Opinion: DONALD TRUMP'S SUPPORT DEMOGRAPHICS; THE HAVES AND THE SILLY HAT BRIGADE.

(First published April 2024).

Donald Trump’s political support seems to derive from two quite separate and differentiated sources.

The first source is comprised of wealthy cynics. These are people whose only common interests with Trump are that taxes be kept low and that labor be kept cheap.

These people are bright enough to know that they are a minority of the electorate. (Remember: 84% of the stock market is owned by the richest 10% of the population). That wealthiest 10% is generally not stupid; so, it would not be an intellectual stretch for them to appreciate that there is another 90% of the population that is not them.

Their dilemma is that they need the support of a substantial proportion of that unwashed 90% to exert their political will.

This is where the second group comes in. This second group might be characterized as The Silly Hat Brigade. It seems to be comprised of the disenfranchised. These seem to be people whose relevance has been compromised by inadequate or outdated skill sets.

An example of this demographic might be a salesperson whose middle-class status has been bushwhacked by internet commerce.

Many salespeople used to get by on the most rudimentary abilities. Being solitary and entrepreneurial by nature, they had no infrastructure to protect them when the goose stopped laying the golden eggs.

So now these forgotten men find themselves with a sense of entitlement which can no longer be sustained by their earning potential.

This portrait typifies a demographic which is disenchanted and skeptical of everyday political reassurance. Its members require a radical solution to salve their bruised egos. Not being especially intellectually gifted they are susceptible to chicanery and subterfuge. It is this demographic that the Trump political machine targets with fictions that audiences with a more analytical propensity might dismiss as lacking credibility.

These fictions include the notion that Hispanic immigrants are flooding across the southern US border to take jobs that might otherwise have been the prerogative of themselves, the disenchanted ones.. They ignore the glaring non sequitur that they, the disenfranchised, wouldn’t want the jobs that the immigrants take even if they were offered them.

According to the right wing propaganda mill, these immigrants are also straining medical resources and depriving the forgotten men of affordable healthcare.

Some fantasies embraced and amplified by the right wing propaganda machine are downright surreal. Take for example the QAnon fabrication.

The QAnon faction promotes the narrative that wealthy liberals are kidnapping children, keeping them in the basement of a pizza parlor in Washington DC, and extracting adrenochrome (whatever that is) from the children’s pineal glands as an elixir to ensure their (the liberals’) eternal youth. The liberals allegedly guilty of this outrage include Hilary Clinton and (for some reason) poor Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks’ guilt was apparently established beyond a shadow of a doubt when he caught Covid 19 while filming in Australia. I think the idea was that he caught Covid from the kidnapped children’s blood. Not quite sure how it got to Australia.

At the credibility zenith for the QAnon conspiracy, as many as 17% of adult Americans subscribed to its veracity. You can’t fix stupid.

The forgotten men ascribe magical powers to Donald Trump, Somehow, while keeping taxes low he can restore the fortunes of the lame duck middle class, despite the overwhelming evidence that trickle-down prosperity simply doesn’t. -Trickle down, that is.

(Reliance on trickle-down prosperity during the Reagan presidency introduced the first seriously irreparable inequality gap between the incomes of the wealthy and the incomes of the middle class in the USA).

(The intention was that cutting the taxes of the wealthy should leave them with sufficient wherewithal to increase investment in business and manufacturing. The actual result was that the money saved in taxes was used to buy back publicly owned company shares. The purpose of this was to increase the value of the remaining shares; the ones that were not withdrawn. The company’s value, a fixed figure, would now be represented by fewer shares. (So each share would be worth more, right?) The added value on each share was paid out to the shareholders).

(So what should have been tax revenue was paid out to investors. What you had was a reverse Robin Hood scenario. Reagan’s government robbed the poor to feed the rich).

So, without spending a red cent, Donald Trump can provide jobs for the perennially unemployable. Wonder how he can do that?

Well the truth is, he can’t. It’s pretty obvious from Trump’s track record that his methodology is basic snake-oil salesman. He thinks you can run a country on snake-oil salesman economics; his belief is in the firm handshake and the winning smile. Pure unadulterated Elmer Gantry.

Trump’s contempt for concerns that might benefit Joe Lunchbucket, like climate change mitigation and infrastructure improvement, demonstrates that he is strictly a rich man’s president. That means fiscal austerity and the old trickle-down prosperity (that doesn’t).

And none of the unspent money goes on re-training the de facto nouveau unemployable sector of the erstwhile middle class.

That would require substantial public spending and substantial public spending is anathema to the plutocrats.

Any fiscal wriggle room will go to provide tax cuts for the wealthy.

All the newly disenfranchised will get is more unpaid leisure time to parade around in their silly hats. Once Donald is back in the White House (God forbid), he isn’t going to need the disenfranchised any more.