Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/05/02/what-trump-supporters-see.html
“Doesn’t look like anything to me.”
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Well put.
Is this perhaps aimed at this guy?
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Bravo. This one is brilliant, especially the last panel!
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I used to really look forward to this comic. Then Trump got elected.
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I’m stealing that one, too, @Papasan!
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It really is a nightmare, but it’s one that should probably be laid at the feet of Hillary rather than Trump.
She knew the very early polling said she would have an uphill battle with even the most lunatic, traditionally unelectable Republicans, but she ran anyway. Apparently because it was “her turn”, and screw everyone else if she didn’t get what she wanted.
Democrats wanted a far left swing from Obama, whose lite-Republican moves just weren’t enough for lower-income Dems. Instead the DNC (who admitted to being compromised by Hillary, giving her hiring veto power since 2015) shoved Hill-dawg down our throat, who is easily further right than Obama.
And, predictably, Democratic voters revolted. Mostly by staying home, but some also by voting for the one person who was talking about their economic well-being, and that sure as hell wasn’t Hillary. And now the DNC / DCCC are making the same mistakes over again with how they’re treating the 2018s, trying to avoid talking about economic and social welfare issues in lieu of fucking gun control (great way to energize the right’s base when they’re slumping, you assholes!) and a rerun of the social justice issues (second verse, same as the first - it’s important, but it’s not getting the left wing base out the door in droves, Hillary proved that with BLM, it just gives the right wing ammo when a new-and-not-ready-for-primetime movement is shoved into the limelight and makes mistakes).
We don’t have Trump because America is secretly racist as fuck, we have him because the Democratic party decided to swing waaaaay to the right at the worst time humanly possible, mostly because the Democratic donor class now consists of what would have been moderate-to-right-leaning-Republicans ~25 years ago, because the current Republican party is starting to be widely recognized to be bad for business except for the ultra-super-stupid-rich.
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insert favorite “Why not both?” gif here
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Well, my personal opinion is that we’ve had racist dicks run before, they just were such non-starters that it never got out of the gate.
But since Donnie Moscow managed to fuse an economic hope message with an ugly nativist one, he was narrowly able to slime past the usual filters… But again, mostly only because he was the only candidate with an economic hope message.
Let me repeat that: fuckmothering Donald Trump, cowardly racist clown shoe asswipe that he is, was the only candidate that was willing to run primarily on an economic message. Shit, a lot of his racist messaging was also couched in the same, e.g. “Mexicans takin’ ur jurbs”, that or in a safety / domestic security message, at least until he had significant public buy-in to his “underdog fighting for the working man” core message.
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Only in the sense that “all your problems are being caused by brown people and Muslims but I can fix that” can be framed as an “economic hope message.”
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Uh… You do know that while his overt racism on the trail got the most headlines outside of right-wing media, he DID run on jobs, economic security, and so forth, right?
I mean, that’s what “Make America Great Again” was coined on, bringing back those manufacturing jobs from China and the like, or actually more like preventing the loss of existing manufacturing jobs from people scared “we’re next”.
Example: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/donald-trump-manufacturing-jobs-hope/496541/
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Why would a group of voters that mostly included people with plenty of money vote for his economic message?
As one analyst points out,
many polls showed that Trump supporters were mostly affluent Republicans. For example, a March 2016 NBC survey that we analyzed showed that only a third of Trump supporters had household incomes at or below the national median of about $50,000. Another third made $50,000 to $100,000, and another third made $100,000 or more and that was true even when we limited the analysis to only non-Hispanic whites. If being working class means being in the bottom half of the income distribution, the vast majority of Trump supporters during the primaries were not working class.
Source:
Dude, I do think that if Sanders had been given a chance by the DNC, he would’ve done better than Clinton did against Trump. But that doesn’t mean that the primary voting impetus for Trump wasn’t racist xenophobia/fear of brown people, black people and Muslims.
He may have mostly ran on those issues, but they’re not what most of his voters mostly voted for.
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Fun fact: Democratic households are actually more affluent than Republican ones.
All those numbers say is that for some reason, Trump’s appeal more or less cuts across the economic spectrum, BUT it fails to connect whether those voters are in “vulnerable” economies, ones that “might be next” to be offshored and/or obsoleted (petrochem, manufacturing, etc.), because that’s who most polls seem to say he was killing it with.
Try “irrelevant fact.”
The issue here is those who voted for Trump, not those who vote for Democrats.
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See edit - he does well in an economic spectrum that is mostly people that might not have jobs in 10 years, and know it, even if they’re doing okay right this second.
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Even his so-called “economic” message was largely predicated on racism and Xenophobia. Mexicans are sneaking in to steal your jobs and use our social services! The Chinese are stealing our manufacturing industry! (Forget that Trump’s own product lines were made in China & Mexico.) And of course let’s not forget all those black people using up your tax dollars on welfare!
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I wouldn’t go so far as to say that his “anti-China-offshoring” message was primarily racist; that’s just tapping into a really, really obvious vein of fear to appeal to the current manufacturing sector.
Let’s face it, Trump mostly ran on a core message of “YOU ARE IN DANGER, ONLY I CAN SAVE YOU”, which was divided into political, criminal, and economic messages.
It would have been easy to beat him at this game, but nobody tried.
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Well, gee willikers, what COULD that reason be???
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Um… I’d say that many, if not most of our presidents were probably racist dicks. It’s not like Woodrow Wilson or Andrew Jackson were paragons of racial enlightenment. Even presidents who moved forward racial equality had some reservations about ending segregation and Jim Crow. It’s white supremacists all the way down.
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