Understanding Trumpers
Full text of an oped 30 days ago at WSJ
Incompetent Elites Make Trump Look Appealing
His supporters don’t love everything about him but are sick of being disdained and misgoverned.
Democrats and traditional Republicans are flummoxed. How are 4 in 10 of our fellow citizens ready to vote for Donald Trump? Democrats deplore Trump supporters as racists who must be saved from their ignorance. Traditional Republicans dream that some policy plan or another attack on Mr. Trump’s character might sway his voters.
We ought to listen instead. What motivates Trump supporters? Simple: They want their country back.
They might have lost a loved one in Iraq or Afghanistan. What was the sacrifice for? In the botched peace and withdrawal, they concluded that the foreign-policy elite don’t know what they’re doing. They are hesitant about Ukraine, Iran and Taiwan because the same crew is in charge. They’ll back an America that fights to win, but they don’t want their sons and daughters to die for America only to lose slowly.
In the 2007-08 financial crisis, they lost a house, a job or a business. They learned that the people in charge of the financial system don’t know what they’re doing. ObamaCare sent them a health-insurance card that doesn’t work well when they get sick. They wonder: Do any of the policy wonks who promote this stuff actually use it themselves? They looked at Hillary Clinton and saw her insincerity, her nonprofit collecting millions, the way she said Trump supporters belong in a “basket of deplorables.” They gambled on Mr. Trump.
Then the establishment blew up. They saw the Federal Bureau of Investigation harass Mr. Trump’s appointees, much of official Washington fashion itself “the resistance,” the Russia-collusion hoax, years of pointless investigations.
In 2020 Covid hit. Trump supporters initially went along, trusting institutions. But the pandemic soon exposed the politicized incompetence of the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the scientific establishment. Lockdowns destroyed lives. Officials made up rules and ramped up censorship. Inquiries about whether the virus came from a lab leak, or anything negative about masks or vaccines, became “misinformation” subject to censorship. Trump supporters saw media, tech companies and national-security bigwigs suppress the news of the Hunter Biden laptop just in time for the election.
When schools went remote, parents found out what was actually going on inside the classrooms. Teachers were coaching students to hate themselves, their country and their religious traditions and sexualizing young children. The FBI treated angry parents as domestic terrorists. After Oct. 7, Trump supporters learned that universities are incompetent and politicized and disdain people like them. They saw that once-trusted mainstream-media outlets had become political advocates long ago.
Voters see the chaos of a dysfunctional immigration system spill into their neighborhoods. They see crime overwhelming and shutting down cities where officials refuse to enforce laws. They see the homeless invading public spaces.
They aren’t proud of Mr. Trump’s actions after the 2020 election. But 91 felony counts, some brought by prosecutors who campaigned on a promise to get Mr. Trump, and most unrelated to the election? Bonnie and Clyde didn’t have this much legal trouble! And now disqualifying Mr. Trump from the ballot? “Destroy democracy to save democracy” is no longer a joke. The existence of the deep state seems to be confirmed with every outrage.
Why aren’t Trump supporters properly grateful for Bidenomics? They understand the economy is just recovering to something like normal after the pandemic. They are smart enough to know that big spending programs will go down a rat hole into someone’s pocket. They know that a mountain of debt must end badly. They see the river of wasted money and the surge of inflation, more evidence that macroeconomic elites don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t want to be force-fed electric cars and trucks. They’re sick of washers that don’t wash, toilets that don’t flush, showers that don’t clean.
Why are these voters inclined toward Mr. Trump? Well, there is no better way to stick it to the elites than to vote for the man who drives them most crazy.
This election isn’t about employment, spending promises or 12-point policy plans. Voters everywhere want the basic institutions of American society and government to return to a semblance of apolitical competence. Warren Harding’s “return to normalcy” after the first Progressive Era might be a good slogan.
What should Nikki Haley do? Show that she understands this deep frustration. Explain how she will fix the country’s institutions and why Mr. Trump won’t or can’t. What should Mr. Trump do? Understand that this election isn’t about him. He is but the vessel for these voters’ hopes for their country. His personal vendettas will keep him from office.
What should Democrats do? Listen. Stop screaming your talking points and hyperventilating that Mr. Trump is a dictator in waiting. Stop falling into the obvious trap. Mr. Trump is gifted at provoking ridiculous overreaction from his opponents. You promised moderation, openness, conciliation and simple competence. You delivered the opposite. It is still possible to acknowledge, listen and pivot.
Mr. Cochrane is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and author of “The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level.”
Not a bad attempt but it still talks about us like we are lab rats and morons. I'm a top 5% earner with a top 1% IQ and voting for Trump in 2020 was a no brainer. I'll share why someone who isn't the 'hayseed' these grotesque hacks hate would readily support Trump. The real question is why anyone who actually loves liberty and our nation would support the Dems and the Globalist, Neo-Con, Neo-Liberal Republicans? A few points in response to this piece.
1. The 2020 election was stolen. Those of us who bothered to keep track of the actual court cases and hearings and legislatures and various actions on elections have all the proof we need now. Just 'drop boxes' alone and how they were managed has been found to have been illegal in key swing states where Dems did massive ballot harvesting based on drop boxes. Forget the dozens of findings of fraud in swing states, the CFTC dumping 400 million focused on literally running the elections in key Dem, swing electoral districts and finally the way the social media companies suppress conservative voices. Then there is 2000 Mules and subsequent cases on Texas, Rhode Island, New York and elsewhere show massive ballot harvesting in illegal ways at scale. Some of us noticed that counting was stopped only in swing states where Trump was winning, and this was done so the Dems could figure out how many fraudulent ballots they had to count. And finally, those who did this had the gall to write an article in Time Magazine bragging how they 'fortified' the election. Don't you dare call me an 'election denier', it's not December 2020 when we didn't have all the evidence together. If you don't realize that election was stolen by the Dems, you are just uninformed at this point.
2. The federal govt has ginned up a fake threat narrative about the Right and under the ridiculous rubric of 'Domestic Violent Extremism' are suppressing our voices and oppressing us in our workplaces, schools and govt institutions. And be clear - anytime one of us is subjected to say a rainbow flag in a school or govt building or workplace, we are being suppressed and oppressed. Why are our embassies flying the rainbow flag during the obscenity called "Pride Month". The FBI and other intel agencies are tracking us, pretending there is a huge White Supremacist threat when in fact, according to multiple whistleblowers they have ginned massive numbers of fake cases to provide the basis for their faux righteousness. We believe that if the Dems get into power they will make being conservative itself a crime of sorts.
3. We are insolvent as a nation and a financial and currency crisis unlike anything this nation has seen is on a hair trigger. The meltdown could begin any moment and only MAGA people are talking about it honestly. If you are unaware how debt service and managing our debt will cost 1 trillion in the current fiscal year, you are asleep. We will have a 2.5 trillion deficit this year - when there is no 'crisis'.
4. Non-interventionism - The article got it wrong. We didn't want to 'win' in Afghanistan and Iraq, we now realize two things. One, Al Qaeda attacked us cuz of our bloody history in THEIR NATIONs. Two, the exact wrong reaction was to further spread our imperial, militaristic reach around the world. This made us also look hard at NATO and Taiwan and ask why is our federal govt making promises to these nations to defend them or arm them to the teeth at least? Same with Israel or Ukraine? We have also learned how our rabid, out of control CIA, arm in arm with our Marxist State Dept have been throwing 'color revolutions' all around the world without bothering to ask us if we wanted them to do that. We see how we cause wars and aren't a stabilizing influence in the world at all.
Short version? We've noticed that we start wars every 2-3 years and have thrown 80 coups since 1945 and we don't want our nation doing that. Period.
5. Our entire education system has been overtaken by radical Neo-Marxist, Crit Theory peddling revolutionaries. From kindergarten to grad school. That BS is infecting the rest of the world with Queer Theory for elementary schools and Critical Race Theory etc. Whiteness is now openly demonized by our news media, and we are then dismissed as whiners when we notice. There is active discrimination against white men in corporate hiring, as recent whistleblowers from IBM and others have shown conclusively. Same is happening at our universities, SCOTUS recently confirmed our nations universities are engaging in wildly illegal discrimination to achieve their Marxist outcomes.
There, I FIFY...
As a Trump-agnostic observer from across the pond, it seems to me that his appeal is that he comes across as a combative outsider who refuses to play by the rules of what so many across the Western world increasingly see as a political stacked deck. Secondly the fact that he has triggered Trump Derangement Syndrome in the millions of the Lefty-sheep-dipped graduate class who now control all the levers of power in America (and the Western world as a whole)....this must have enough appeal to compensate for the more annoying aspects of his personality. The only politician I have admired in my six decades of adult life was Margaret Thatcher. I don't think history will be as kind to Trump's as to her memory but I can see that maybe, in some inchoate instinctive way, the 40% or so of Americans who voted for him in 2020 could see that he was just what Western liberalism needed. Because like Mrs Thatcher, whatever else he is, at least he's not an 'insider' of the group-thinking lefty liberal establishment that has now got a monopoly over every Western institution. And like Mrs T he won't back down and tango dance with the awful MSM. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/mrs-thatcher-and-the-good-life