Donald Trump's Betrayal of the American Working Class

As you can imagine for many progressives in the United States this is not a very happy holiday season.

More like the nightmare before and after Christmas.

But the good news, or small consolation, is that the ranks of the miserable will soon be swollen by many of Donald Trump's working class supporters.

When they finally realize that he has betrayed them, or conned them like suckers.



Finally realize, as Paul Krugman writes, that he is more like a fascist than a populist, and that they will be the biggest losers.

All indications are that we’re looking at huge windfalls for billionaires combined with savage cuts in programs that serve not just the poor but also the middle class. And the white working class, which provided much of the 46 percent Trump vote share, is shaping up as the biggest loser.

Trump and his kleptocracy of billionaires and nutty generals will lower or eliminate the minimum wage while raising the retirement age. They will slash the social security benefits of many of their own supporters, and leave millions of Americans without any health care at all.

And unlike the right-wing movements on the rise in Europe, Trump will offer the working class nothing, for in his case it's just an epic scam...



The movement that’s about to take power here isn’t the same as Europe’s far-right movements. It may share their racism and contempt for democracy; but European populism is at least partly real, while Trumpist populism is turning out to be entirely fake, a scam sold to working-class voters who are in for a rude awakening.

As Krugman points out it won't be easy to convince some of Trump's supporters that they have been conned...



This epic bait-and-switch, this betrayal of supporters, certainly offers Democrats a political opportunity. But you know that there will be huge efforts to shift the blame. These will include claims that the collapse of health care is really President Obama’s fault; claims that the failure of alternatives is somehow the fault of recalcitrant Democrats; and an endless series of attempts to distract the public.

And some of them are unredeemable, for they are driven only by their hatred for liberals. 

The horror show that was the 2016 election will be examined and reexamined for years, and depending on how bad things get, quite likely decades to come. There were, of course, a lot of factors: Cultural change, economic change, racism, liberal complacency after Barack Obama, the FBI manipulating the election, the Russian government manipulating the election, hatred of feminism and so on.

But it’s also important to notice that Donald Trump’s election is the culmination of decades of right-wing media teaching its audience that liberals are subhuman scum, and that hating liberals — whatever their stereotype of a “liberal” looks like — is far more important that minor concerns like preventing war or economic destruction.



They are at war us and with humanity itself.

And they see Donald Trump as their agent of destruction...



Can you believe that? Who are those guys at the end? Is it not fascism? Is it not insanity?

But the good news is that enough of Trump's more decent working class supporters, those who wanted to believe in him so badly because they were so desperate, will eventually see the light. 

Some of them I bet already have... 

Crazy uncle at Thanksgiving: He's not as bad as Hillary!
Crazy uncle at Christmas: Can we talk about something else?

— Mike Birbiglia (@birbigs) December 24, 2016

And when disillusion turns to anger, they will join the progressive majority in resisting Trump's brutish agenda.

And hopefully help create a powerful movement for real change, which will lead to a left-wing revolution...



So Progressives should not despair, or be distracted by the mad emperor's fascist circuses.

Opponents need to do all they can to defeat such strategies of distraction. Above all, they shouldn’t let themselves be sucked into cooperation that leaves them sharing part of the blame. The perpetrators of this scam should be forced to own it.

The moment may be a dark one. 

The struggle will be a brutal one.

But the future still belongs to us...