of history will be revisited. When they are, the myths about what inspired the “Trump voter” will achieve much-needed discredit. Love or hate the man, a lot of Americans love him. There’s your vote. To focus on policy is to miss the point.
