He should remember the people he pledged to fight for.
He should remember the people he pledged to fight for.
L ots of pollsters, even Nate Silver, have Donald Trump ahead in this election. I’m not convinced. In his debate tonight with Joe Biden, Trump would do well to remember what he has apparently forgot: his own forgotten men and women. His allegiance to their interests, and willingness to offend their enemies, is what gave his 2016 campaign a vandal thrill and momentum.
“The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no more,” Trump said in his victory speech in 2016. It was his attempt to give substance to his campaign’s implicit and inchoate message: For too long, the United States had been governed narrowly, in the interests of a small class. Trump’s election was a rebuke to that class, and many voters experienced it as an eschatological reckoning for American democracy — the first shall be last, and the last shall be first.
Trump’s ideological heresies, at least those recognized by the Wall Street Journal editorial board, were each connected to this critique. Our trade policy was a sellout to China, enriching financiers and asset owners but hurting all types of American industrial workers. Recent social research had shown that regions in the United States that suffered industrial job losses as a result of competition with China had seen all manner of adverse effects: lowered household wages, increased reliance on welfare, lowered rates of family formation, and an increase in the number of children raised in low-income households. And these effects were all seen before the opioid epidemic and surges of suicides hit many of the same communities.
Trump’s get-tough border policy was a critique of both parties, whose elected officials, far more than voters, preferred negligent border enforcement. While some say mass immigration is justified by the relatively small number of billionaire success stories, the political weight behind it was down to the fact that it brings in a large class of exploitable workers. Not already drenched in the American creed of political equality, many of these immigrants are more amenable to laboring as domestic servants for people who live in and near the “super-zips” — a class of people who are at once affluent but also a proletariat, who have double-income households but are employees. For this class, the effect of low-skilled immigration — cheaper food at restaurants and more affordable house-cleaning, landscaping, and babysitting services — is a massive boon.
Meanwhile the costs of mass immigration fall on others: the contractor who refuses to hire illegal labor, the police officers in communities that house large numbers of illegal residents who are reluctant to talk to or interact with them. Where there are masses of illegal residents, law enforcement has a harder time. Trump’s wall wasn’t just a policy proposal but a symbol, making clear that the post–Cold War consensus that labor, capital, and goods should flow over borders like rain-swelled streams was over.
It was these campaign themes that brought out a totally new electorate. This was how it came to pass that in 2016, well-connected Republicans in New Hampshire could tell Byron York, “I don’t know anybody who supports Trump,” even as Trump was galloping toward a massive win in that state. It was these themes, set against the perfect foil in Hillary Clinton, that sent the so-called Brexit states — Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin — into Trump’s column.
Where are the forgotten men and women and their priorities in 2024? Trump doesn’t talk about the wall much, lest he draw attention to how little of his most famous promise he managed to keep. He now talks about a war with the drug cartels. This promise, however, cuts two ways. Yes, it heralds the idea of bringing justice to those who are poisoning American communities with fentanyl. But who will do the fighting? And how do you contain a war in Mexico to Mexico? What’s the endgame?
On immigration, Trump has floated the idea of giving out more green cards, promiscuously, to every foreigner who graduates from a U.S. college. Meanwhile, Trump and the Trump campaign are starting to sound like every other CEO in America, bragging constantly about how his campaign is another diversity project, bringing in more black and Hispanic supporters.
The forgotten men and women swing elections. Barack Obama got to the protectionist side of Hillary Clinton in 2008 and won. Mitt Romney went after China’s trade practices in 2012, and he won that GOP primary, only to lose the general when Obama pointed out that Romney would have let Detroit go bankrupt. Trump beat Clinton. And then, Dems sought a candidate who hearkened back to the old Democratic Party, one who could win in Scranton and make Trump sound like just another Republican.
American politics is romantic, and mythical, but it’s also transactional. It won’t matter if the establishment is trying to bury Donald Trump in lawfare. Members of the establishment cancel and persecute each other for fun all the time. If Trump isn’t promising his voters the policies they want, they won’t turn out for him. Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner once said that the base of rural Republicans had nowhere else to go, and so Trump shouldn’t exert himself on their behalf. It’s true, they have nowhere else to go. But they could always decide to stay home.