I feel that a lot of what circulates in the liberal media bubble is shaped by the fact that most of the writers have never faced eviction, have never been threatened by a rogue cop or an enemy soldier, have never lost the family farm, have never been required to choose between dignity and safety, have never been told that they have to revise their viewpoints if they want to keep a job that they need to survive. You don’t understand our priorities, and you simply don’t see most of the country; you’ve banished us for being too uncouth, and we’ve become invisible. At least until you need someone to make your food, fix your car, or deliver your packages. You simply can’t grasp how residually angry people are, how silenced they feel, or how much we need action and meaningful solutions.
Yes, this includes the specific anger of women and the specific anger of minorities. Obviously. But why should we be angrier with Trump than with the Democrats? The Democrats are the ones who lied and sneered at us and piled on the B.S. while doing basically nothing to help. Trump, for better or worse, intuitively understands this anger and can convincingly claim that he will do some kind of something to try to make it better. The Democrats can’t say that. I mean, they can say it, but nobody’s going to believe them, because all they’ve given us for decades is haughty “messaging” that never translates into substantial, meaningful, fair, and broad-based action. People talk about how Trump is going to take away our rights, and that may well be true, but it’s hard to even care about it when our rights are already thoroughly tiered, hardly existent, and contingent on constricting identity claims, and when every day we confront the stark inequality and looming precarity of our lives.
The Democratic Party, and the left-leaning ecosystem in general, have done precious little to acknowledge and directly address the real issues that Americans are contending with or to demonstrate that they can take action to support widespread freedom and prosperity. They say all kinds of things, but there is no actual plan. People tune into Trump because they believe he will actually do something, take serious coordinated action, to try to address the country’s problems—and people are willing to take a chance on that over the suffocating, disempowering, nauseating, soul-sucking status quo that we are forced to inhabit. Is that really so surprising? If you can understand why a Palestinian might favor Hamas, then surely you can understand why an American might favor Trump. The solution is the same as it has always been: Care about the lives and needs of ordinary people and do something, when you have the opportunity and the power, to defend our liberties, remove bad actors and scammers of all stripes, and reduce inequality in a fair, direct, and universal fashion.
