The Curious Divide Of Trump’s Base
Broken down to its crude essence, Trump’s base is power at the top by pure greed and at the bottom by existential fear.
The top twenty percent of the mainly White electorate, the Wall Street, corporate, super wealthy crowd that is tied to the insurance, pharmaceutical, hospital, energy, military industrial complex and social media industries only care that their gravy train roll on unimpeded. This economic cream of the nation does not love Trump, but on the other hand it passionately hates the threat of Democratic fairness. This is the constituency for whom the GOP shills exist to serve, their deep pocket donors.
At the other end of the electorate of Trump’s base is the twenty percent of the nation’s lower White middle class that fears a drastic change in the country’s completion that they see evolving toward a — completely alien to them — multicultural America.
The strength of this seemingly unnatural allied base for Trump is that neither the greed at the top nor the fear at the bottom of it is susceptible to reason and truth. All Trump need do to keep its elements firmly in his corner is to inflame the primitive emotions of greed and fear, which is easy to do since both are closely tied to basic human survival instincts.
And since Trump’s base is built on irrational emotion the fact that the top of Trump’s support preys heavily upon the bottom of his loyal following means nothing to MAGA hats. Indeed, Trump can borrow trillions of dollars and hand it over to his super wealthy supporters, and even foreigners for that matter, undercutting the basics of healthcare and the sort of infrastructure critical to lower class Whites without penalty. Yes, that seems to mean nothing to the White working class as long as he says that he loves them and shows a distain for non-White immigrants.
The sixty-four thousand dollar question for Trump and the nation is that by him appealing to greed and fear is that going to be enough to cause him to be reelected? In other words is Trump’s strategy of playing to greed and fear enough to doom the great American experiment in democracy.
