Why on earth would anyone vote for Donald Trump?

(c) by Mark Dempsey

Most of  my Democratic friends are amazed that anyone could ever have voted for Donald Trump. "How could 70 million people be that stupid?" is the implied question. To them, it's obvious that Trump is a con man who can't open his mouth without sticking his foot in it--the opposite of the elegant, eloquent Obama. They are also just as certain Obama didn't contribute to voter revulsion and Trump's election. Yet Republicans shamelessly don't like being called "deplorable"!

But why 70 million votes for Trump? (Trump won 74 million votes, nearly five million more than any previous presidential candidate) Says Thomas Greene (from Noteworthy): “Trump will not be defeated by educating voters, by exposing his many foibles and inadequacies. Highlighting what’s wrong with him is futile; his supporters didn’t elect him because they mistook him for a competent administrator or a decent man. They’re angry, not stupid. Trump is an agent of disruption — indeed, of revenge.....Workers now sense that economic justice — a condition in which labor and capital recognize and value each other — is permanently out of reach; the class war is over and it was an absolute rout: insatiable parasites control everything now, and even drain us gratuitously, as if exacting reparations for the money and effort they spent taming us. The economy itself, and the institutions protecting it, must be attacked, and actually crippled, to get the attention of the smug patricians in charge. Two decades of appealing to justice, proportion, and common decency have yielded nothing."

Disappointed by the conventional parties, Trump voters are willing to take a chance on a "disruptor" who his own party initially rejected. Meanwhile, Republicans are adaptive enough to embrace him as long as he helps them maintain their grip on power. 

The problem is that Obama is at the origin of Trump voters' disappointment. He promised justice, even hope, after the disastrous Bush 43 presidency. Americans were disgusted by the naked, aggressive imperialism of Bush/Cheney. Their votes reflected that, too. They gave Democrats both houses of congress and the presidency in 2008. 

That mandate is worth remembering because the conventional excuse for Obama's inadequacies is that Republican control of congress denied him any policy victories. Yet rather than using this mandate, Obama spent most of this political capital passing big-pharma-friendly "Romneycare"--a Republican health care plan. As for justice: Obama not only refused to prosecute the war crimes of Bush / Cheney, he promoted those who supervised torture and prosecuted the whistle blowers. 

Perhaps most revealing was the way Obama handled the subprime / derivatives meltdown, now called the "Global Financial Crisis" (GFC) by economists--something the Clinton administration's collusion with a Republican congress to deregulate Wall Street enabled.  In the GFC, U.S. net worth declined 40%, and nine million families lost their homes. Republican pollster Frank Luntz reports the Obama administration was the only time he saw people weep in his focus groups. The public hated seeing enormous bank bailouts--$16 - $29 trillion, in addition to TARP, the Fed's audit reports--while they were losing their homes and retirement accounts. For only $9 trillion, the Fed could have paid off everyone's mortgage; but Wall Street, whose frauds crashed the economy, not Main Street, is who got bailed out.

It's no surprise that the victims of this scam wept. And as long as the corporate Democrats--like Joe Biden--continue to ignore the public outrage at the failure of the public institutions they manage, at best they will have a precarious mandate to rule, even as systemic problems best handled by government--like the climate catastrophe--continue threaten the survival of the species. 

Unfortunately, outrage is not a solution in and of itself, but some Democratic humility might make us less divided.