Donald Trump continues to gain support from the most unlikely Americans. Michael Goodwin explains why he thinks it’s time for a Trump revolution and also why he think Trump has such a huge appeal to the average American voter.
If he weren’t the GOP front-runner, the gaps in his game would make it easy to dismiss him. But dismissing him requires dismissing the concerns of the 7.5 million people who have voted for him. That I can’t do.
My gut tells me much of the contempt for Trump reflects contempt for his working-class white support. It is one prejudice gentry liberals and gentry conservatives share.
It is perhaps the last acceptable bigotry, and you can see it expressed on any primetime TV program. The insults don’t all seem good-natured to me. I grew up in central Pennsylvania, surrounded by the kind of people supporting Trump, and I sympathize with their worsening plight.
For generations, they went all in for the American dream. Their families fought the wars, worked in the factories, taught school, coached Little League and built a middle-class culture. Now they are abandoned and know it.
Nobody speaks for them. The left speaks for the unions, the poor and the nonwhite, even shedding tears for illegal immigrants and rioters and looters. The GOP speaks for the Chamber of Commerce, big business and Wall Street.
Trump alone is bringing many of these forgotten Americans into the political system, much as Obama did with millennials and black voters. Trump has done it with full-frontal attacks on lopsided trade deals and a broken immigration system. His message is a potent brew of populism and nationalism that reaches across the partisan divide, and the public response is stirring the country.
In fact, many who despise Trump concede he is right that globalization and the open-border flood of cheap labor, while benefitting many Americans, has hurt many others. But instead of working to fix a broken status quo, many on the left and right echo each other’s venomous attacks against him. One day he is Mussolini, the next he’s Hitler, and he’s routinely accused of hate speech and racism.
Read more: NY Post
GOODWIN: The people that built this country feel abandoned by the government and that's why they are supporting Donald J. Trump
Posted by Fox & Friends on Monday, March 21, 2016
