Sundance – Dinesh D’Souza points out: “the GOP establishment must recognize there is no way forward without the Trump voters, and the Trump voters demand a challenge of the election results.” I would slightly disagree with the party linguistics, but essentially D’Souza has a point. Unfortunately, the GOPe doesn’t care.
https://youtu.be/AgTDKILfI4s
Mark Patricks – During this past presidential election season, pundits and pollsters were tempted to draw a demographic picture of an average Donald Trump supporter and put them in a box that would be easy to categorize. The adjectives “poor,” “white,” “old,” “uneducated,” “rural” and “racist” tended to come up again and again.
Unfortunately for the pollsters and pundits, the spectrum of people who actually voted for Trump ended up being much broader and more diverse than they had anticipated. And in the end, there were also a healthy number of defectors from the Democratic Party who decided in this election cycle to support Trump.
Perhaps the biggest notion that pollsters miscalculated was the median household income of the Trump voter. Following the election, that number was judged to be $72,000 per year.
At first it was estimated to be much lower, but as state totals rolled in and Trump ended up winning over states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania that no Republican had managed to declare victory in since 1988 it became obvious that Trump’s message on jobs and the economy resonated not just with poorer voters but also middle-class ones, who in many cases have seen their inflation-adjusted incomes stagnate or fall over the last 20 years.
Donald Trump will often be mocked in the coming months as the anti-elitist, anti-establishment disruptor of politics who wants to lower taxes on the elite and who is not above hiring establishment figures such as Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus for his team. The mockery will mostly be misplaced simply because the terms “elite” and “establishment” are understood too broadly: Trump’s movement was only against certain forms of establishment elitism which have nothing to do with wealth, membership in a party hierarchy or even political experience. – Bloomberg
Daily Bell Staff – In this editorial we learn that Trump voters were against America’s intelligentsia. These are the people who occupy the bureaucratic rungs in Washington and the tenured chairs in top universities.
These are the people as well that cluster in New York, Los Angeles and Washington. They move back and forth between corporations and “public service.”
These are the folks that set the tone for the cultural attacks that are ruining the United States. These people, as well, constitute the ranks of globalists. Much of what they want for America is intended to destroy it.
More:
When Trump supporters think about the “elite” or the “establishment” what they really mean is America’s intelligentsia.
… Collectively, they — we — were seen as an entrenched, closed, arrogant group that sees fit to tell people what to say and think.
… This is the same understanding of “elite” and “establishment” that informed Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”: The Trumpists share Rand’s exasperation with teachers, writers and bureaucrats and their fake recipes for social justice, as well as her admiration for the rough but creative doers, the titans of business.
Of course this is nonsense, and in fact these perceptions are exactly what’s wrong with Rand.
She saw the world as a place where “doers” were hemmed in and pulled down by their inferiors.