The Brooklyn Rail

I have never understood why so many working-class and working poor people stick with Trump. It’s just never made sense to me, why working people are attracted to a narcissistic billionaire who has never worked a day in his life and has always treated working people with utter contempt, as losers. But that’s obviously not the Trump they see. Working people loved Bobby Kennedy, too, and he was a wealthy scion who had everything handed to him on a silver platter and could be tremendously arrogant and cruel. They see Trump as someone who saw the rigged system of American business and figured out how to beat it and prevail. And now he is speaking out for all the people who have been screwed by this rigged system. He wants to burn the government part of this rigged system down, and that’s fine with them.

I understand that the system has screwed working people for a long time, and they’re sick of it. Nobody’s been listening to them, except Trump. Yes, he says a lot of crazy things, but he’s on our side, and in the end, he’ll look out for us. He’s our guy—one guy against the rigged system. If this means he needs to be a little rough at times, so be it. Move fast and break things—how do you like it now?

You say he’s a fascist, that he’s determined to undermine American democracy and replace it with autocracy. We think that’s an exaggeration. Trump uses that language because he knows it drives liberals crazy: TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome. We put him in the presidency for four years and he didn’t become a dictator or do most of the things he had threatened to do. He’s playing with you. He doesn’t really mean it. It’s a joke and you don’t get it.

And what if he does take power and bends the Constitution a bit? What if he remakes the rigged system? The old one didn’t do us much good. Is “democracy” really the be-all and end-all? What has democracy done for us lately?

You can’t eat democracy. You can live without democracy, but you can’t live without food. Food costs more under Biden/Harris than it did under Trump. Gas and lumber and rent cost more now than then. And we got big checks in the mail then, signed by Trump when he was president.

Adam Seessel just published a piece in the Times about his interviews with working-class people in the South, the Midwest, and the West a few months ago. Every one of them described the current economy as terrible and every one of them said they were for Trump. “Working people worry much more about payday than they do Jan. 6,” wrote Seessel. “Fair enough: But why turn to a lying, abusive billionaire to solve their economic problems? Their explanation is simple. Times were good when Trump was president. Now, eggs cost nearly three times what they did four years ago, the rate on a car loan is more than 50% higher, and some companies are cutting hours. Mr. Trump, they think, is the candidate to turn things around.” ¹

Yes, you can argue that the good economy people remember just before the Covid-19 pandemic was mostly Obama’s economy, not Trump’s. And that the economy of the Biden/Harris years is the best economy America has had in decades and is the envy of the world. And that the vast majority of economists say that Trump’s proposed economic policies for 2025 would be disastrous, especially for working people. But none of that is really addressing what people are feeling, and it looks like they won’t be moved, no matter what.

When a woman in the crowd of “undecideds” at the CNN Town Hall on October 23 asked Kamala Harris what she would do about the price of groceries if elected, Harris didn’t really answer the question, but turned it around to talk about how bad Trump’s “all tariffs all the time” plan would be for working people. The Harris/Walz campaign has clearly decided to concentrate on other parts of the electorate that are more getable in the time left. But that reservoir, that base of angry, fed-up working people will not go away, no matter how this election turns out.