Why Donald Trump, for all his Grievous Faults, May Win

Many Trump voters are not aligned with the hard right but harbor immensely hostility to a Democratic Party which, they believe, has forsaken them.

By

David Gottfried

If you want to understand Trump’s tenacious hold over the American mind, you could do worse that to reread one of the finest American novels of the 20^th Century, J.D. Salinger’s, “A Catcher in the Rye.”

The protagonist in that book complains that almost everyone in authority is a “phony.”   And that’s how the Trump contingent feels.   They believe that the intelligentsia, academia, government and politically correct liberalism is a field of phonies, is something akin to the field of poppies, in “The Wizard of Ox,” implanted by the Wicked Witch of the West to make Dorothy sleep and not brace herself to rebut the avalanche  of evil waiting in the wings.   

Of course, Trump has spewed legions of lies, and his lies almost toppled our government on January 6, 2021, but Trump never purported to be Mr. Clean, whereas Hillary, Biden and company purport to be angels of mercy who “feel our pain,” and presumably suffer stabbing chest pains whenever an American is denied medical coverage.

Many Trump voters are hurting economically.  Many of them are supporting Trump not because they hate the Left, but because they hate what liberal democrats have become, apostles of identify politics.    Many of them would vote for a socialist, leftist candidate if that option were available.  The proof is in the presidential primaries in 2016 in which Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton in those regions in which Democrats usually  lose, ramshackle towns where poor white people live.  In New York, Bernie did beautifully among working  class Italians in Staten Island, in West Virginia he did well with just about everyone, and in beat-up, white, working-class villages and small cities in every part of the country he won sizable pluralities and majorities.   And these same people are voting for Trump.  They are voting for Trump because the Democratic Party is like a snide, dyspeptic schoolmarm criticizing us for coming to school without shoes.   It reeks with Park Avenue condescension.  Poor whites don’t want to vote for a conservative Republican.   They are voting for Trump because, to an extent, they want the entire edifice of our civilization smashed to smithereens.  If this doesn’t appear to make much sense, remember that many pollsters said that poor whites who supported Bobby Kennedy in the Spring of 1968 supported George Wallace, the veritable antithesis of Kennedy on race relations, in the November 68 election.  

SPECIAL NOTE:  Although I used to love Bernie Sanders because of his stance on economics, I now hate that man as he has become the property of folks opposed to Zionism. 

The Seeds of my Disgust with Democratic Party Liberalism

I started to despise the “liberal elites” (I am not referring to the Left. I am referring to corporate Democrats who affect compassion for a working class they have contempt for)   when I worked with Democratic Clubs in Lower Manhattan at the inception of the AIDS pandemic.   Among other things, I noticed that whenever Robert Abrams (the attorney general of New York State) made a speech at Democratic Clubs in Lower Manhattan, he patted himself on the back for allegedly using his power to help Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, a doctor threatened with eviction because his medical practice had many AIDS patients whose presence, allegedly, might lower property values.

I found this strange:   Why in G-d’s name was he congratulating himself for supposedly saving Sonnabend and his medical office from oblivion. To paraphrase Lloyd Benston, I knew Dr. Sonnabend,  Dr. Sonnabend was a friend of mind and, in all fairness, you, Mr. Abrams, were no Bobby Kennedy.  

I was a patient of Dr. Sonnabend.   When I started seeing him, in 1984, his office was on either West 10^th or West 12^th Street in Greenwich Village,  the site he was being evicted from. By  1985, he had been booted out of his office and was a refugee in a nearby warehouse whose faucets did not always  yield water.  One day, when I had an appt. to see him at his warehouse/medical office, another patient needed an injection which he couldn’t administer because his poverty-stricken office lacked sterile water.  (I ran to Bigelow’s Pharmacy to buy sterile water and other items so he could give the guy a shot.)  By 1986, he was practicing in  a smelly tenement near 10^th Avenue.  

I asked Sonnabend why Mr. Abrams ran around New York praising himself for being Sonnabend’s legal salvation.   Sonnabend sheepishly told me that although he was evicted, he was given money.  I would think that if he had a gotten a reasonable settlement, he would have had offices with running water, and sterile water, and would not have been a refugee with rats and roaches in a tenement.  (In 1992, Abrams tried to unseat New York’s incumbent Republican Senator, Alphonse D’ Amato.   Damato kicked his ass with dispatch.   The career of yet another apostle of bullshit, wimpish liberalism had unceremoniously, and mercifully, bitten the dust.) 

Soon enough, I learned that gross exaggerations of liberal achievements were the order the day.  Liberal pols rise to a podium, and they frenetically pump their fists in the air and tell us that they have “pushed” for Medicare, the arts, transportation, and everything but your severe attack of hemorrhoids which makes you want to take off your clothes and start scratching, the press conference be damned,  

Their recitations of great liberal deeds are devoid of the slightest measure of specificity, and when a pol says he “pushed” for education, we don’t know if he actually persuaded the legislature to enact a bill, or if he pushed a mop while he was cleaning the floors of the Board of Education.

Of course, sometimes they do specific things, but they never fess up on how their specific endeavors made matters worse:   Sure, starting with FDR, we paid farmers not to grow crops to stop prices from nose-diving, but most of this money went to enormous plantations which, upon receipt of federal monies, evicted 1 to 2 million tenant farmers, sharecroppers in common parlance, in the American South.    Sure, we gave weapons to our “allies” in South Vietnam, but much of it was then sold to the NVA and the Vietcong who used American weapons to kill American boys.   

Usually, pols can talk their way out of any corner, and  their deft composition of evasive drivel can justify any crime in the cornucopia of a politician’s criminal imagination.  For example, my disgust with liberal lies reached almost Trumpian proportions when Hillary Clinton, shortly before she started her 2000 campaign for the US Senate, said she was going to conduct a listening tour of the State of  New York and, adjusting her taut facial muscles to affect an air of motherly compassion, added that she really wanted to know what people were “feeling.” 

Understand something:  Hillary Clinton rarely listens to anyone save a misandristic Amazon who is hoping that menopause means she can start shaving her face, and she does not care about anything as trite as feelings.

Indeed, the New York Times reported, about 20 years ago, that when Russel Feingold (Then Democratic Senator from Wisconsin) stressed the importance of Campaign Finance Reform at a conference of Dem. Party big shots, Hillary shut him up and tartly said, “Russel, get real.”      

And so although lib dems always purport to care about the woes of poor and oppressed people, they are as icily pragmatic as the sternest triage manager at a disaster site.  With the exception of the Bernie Sanders contingent in the Democratic Party, the democratic party is dominated by Clintonians who sought to neuter the democratic party and alienate it from its working-class sympathies.

Disgust with Conventional Democratic Party Liberalism is Inextricably Tied to Disgust with so Called Professionals.

Scratch the surface of a Trump supporter, and you might meet someone who wants to rip apart his teacher, doctor or lawyer. 

Professionals and Liberals speak in measured tones of politically correct, dogma-laden vacuity, and they purport to be your zealous advocate, and when you leave the room, they are laughing their heads off because they so masterfully screwed you.

Psychiatry:

In the 1990’s, I was legal counsel for some mentally disturbed adults.   In these cases, the psychiatrists, like perfect liberals, purported to care about their oppressed and long-suffering patients.  They couldn’t give a rat’s ass about their patients.

My client SP:  His landlord sought to evict him because his apartment was such  a filthy mess that rats infested the building as if he were the pied piper.

 I  asked SP’s therapist to try to persuade SP to get rid of the damn garbage.   The therapist asked me,

“Does SP really have some sort of trouble with his apartment.  He has talked about it, but I don’t know what’s going on because I never listen to him because he’s completely crazy.”

Remember this:  They are getting paid by insurance companies, or Medicare and/or Medicaid, whether they do a good job or whether their patient drops dead 5 minutes after he exits the doctor’s affluent, haughty offices.  They are not listening to you, as Hillary is not listening to you and this, sometimes, is why people resort to, and truly believe in, violence.

SR and KP:   With respect to both clients, I spoke to their therapists so they could better navigate their legal and economic problems.  The doctors spoke to me, about their patients, even though they had not yet gotten authorizations, signed by the patient, which would permit them to relay confidential information.  Indeed, they blabbed to me, on the phone, and revealed damning information in our very first phone call.  Their bitchy, witchy voice boxes summed up my patients simply and dismissively, telling me that they were schizophrenics destined to be fuck-ups and that nothing could be done.

I felt particularly bad about SR.  He scored above 770 on both the math and verbal sections of the SAT, was a student at Columbia, and he couldn’t stand himself because he was an orthodox Jew, and he was gay. He was booted out of Columbia.  For a time, he resided in NYC’s shelter system for the homeless.  Finally, he was admitted to the “Bridge,” some sort of organization that praises itself for helping messed-up people.   The Bridge housed SR, and scores of other messed-up, forgotten people, in a tenement in Spanish Harlem, (The difference between what they collected from the patients, from SSD, SSI, welfare and Medicaid payments, and the paltry amount of money they spent serving them beans and rice in Spanish Harlem, was their SIZABLE profit.) 

In any event, one day SR fell from the roof of the building, and he landed, or rather a spike ripped through his neck, when he collapsed on a set of railings at the base of the tenement.

It was never clear if he was pushed or if he had  committed suicide.  Neither the Bridge, nor his mother, who aloofly commented that SR suffered a chemical imbalance and was always a hopeless case, nor the police ever seemed to care.    And I remember, a few years ago, an article in the Times said that the Bridge, and similar organizations, needed more government funding so it could continue its labors of mercy for messed-up fuck-ups.   

And looking at the Bigger Picture in Psychiatry:
 

More people are receiving psychiatric care than ever before and our suicide rate is rising and people seem to be getting crazier and crazier.  

Also, the psychiatric establishment has been sending out so many contradictory messages that we wonder if shrinks are capable of sustained  and clear  cognition:   A few decades ago, when psychiatry was dominated by mainstream feminists, it said that most likes, dislikes and inclinations were not inborn or genetically determined.  Men could be nurses and women could be ditch diggers; no sex change operation was warranted.  However, nowadays, psychiatry has been invaded by the celebrants of the Trans faith.  So if a little boy watches a cartoon in which a woman is a superhero, and the boy has a fleeting interest in wearing sleek tights like the superhero, they will, I suppose, think we should alter his sex.  Very simply, psychiatry’s embrace of trans ideology, besides being bonkers, implicitly repudiates feminism.  So what the fuck do these people really believe in.

Similarly, in the  pre-Stonewall era, psychiatry, instead of being a science, seemed to be a secular religion insofar as homosexuality was concerned as it deemed same sex relations as conclusive proof of derangement.  Now, however, homosexuality is idolized, lionized, lauded and celebrated unconditionally.  Some people, quite logically, have concluded that psychiatric judgments are not scientific judgments alone; they are scientific judgments that have been modified and informed by the ascendant psychosexual orthodoxies of the times.  

And do you really have to wonder why Trumpers, and other people who are denigrated as poor white trash, are dubious about the merits of your frigid new world order of prudery and prejudice masquerading as science and logic.   

 The Phoniness of Liberal Educators

 I have a black friend who is a pretty nice guy.   He’s not a stupid guy, and he is fully attentive to the arguments and machinations in our current political battles between Trump and his antagonists.   However, he is academically stunted.   He seems to be unsuited for any work requiring an average measure of literacy.  He spent four years in college, and he has a BA degree, and plenty of student loans screaming for repayment.  He works as a short order cook, preparing stuff like burgers. 

I think he was  a victim of bullshit liberal education (I use the word bullshit not to mar liberalism itself; rather, I deplore the bastardized grotesque thing that liberalism has devolved into.)  He had a succession of “nice,” soft, pussy-assed teachers who always told him that he was wonderful and never sought to ready him for serious academic work.  These alleged liberals maybe thought, because he was black, that he was too inherently stupid to crack the work.  They may have been afraid that if they honestly criticized my friend, who was a big, strong black boy, that he would have proceeded to beat them up.   

And why have some people become so extreme that they find favor with Justice Clarence Thomas – because he had a grandfather who beat him if he didn’t do his schoolwork, and he certainly knows how to read.    Similarly, why did Winston Churchill write English prose that was the West’s clarion call in World War Two ?  He was made to repeat the First grade twice.  Hence the fatigue with mushy, pussy liberalism and the longing for the alacrity of the lash and the whip.   

Furthermore, liberal educators, and almost all politicians for that matter, obscure education’s contradictory objectives:  A) Education seeks to help students learn, but B) education also seeks to track students, and it always has.  It tracks students into different classes, or different castes, so employers will know which students are fit for academic work, and professional or executive positions, and which students are not fit for academics and must be relegated to manufacturing or menial roles.  

Accordingly, when liberal educators say that they will leave no one behind, it’s a bald-faced lie.   Education has always sought to separate the bright from the dull, the elite from the rabble, the college bound from the subordinate students.  Of course, with the expansion of college enrollments, and the degradation of academic standards, a college degree is often practically valueless, but that of course does not necessarily relieve the students of the obligation of paying off their ridiculous loans for their exorbitantly expensive educations that were often just a bloody waste of time.    

Actually, I think that our propensity to shout hosannas to the idea that we must “leave no one behind” is positively correlated  with our tendency to leave more and more people behind.   In other words, to compensate for our increasingly unequal society and the skewed distribution of economic rewards, we talk about our love of equality.

San Francisco and the Degeneration of Liberal Dreams

Finally, consider San Francisco, a metropolis which exemplifies the very worst in contemporary Democratic Party liberalism. 

The debacle that is the Left in San Francisco is something akin to Mother Mary becoming a kept whore, dressed up in garish silks and jewels.   There once was a San Francisco which had a short-lived but earnest socialist uprising after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia.   There once was a San Francisco that took center stage in California’s socialist political revolution of the Depression, Upton Sinclair’s EPIC (End Poverty in California) campaign.   There once was a San Francisco which led the nation in opposition to the War in Vietnam.  There once was a San Francisco that was the gayest metropolis in America and that heralded a gayness that was free, liberating and happy.

But the youthful gayness of San Francisco soon became the gayness of a dyspeptic antique queen who behaves like Mrs. Drysdale of “The Beverly Hillbillies.”   And as that queen got more and more wrinkled, she became increasingly grotesque, miserly and mean.   She studied the market, she married Silicon Valley which married technology to tyranny, and she is the apotheosis of the new social order, sterile and sadistic.        

And the supposedly loving liberals of San Francisco are the selfish sadists which have created a city which is now famous for the breadth and severity of its homelessness crisis.  Millionaires became richer and richer as their real estate skyrocketed in value and what once were nice but modest one family homes are now valued at one million dollars, and this unholy concentration of almost cancerous wealth has put school teachers, firemen and hard-working people on the streets.

The towering steepled tops of millionaires’ mansions  should no longer spike like swords in the sky.   They should fall to the ground, and a new Joshua should make the walls of Jericho come “tumbling down” once again.

Of course, my hostility to unmitigated privilege might seem a tad un-American,   but I am here to tell you that people who make lots of money usually do not deserve the slightest scintilla of respect.  Of course, if a man is rich because he is a surgeon who successfully extracts severely inflamed and infected appendixes, he deserves his Cadillacs and his swimming pools.   If a man is rich because he saves innocent men from the living hell that is jail, he deserves to live in resplendent, sparkling luxury.  But the overwhelming majority of rich men are rich because of work  that has no redeeming social value.

In a word, most people are rich because they took  a product worth twenty dollars and they convinced someone to pay 50 dollars for that piece of dreck.  That, dear reader, is the alpha and omega of capitalism.  It is nothing but theft achieved with etiquette, with good manners, with a handshake.  It is robbery lite.  It is felonious conduct married to the manners of Fairfield County, Connecticut.    

And San Francisco, a bastion of luxury and rapaciousness that seems to consciously emulate the Court of Louis the Sixteenth, is overwhelmingly Democratic.