How
long before the white working class realises Trump was just scamming
them?
He
hasn't even taken office yet and the broken promises are piling up
Paul Waldman
While we’re still
analysing the election results and debating the importance of
different factors to the final outcome, everyone agrees that white
working class voters played a key part in Donald Trump’s victory,
in some cases by switching their votes and in some cases by turning
out when they had been nonvoters before.
And now that he’s
about to take office, he’s ready to deliver on what he promised
them, right? Well, maybe not so much:
President-elect
Donald Trump abruptly abandoned some of his most tendentious campaign
promises Tuesday, saying he does not plan to prosecute Hillary
Clinton for her use of a private email system or the dealings of her
family foundation, has an “open mind” about a climate-change
accord from which he vowed to withdraw the United States and is no
longer certain that torturing terrorism suspects is a good idea.
The billionaire real
estate developer also dismissed any need to disentangle himself from
his financial holdings, despite rising questions about how his global
business dealings might affect his decision-making as the nation’s
chief executive.
And it’s not just
that; at the same time, the Trump administration and congressional
Republicans are getting ready to move on their highest priorities,
cutting taxes for the wealthy, scrapping oversight on Wall Street,
and lightening regulations on big corporations.
Imagine you’re one
of those folks who went to Trump rallies and thrilled to his promises
to take America back from the establishment, who felt your heart stir
as he promised to torture prisoners, who got your “Trump That
Bitch” T-shirt, who was overjoyed to finally have a candidate who
tells it like it is. What are you thinking as you watch this?
If you have any
sense, you’re coming to the realisation that it was all a scam. You
got played. While you were chanting “Lock her up!” he was
laughing at you for being so gullible. While you were dreaming about
how you’d have an advocate in the Oval Office, he was dreaming
about how he could use it to make himself richer. He hasn’t even
taken office yet and everything he told you is already being revealed
as a lie.
During the campaign,
Trump made two kinds of promises to those white working class voters.
One was very practical, focused on economics. In coal country, he
said he’d bring back all the coal jobs that have been lost to cheap
natural gas (even as he promotes more fracking of natural gas; figure
that one out). In the industrial Midwest, he said he’d bring back
all the labour-intensive factory jobs that were mostly lost to
automation, not trade deals. These promises were utterly ludicrous,
but most of the target voters seemed not to care.
The second kind of
promise was emotional and expressive. It was about turning back the
clock to a time when immigrants hadn’t come to your town, when
women weren’t so uppity, when you could say whatever you wanted and
you didn’t feel like the culture and the economy were leaving you
behind. So Trump said he’d toss Hillary Clinton in jail, force
everyone to say “Merry Christmas” again, and sue those dastardly
liberal news organisations into submission.
And of course, there
were promises - like building a wall on the southern border and
making Mexico pay for it just so they know who’s boss - that
claimed to serve a practical purpose but also had an important
expressive purpose. And now one by one Trump is casting them all off.
So what are we left
with? What remains is Trump’s erratic whims, his boundless greed,
and the core of Republican policies Congress will pursue, which are
most definitely not geared toward the interests of working class
whites. He can gut environmental regulations, but that doesn’t mean
millions of people are going to head back to the coal mines - it was
market forces more than anything else that led to coal’s decline.
He can renegotiate trade deals, but that doesn’t mean that the
labour-intensive factory jobs are coming back. And by the way, the
high wages, good benefits, and job security those jobs used to offer?
That was thanks to labour unions, which Republicans are now going to
try to destroy once and for all.
Had Hillary Clinton
won the election, the white working class might have gotten some
tangible benefits - a higher minimum wage, overtime pay, paid family
and medical leave, more secure health insurance, and so on. Trump and
the Republicans oppose all that. So what did the white working class
actually get? They got the election itself. They got to give a big
middle finger to the establishment, to the coastal elites, to
immigrants, to feminists, to college students, to popular culture, to
political correctness, to every person and impersonal force they see
arrayed against them. And that was it.
So what happens in
two years when there’s a congressional election and two years after
that when Trump runs for a second term? Those voters may look around
and say, Hey wait a minute. That paradise of infinite winning Trump
promised? It didn’t happen. My community still faces the same
problems it did before. There’s no new factory in town with
thousands of jobs paying great salaries. Everybody doesn’t have
great health insurance with no cost-sharing for incredibly low
premiums. I still hear people speaking Spanish from time to time.
Women and minorities are still demanding that I treat them with
respect. Music and movies and TV still make me feel like I’m being
left behind. When Trump told me he’d wipe all that away, he was
conning me. In fact, in many ways he was the fullest expression of
the caricature of politicians (everything they say is a lie, they’re
only out for themselves) I thought I was striking back against when I
supported him.
Those voters may
decide to vote for a Democrat next time. Or they may be demobilised,
deciding that there isn’t much point to voting at all. The nearly
all-white areas where turnout shot up in 2016 might settle right back
down to where they used to be.
Or maybe Trump will
find a way to actually improve the lives of working class voters.
That’s theoretically possible, but absolutely nothing he has done
or said so far suggests that he has any idea how to do it, or even
the inclination. So he may try to keep the fires of hatred,
resentment, and fear burning, in the hopes that people forget that he
hasn’t given them the practical things he said he would.
The Washington Post
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário