The 2016 election and its aftermath -- the appointment by Trump of top managers like Jeff Sessions -- from the rural South depended on the support of the white working class. Twice as many voters from this demographic supported Trump over Clinton.
The popular narrative is economic anxiety -- jobs! -- was the key motivator of white working class voters. Not so, according to Atlantic.
PRRI data suggests 79% of white working class respondents affirmatively reacted to the following two statements:
Things have changed to much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country
The American way of life needs to be protected from foreign influence
Trump stoked (the birther movement) and continues to stoke cultural anxieties. The extreme right took its lead from Fox News and drove even further to the right where it met up and matched the Russia/ Putin disinformation campaign that focused on the SAME themes as Trump: ie. "democracy is corrupt", "the system is rigged".
The extent to which Trump colluded with Russia is very much at the center of what is quickly mushrooming into a full-blown constitutional crisis. White working class voters were dissuaded by the extreme right from getting their information from newspapers and other mainstream sources. Instead, they were corralled into social media, like Facebook and channels like Breitbart and Infowars, where cultural anxieties are constantly hammered. According to the Columbia Journalism Review:
Our own study of over 1.25 million stories published online between April 1, 2015 and Election Day shows that a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world. This pro-Trump media sphere appears to have not only successfully set the agenda for the conservative media sphere, but also strongly influenced the broader media agenda, in particular coverage of Hillary Clinton.
The UK Guardian is documenting links between Robert Mercer, the data mining firm Cambridge Analytica, and the Trump team, including Michael Flynn and Jeff Sessions, the US Attorney General.
Contrary to the popular narrative, members of the white working class who struggled financially were actually more likely to vote for Clinton.
87% of white working class Americans who said they favor a policy of identifying and deporting illegal immigrants supported Trump.
Given these observations, it is shameful that Cuban American leaders, including Republicans in Congress like US Senator Marco Rubio, are hiding in plain sight and not leading against the most chaotic, incompetent presidency in U.S. history whose legitimacy rests on ethnic divisions.
9 comments:
Good read. I totally agree that xenophobics supported Trump.
OK? Now that we know, we need to begin keeping a list of all the negative things they are doing within the powers of the Executive Branch to hurt our democracy and the American people. The big pieces we know about, but I think there are many other things we don't know about. And this continuous show at the White House is designed to keep us from looking or seeing.
"Democracy is corrupt" and "the system is rigged" are not memes invented by Russian agents: you have been saying exactly that for years (because it's true).
The Trump/Brietbart/Mercer connection to Cambridge Analytica has nothing to do with Russia: they're British.
After 10 months of investigation, they have nothing, zilch, zip. Another liberal story to somehow explain their loss.
You have to admit that all these relationships between so many important Trump operatives and Russia are unusual. That 17 US intelligence agencies and scores of agencies from other countries verify that Russia interfered with our election, is proof that we have a major problem with Russia. The President admitted to the world that he had his staff lie that he was hiding behind the recommendation of his new deputy attorney general and his reclused attorney general about Comey's firing. He even put the lie in writing with his signature. Then he openly admitted, for all to see and hear, that it was a lie, and that he fired Comey because of the Russia investigation. After the firing, he ran Comey under the bus. And to add insult to injury, he publicly threatened Comey for all to see in writing about leaking information to the press with the existence of tapes of their meeting/s.
Watergate was just a domestic physical break-in, and it lasted a little over two years. The break-in occurred in June of 1972 and Nixon resigned in August of 1974. Even though there is a lot more involved here, it may be even faster. Nixon knew the rules, the law, and basic protocols, so he was not that helpful. But Trump will speed up the process quite a lot by giving much of the information himself.
Cuban spy network should go under the microscope for its part.
Little Marco, little Marco, where are you? How does it feel to have your balls cut off by the Donald.
Trumps campaign and administration thus far is all about denigration of certain classes. I can not name anything he cares about that will float boats higher without it being at the expense of those lower income or people affected by NAFTA who supposedly voted for him much less moderate Republicans.
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