The Real Reason Donald Trump Appeals to Millions Of People

 

I’ve lived in New York for more than thirty years which means on a near daily basis I use the subway or the Long Island Rail Road

During that period no part of the service has notably improved. The trains still arrive on a schedule that involves a lot of contortion if you’re not near a particular station. The subways are as dirty and smelly as they were thirty years ago. The homeless people still move from the subway cars begging despite the warnings not to do over the announcements. The trains still stop between stops with no real explanation. And every time they do so, the loudspeaker does not give an explanation but always ends the lecture with ‘Thank you for your patience.”

I have always found that last part the most infuriating. When you are stuck in a metal tube going nowhere, you are at the mercy of the system. You have no choice but to be patient because if you ask a question or worse still, raise your voice, you are automatically considered a problem. If you get too loud, they might throw you off at the next station.

The only thing that has changed in thirty years on either is that the price on both keeps going up. You truly wonder why. It isn’t to improve the service because there has been none; it isn’t to make repair work because that never has happened. But the average New Yorker has no choice but to suck up it and take it. We have no one to complain to. We can write a letter to a newspaper if we have the time and energy, but that’s an act of futility. We might complain at a community board, but that takes effort and no one listens. And at the end of the day we know that its posturing because we are trapped by the system. What else can we do? Swim from Long Island to Manhattan? No, we just suck it up and seethe.

I have long considered that life is little more than a series of microaggressions. The one involving public transportation is the most glaring one in my life, but every day I go through at least one or two. We all do. Some of us, because of our race or gender, have to deal with far more than someone like me, a straight white man but we all have to go through them as part of our daily lives. What makes them worse is not merely the existence of the microaggression but that we can never get angry about any of them. As a straight white man, I am no doubt granted more latitude in many aspects of my life, but whenever I try to express any signs of frustration at the vicissitudes life throws me, whenever  I argue about the unfairness of it, whenever I even raise my voice, the response is always some variation on a theme: Calm down. That’s just the way life is. Why are you taking it out on me? It’s not worth getting mad about. None of this makes you feel better or helps you deal with these problems. Indeed, it makes you feel that there is something wrong with you. The best case scenario is that you have to bury your rage, day after day, month after month. We all know what happens when this rage boils over; we see it in so much of our lives. We’re desensitized to the violence in the world.

And what I have found more frustrating is that while one side continuously always blames guns and another side blames cultural differences, no one wants to consider the simple fact that so many of us are just plain angry. Both sides argue against the others grievance politics, saying that their grievances are real and the others are manufactured. That’s part of the larger problem: everyone agrees we’re all angry, but we have no solutions as to how do anything about it.  And worse, we each call the other sides grievances made up and not connected with reality.

This brings me to a revelation I have had about Donald Trump’s popularity with a certain part of America. It has nothing to do with his politics or the movement he represents. It has nothing to do with his privilege or his utter contempt for society. It doesn’t even truly have to do with what he actually says. The reason so many people go to Trump rallies no matter what he says or does is simple: Donald Trump get to yell and scream and say how unfair the world is and never gets punishes.

I do not have one bit of commonality with anything Donald Trump has ever said or done in his entire life, and that includes well before he even considered running for President. But don’t kid yourselves: there is a part of every single person on this planet who wishes they could hold a rally like Trump does and just vent. The left is very clear that’s all he does: vent, scream at his perceived slights, bemoan the unfairness of the world and call everybody he doesn’t agree with names. If some part of that has never appealed to you at any point in your life, if at some point in your life you haven’t just wished you could do what Donald Trump was and suffered no consequences for it, in fact be worshipped by a certain people for doing so, then you’re lying to yourself.

Both sides of the political spectrum are agreed about so many of the fundamental basics: the system is irrevocably broken and just doesn’t work the way it should. Every agrees that the world is just plain as simple a mess and only seems to get worse every day. The institutions that are supposed to work for us don’t work now and maybe never have. What none of us are allowed to is scream about it, not just in public but to anybody at all. We are just at basic level told that it’s part of life or that you’re making too much of things. None of these things do anything to abate our justifiable hostility towards this. We’re told that is just how our society works.

So in that sense Trump does not represent to much a political movement but the national id. I have a feeling that the fact of his wealth and privilege appeals who the Democrats claim the right is exploited for that reason. Donald Trump, despite his wealth and privilege, has spent his entire life in politics playing the victim and claiming he is being persecuted. Don’t pretend that so many Republicans – so many people -  don’t have that exact same feeling in their everyday lives.

For at least twenty years, the Democrats have argued that the Republican party and the conservative moment has no real policy and is simply a culture of grievances. Let’s say that they are right. I’ve read enough articles from progressives and the left to know that they have any many grievances as the Republicans do. What makes their grievances less important or significant to them than the ones that the right has? I certainly have never read articles from at least the beginning of the Trump era to argue anything otherwise or even so much as empathy for them.

The left rarely talks about the people who vote Republican specifically. The most generous interpretation that they have willing to give in their articles – when they are not calling them outright racists, sexists or homophobes – is that they have been brainwashed into a way of thinking from Republican politicians, Fox News and conservative pundits. This is, to be clear, demeaning and insulting enough because it fundamentally argues that these people  are incapable of having these opinions on their own and will simply listen to any voice that shouts at them, but fine, let’s meet them on the idea they are suffering from a massive delusion.

When a therapist has to deal with a patient who is suffering from delusional thinking, such as an irrational fear, they do not dismiss his clients fear as irrational. He spends time talking to them, trying to meet them halfway. They try to get to the core of their problems, why they feel this way and what the real reason is, use logic and dictum to try and get to the root cause and do everything they can to help them. This is a long-term process, and it may not succeed, but if you know your patient is sick, a therapist is obligated to help them.

The progressives attitude to so much of the Republican voters thinking in this regard is that of a therapist going to a claustrophobic, yelling at them that their fears of closed spaces is something only stupid people believe, that no reasonable person would be scared like this, and then locking them in a closet for a week and waiting for them to get over it. Overdramatic? I’ve read enough articles written by people on the left, commentators on MSNBC and so many so called ‘enlightened Americans’ that take this exact attitude. They argue that whatever fears that a Republican voter or people who live in red states might have are false ones, not even worth considering by ‘reasonable people’. They will then often in articles argue about how many Republican voters don’t graduate college, saying not very subtly they are ignorant. They will argue that these people believe in these things because they live in rural areas that people who grow up in ‘civilization’ would not think this. And of course because so many conservatives thinkers talk in racist and sexist views, all of these people must have these same views just because they lives in states that vote for candidates who might espouse these views.

That’s if they were to give them therapy in the first place. Just as often, when you hear Democrats talk say, when they chortle about ‘the brain drain’ on red states or how states led by Republican governors are suffering from advanced poverty or Covid rates, the acknowledgement is as much a dog whistle as they accuse the Republican of making. It translates to: the inmates are running the asylum, so let’s not waste time treating them.

From so many of these newsletter, you constantly hear variations on the same things when it comes to Republican officeholders or the people who vote for them. “Their time is almost over.” “They are on the wrong side of history.” “The change that is coming is inevitable and it will sweep them away.” That is not a tone of accommodation or inclusivity. It is the political equivalent of so many of the microaggressions that we deal with on a larger scale. It’s telling you that the phone that you’ve had for five years has to be replaced because none of the new technology you’re going to need these days is compatible with it.  It’s telling that you’re going to have to refile your documents with the government to get disability payments because they didn’t read your form correctly. It’s telling you that even though you’ve been waiting in the subway for fifteen minutes waiting for your train to move that we still have no idea when we’re going to be moving but ‘thank you for your patience’. And then having to go home and learn another fare hike is coming.

Are all of these minor versions of what so many of us have to deal with? I don’t pretend they’re not. But to just give answers that you have to do these things whether you want to or not because that’s the way the world works, it makes you hostile towards the world with no outlet. It makes you want to rant at the unfairness of the world or call people dirty names or look for someone who says they can fix or at least is as angry as you.

I honestly think that the way to solve the problem that so many people think Donald Trump represents to society is simple. The Republican Party just has to tell him that if he drops out of the rate. they will pay him the same exorbitant fees gets from fundraising. He can give all the rallies he wants; it’s the only part of the job he ever liked. All he has to do is just rant on stage for two hours and in the last five seconds say: Vote for such and such a candidate.

I’m not saying it solves any of the systemic problems we face in our society (I’m not convinced either side truly wants to solve them, but that’s a story for another day) but it would let Trump to do what he – and America really need him to do – be our national outlet. Be the Complainer-in-Chief. I’ve always thought that the world would benefit from their being some phone line where the caller could just scream for one minute about all the things that bother them in daily life. Why not let Trump fill that purpose for the nation? We’re all fundamentally angry at the world and we all agree life is just unfair. Let him spend the rest of his life saying that for all of us. He’s been doing that anyway all his life. Let it be a contribution to society. I know I might feel better about my daily life if I could turn on TV somewhere and just hear someone rant about how unfair fare hikes are. Why not let him just do that on a national level?