Yes. Other hallmarks, which apply to both them and the coal miners, are being age 45+, having mediocre or poor educations (with or without post-secondary credentials), and living in poorer states with less diversified economies.
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Yes, but I think wit the reinforcement of social media and the misinformation of the internet reinforcing it, it has gotten way worse.
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Today for some reason I was looking up the wedding of Rock Hudson and Jim Nabors (someone made a quip about it in another thread). There was no such marriage:
What’s strange is that basically it was a joke someone made and it took off. People believed it. It apparently ruined their friendship because they couldn’t be seen together anymore. This was 1971, but it made me think of the recent antifa supersoldier thing. I only bring this up because while I think the internet has made it easier to produce a large quantity of false rumours, the basic framework of people repeating and magnifying falsehoods has been there since time immemorial.
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If the book Art of the Deal is valid, Don borrowed against his fathers construction company roughly worth 2 million. To balloon that to present day net worth is impressive.
Art of the Deal’s ghostwriter has pointed out it’s mainly fiction- and of course that 2 million was an early deal made before his father died and left him control of a company worth hundreds of millions and a further unknown but sizable inheritance. He could have done nothing but put his money in a fund and made a bigger increase to his wealth. Taking a large stack of cash and making it into a bigger stack is apparently quite easy. Soon to be easier if Trump’s tax plan goes through.
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Well put. Indeed was a leg up.
Build that wall - around the shit-gargling morons that support the Apricot Arsehole.
Why are we talking about reaching the deplorables? Fuck them.
Everybody with half a clue knows the way to defeat these fuckwits is to save the Democratic party from the neocon filth, and give folks somebody to actually turn out and vote for.
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who used that position to secure power for their class instead of to actually make things better.
That includes quite a number of Republicans in power currently on the Dump train. That makes them hypocrites at best. But, yeah, you knew that already.
Well, here’s what you missed:
I think the Trump supporters who are on anti-elite bandwagon feel that way too, and I don’t think they are hypocritical on this issue. They hate Mitch McConnell. The go to excuse for Trump getting nothing done was it was congress’ fault. I think if you polled them with the question, “Did the Republicans in Washington done shit for you before Trump came along?” among the Trump base we’re talking about it would be about 90% no.
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Being a billionaire doesn’t get you automatic respect, and Trump was not respected by old money types, the kind that are less loud about how big their fortune is, not to mention their body parts. I think he bought a bunch of private clubs because otherwise he wouldn’t be a member of any.
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He’s not an “elite” and they can proove it. He doesn’t like things like art or knowledge. He even destroyed artwork in order to save some time and money.
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I’m not sure there really are two segments, either. I think there are the more obvious racists/homophobes/xenophobes/tribal haters of “liberals”/ etc. and those who deny that they are but secretly and not-so-secretly hold those views as well, to some degree, even if they have other issues that draw them to him, in ignorance. (E.g. coal jobs) After the election, I was convinced that a combination of profound ignorance and stupidity were sufficient to be a Trump supporter, but at this point it seems clear that it’s not enough.
I’m not sure it would entirely help - some of them know but don’t care, as long as those “libtards” and “elites” (urban, coastal dwellers) get hurt, too.
Oh come now - they don’t hate black people. Just black people who get all “uppity.” They love black people who “know their place.” And by “love” I mean “tolerate, maybe.”
It wasn’t tone deaf, though - she was specifically talking about white supremacists and various fascist groups, and it got taken out of context. The fact that Trump supporters were so willing to adopt a label given to the KKK, etc. should have been a big warning sign at the time.
It really does seem to be getting more extreme. No-information voters getting what little “news” they read from fake news web sites is destroying shared reality in a way that was unimaginable not so long ago.
Sadly, just about everything Trump is doing won’t have any sort of impact until he’s well out of office (even if he got another term. The damage he’s doing to the Department of Agriculture, for instance, might hugely impact food resources - but decades down the road. His supporters, on the other hand, expect that his impact is immediate, so the lack of immediate bad things was seen as a sign of his success.
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As bleak as the linked article is, it kind of makes me feel like there could be hope in the long run. It’s just the story of a county suffering from pandemic clinical depression, using Turmp as an instrument of self-harm. So it’s not an uplifting story, but what it does have is the ring of deep truth, unlike the confusing miasma of columnists’ efforts to intellectualize the problem.
For these people, Turmp is nothing more or less than the humanoid form of Fentanyl. If that sounds simplistic, well, read the things they’re saying and let me know if there’s another narrative that makes as much sense; sometimes things are simple. It doesn’t make the problem smaller, or suggest any easy solutions, but at least it cuts through the horseshit about policy checklists and beliefs and other stuff that is not relevant to voters like this.
One cause for short-term optimism – not for the people in Johnstown, but for everyone else – is that addicts inevitably isolate themselves. You might start out injecting alongside adventurous college kids, but sooner or later those college kids will run away and stay away. The more Turmp plays to the hardcore Turmp addicts, the more he will force everyone else to decide whether they’re a member of that group or not. And his hardcore supporters, while horrifyingly numerous, aren’t numerous enough to win any elections on their own.
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I agree! Where are the principled, charismatic, and smart 35-45 year old candidates?
In France and Canada?
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Oh boy, my mom and dad are those people for sure. They live off of nostalgia-driven resentment. They want the past (or rather their romanticized version of it) to come back. It’s really hard to talk to them when it comes to the facts. They rather work from fantasies than hard facts that capitalism enables the race to the bottom which our home state has endured (Kansas).
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Depends on what you mean by “deplorables”. If you mean the rural people that grow the food that feeds the cities, I’d rather reach them, for exactly that reason. Urbanites require their helots, even though I don’t.
If you meant the racists and mysognists, though, then yeah, OK, I’m on board wit y’all! But my Trump-voting rural relatives are neither racist nor mysogynist.
BOOM! That’ll get the votes of all the people I just mentioned! They would have voted for Bernie, you know. I think one of my cousins still has both Bernie and Trump stickers on her car, in fact.
Ah, I fell asleep.
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This has become my attitude, also. You can’t reach hardcore Trump supporters. You CAN make sure you outnumber them.
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