To understand *part* of the anger that leads people to Trump, there’s a video Trump posted at an air conditioner factory that has gone viral and for good reason. I’d link it, but basically, google “air conditioner factory” and it prob comes up.
It’s something that has been happening for decades: owners/investors of a company that has made things in the US realizes that they would make even more money if they had workers in another country make the products. In some cases, the company feels like it has to just to keep up with what’s happening with the competition (the end result, no matter what: someone ends up making a lot of money and many more people make no money). In any case, you have situations like that air conditioner company, where they’re like “ummmm, yeah, to survive, we need to move our factory to Mexico and pay the workers there about 50 cents per hour so unfortunately you’re all fired, all 1,000 of you.”
Now if you haven’t been paying attention, there are two schools of thought on this practice. Democrats hate it, but they’re sort of lukewarm about doing all that much about it. Some are salty about free trade agreements that encourage this sort of thing but there isn’t exactly much movement on the issue. Anyway, go unions.
AND OH HO HO, ON THE OTHER SIDE: Republicans are all about the free market. They promised their base that they should vote for them and get free taxes, the wealth would trickle down, and everyone would be very happy. The reality, over 30 years later: a lot of them get paid poorly. If they get hurt at work, they’re screwed. They haven’t saved enough money for retirement. If they have a debilitating disease after working in a dangerous field, oh well. Pick yourself up by your bootstraps or something.
Basically, the owners of the companies are getting much richer, the working class is told to shut up and keep working, and I think the workers are starting to put together the pieces and what a lot of them have found is that they’ve been fucked over. These workers might not have believed a Democrat who says they’re trying to help, but Trump’s message resonated. There’s some xenophobia at play here, but there’s also the reality that these workers are screwed and they have no idea what to do. So they do they only thing they can think of: blame China and Mexico. If I worked in a factory for 20 years, maybe the same factory my parents worked at and collected a decent living from (different times, you know), and all of a sudden, that job was gone, with nothing else in the pipeline, what do you do?
And again, this is ONE PORTION of Trump’s base, but to understand that base, you have to look at it from several angles. This part is particularly important because a lot of these people have voted Dem in the past and a lot of them could easily vote Dem in the future. If you dismiss them entirely, that strategy might backfire.
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