Donald Trump is going down in American history in the same way Nero went down in Rome.
Trump fiddles while his campaign burns and, disturbingly enough, he still has a chance at becoming president.
As I watched Trump’s first debate performance spiral into a delusional rant about Sean Hannity, the mind numbing and infuriating questions of “what made Donald Trump? What the hell is the core of his popularity?” began repeating in my brain.
While the overpaid talking heads on television continue to espouse the line that Trump has only been picked up by a resurgence of racism, I find the argument disturbingly lacking.
Yes, the Klan endorsed him, but the Klan is basically a backwoods group of inbreeding knuckle draggers at this point.
President Barack Obama has recently blamed Republicans “They stood by and they didn’t say anything, because it was a way to rile up their base … Over time, because a lot of the hardcore Republican partisan voters were just hearing this stuff over and over again, they started to believe it,”
While that’s certainly a perfect summarization of the Republican fault, he failed to mention continuing the birther crap, the Iraq war, the failure of trickle down, demanding insane tax cuts for the wealthy, demanding cuts for programs that help the lower class, and of course, duping voters, a fact the voting base is all too aware of now.
Under the auspices of limiting government, cutting spending and balancing the deficit, the Republicans, (especially the Tea Party,) used the chance they were given to simply annoy the Obama administration, hold the country hostage over the debt ceiling and, even going so far as to shut down the government a few times. Obama failed to mention something.
The Democratic Party is equally guilty of this trash heap.
Democrats have done a fair share of damage to the middle and lower classes.
President Bill Clinton signed NAFTA which crushed the middle classes staple factory work by allowing outsourcing on a scale so grand most major companies from Nike to Ford have abandoned states in the rust belt for a factory in China and Mexico, Trump isn’t lying when he says that, even if he made use of said trade deals himself.
It’s the second sign of the apocalypse I know.
According to Lori Wallach in her Huffington Post article “NAFTA: At 20: One Million U.S. Jobs Lost, Higher Income Inequality,”, America has lost more one million jobs to the trade deal when Clinton promised the American people it’d create 200,000 jobs.
NAFTA isn’t alone, as it currently sits with thirteen siblings from countries ranging from Israel to Panama, which was recently this year’s ground zero of the Panama Papers. Obama is pushing for the next trade agreement the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is already regarded with suspicion.
Long story short, there’s a very real anger behind Trump.
A good deal of it is indeed racist chest thumping at excessively unconstitutional, and unrealistic ideas, such as a ban on Muslims and building a wall respectively.
But most of it is the pain of having lost the decent life lived in the pre recession world, and the slow, bogged down recovery.
Vote for whoever you will, or don’t vote at all. This is just my theory on why Trump became so popular.