1 of 1- Goose
- Cogito ergo sum
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Trump's Chumps
"You shrug at all of this hypocrisy and craziness, because you still think he’s going to help you. But you’ve been played, sucker-punched, duped. You can continue to believe Trump has your back, but the evidence is already overwhelming that the people his presidency will hurt most are those at the bottom who gave him their trust."
Trump’s Chumps
Timothy Egan
You voted for a man who boasted of sexual assault, a man whose “university” defrauded thousands of people, a billionaire who thought the minimum wage was too high. You switched from Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016 — one in four white working-class voters — because you thought he was on your side.
You don’t mind the lying. In fact, you’re all in with the biggest lies, the baseless claims that three million people voted illegally, that Obama ordered a wiretap of Trump Tower, and on, and on. The lying is disruptive. Yay for disruption!
You don’t mind the flip-flops. Last year, Trump said the unemployment rate was “one of the biggest hoaxes in American history.” This year, because he’s president, it’s very real. Last year, Wall Street was a puppeteer for the Democrats. Now your man has brought in Goldman Sachs puppeteers to run the economy. Last year, a golfing president was lazy. Now your guy has paid 14 presidential visits to a golf course.
You’re not bothered by the foreign policy incompetence, the siding up to gangster regimes and human rights violators, the snub of the rest of the world in the name of America First. You don’t mind unleashing polluters. If the job creators want filthy air and foul water, give it to them.
You shrug at all of this hypocrisy and craziness, because you still think he’s going to help you. But you’ve been played, sucker-punched, duped. You can continue to believe Trump has your back, but the evidence is already overwhelming that the people his presidency will hurt most are those at the bottom who gave him their trust.
Trump acknowledged as much when told that the health care plan he pushed would significantly harm his base. “Oh, I know,” he said, and then promised to fix it later. Later was changed to let the whole thing die, and damn the consequences.
Given that Trump’s approval rating, 35 percent, hit a historic low this week in Gallup’s survey, given that a majority of Americans believe that Trump is not honest and does not care about average people, it’s easy to think Democrats can abandon the voters who abandoned them last year.
In a New York magazine piece titled “No Sympathy for the Hillbilly,” Frank Rich wrote that white voters without a college degree, who went for Trump by 39 points, are never going to come around — no matter how much this president turns his back on them. An earlier piece, from the right, made some of the same points. “Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good,” Kevin Williamson wrote in National Review. “So does OxyContin.”
The condescension, like the opioids, may feel good as well, but it won’t do anything to help the forces of reason and progress. The way to bring around the forgotten men and women is to remind them, every day, that Trump has forgotten them. And to give them something — say, Medicare for all, being pushed by the energized Bernie Sanders base — to back words with action.
Trump is banking on the ignorance of voters who took a chance with him. His budget proposal — a cruel, Dickensian document — offers nothing but pain for these people. An Appalachian economic partnership that helps workers in 420 of the nation’s poorest counties would be abolished. Seniors who need Meals on Wheels for food and social contact would lose the service. Cancer victims, waiting for something miraculous to come from the extraordinary work of the National Institutes of Health, will have to wait longer, as Trump cuts cancer research to fund his Mexican wall.
If you’re a poor kid in Kentucky looking for that college break that will get you somewhere, his budget slashes tuition grants for you. If you’re a single mom trying to hold onto a job, he could force you onto welfare by eliminating the after-school program that enabled you to work full time.
He promised “insurance for everybody” and then supported the ill-fated Republican plan that would have added 24 million Americans to the uninsured. Those in their 50s and early 60s, and the working poor, would have been hit hardest. And Medicaid recipients, many of whom didn’t realize they had coverage for the first time in their lives thanks to Obamacare, would have been left out.
Oh, but Trump is bringing back jobs — that’s why you put him in office. About those jobs: The coal mining initiative is a hoax. We have half the coal industry jobs today that we had in 1990 — down to 64,000 from 131,000. This is because of the free market, turning to cheaper natural gas for power, and energy alternatives because they are the future. It’s as if Herbert Hoover ordered the federal government to bring back manure sweepers and horseshoers to the cities.
“He can’t bring them back,” said Robert Murray, founder of the largest private coal company in the United States. Give the coal man credit for being honest. It’s more than some Trump supporters are being with themselves.
Last edited by Goose (4/01/2017 11:51 am)
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
- tennyson
- Exchanger
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Re: Trump's Chumps
Those failed promises keep adding up.
"Do not confuse motion and progress, A rocking horse keeps moving but does not make any progress"
- Goose
- Cogito ergo sum
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- Posts: 13,427
Re: Trump's Chumps
It'd difficult to admit that you made a mistake, and easy to indulge in the myth that our troubles are due to the other guy's benefits.
“There’s a lot of wasteful spending, so cut other places,”
In Trump Country, Shock at Trump Budget Cuts, but Still Loyalty
Nicholas Kristof
TULSA, Okla. — Rhonda McCracken is a kindergarten teacher and a Republican who voted for President Trump. Now she’s wrestling with the consequences.
McCracken’s deep-rooted conservatism is matched by a passion to support Tulsa Domestic Violence Intervention Services, a nonprofit that helped her flee an ex- who she says beat and choked her, once until unconsciousness. She became teary as she described how staff members at the organization helped her and her son escape that relationship.
“They saved my life, and my son’s,” she said, her eyes liquid.
So she is aghast that one of Trump’s first proposals is to cut federal funds that sustain the organization. “My prayer is that Congress will step in” to protect domestic violence programs, she said.
Here in Oklahoma, I’ve been interviewing many people like McCracken — fervent Trump supporters who now find that the White House is trying to ax programs they have depended on, to pay for Trump’s border wall and for increases in military spending. And they’re upset.
“Why is building a wall more important than educating people?” asked Billy Hinkle, a Trump voter who is enrolled in a program called Tulsa WorkAdvance that trains mostly unemployed workers to fill well-paying manufacturing jobs. Trump has proposed eliminating a budget pot that pays for the program.
Another Trump supporter in the program, Tarzan Vince, put it this way: “If he’s preaching jobs, why take away jobs?”
I came to Trump country to see how voters react as Trump moves from glorious campaign promises to the messier task of governing. While conservatives often decry government spending in general, red states generally receive more in federal government benefits than blue states do — and thus are often at greater risk from someone like Trump.
Ezekiel Moreno, 35, a Navy veteran, was stocking groceries in a supermarket at night — “a dead-end job,” as he describes it — when he was accepted in WorkAdvance two years ago. That training led him to a job at M&M Manufacturing, which makes aerospace parts, and to steady pay increases.
“We’ve moved out of an apartment and into a house,” Moreno told me, explaining how his new job has changed his family’s life. “My daughter is taking violin lessons, and my other daughter has a math tutor.”
Moreno was sitting at a table with his boss, Rocky Payton, the factory’s general manager, and Amy Saum, the human resources manager. All said they had voted for Trump, and all were bewildered that he wanted to cut funds that channel people into good manufacturing jobs.
“There’s a lot of wasteful spending, so cut other places,” Moreno said.
Payton suggested that if the government wants to cut budgets, it should target “Obama phones” provided to low-income Americans. (In fact, the program predates President Barack Obama and is financed by telecom companies rather than by taxpayers.)
Yet Democrats gleeful at the prospect of winning penitent voters back should take a deep breath. These voters may be irritated, but I was struck by how loyal they remain to Trump.
I talked to many Trump voters about the impact if Trump’s budget cuts go through, and none regretted their votes in November. They all said that they might vote for Trump for re-election.
“I don’t think I re-evaluate Trump,” Moreno said, adding that he just wants the president to re-evaluate his budget proposal.
Judy Banks, a 70-year-old struggling to get by, said she voted for Trump because “he was talking about getting rid of those illegals.” But Banks now finds herself shocked that he also has his sights on funds for the Labor Department’s Senior Community Service Employment Program, which is her lifeline. It pays senior citizens a minimum wage to hold public service jobs.
“This program makes sense,” said Banks, who was placed by the program into a job as a receptionist for a senior nutrition program. Banks said she depends on the job to make ends meet, and for an excuse to get out of the house.
“If I lose this job,” she said, “I’ll sit home and die.”
Yet she said she might still vote for Trump in 2020. And that’s a refrain I heard over and over. Some of the loyalty seemed to be grounded in resentment at Democrats for mocking Trump voters as dumb bigots, some from a belief that budgets are complicated, and some from a sense that it’s too early to abandon their man. They did say that if jobs didn’t reappear, they would turn against him.
One recent survey found that only 3 percent of Trump voters would vote differently if the election were today (and most of those would vote for third-party candidates; only 1 percent said they would switch to voting for Hillary Clinton).
Elizabeth Hays, 27, said her life changed during her freshman year in high school, when four upperclassmen raped her. Domestic Violence Intervention Services rescued her, she said, by helping her understand that the rape wasn’t her fault.
She’s profoundly grateful to the organization — yet she stands by Trump even as she is dismayed that he wants to slash support for a group that helped her when she needed it most. “We have to look at what we spend money on,” she said, adding, “I will stand behind my president.”
Last edited by Goose (4/02/2017 12:50 pm)
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
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