“As democracy is perfected, the office (of president) represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move towards a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
- H.L. Mencken, 1920
“We rip off the other guy and pass the savings onto you.”
- Motto of Chilkoot Charlie’s bar, Anchorage, Alaska
I’ve been staying with family in Marcus Hook, Pennyslvania, an industrial ghetto just south of Philadelphia on the Delaware River. Marcus Hook’s two thousand residents live in row houses jammed between two giant oil refineries that belch gas into the atmosphere all day and night.
Daylight-bright street lights and late-night sirens provide the ambience of a penitentiary. When a local hires on at one of the industrial plants here, the first thing they do is move out of the Hook to a decent town with lawns and clean air.
Struggling members of my family have lived in the Hook for 107 years. For decades, the white town fathers used different tactics to keep out the Blacks from neighboring, impoverished Chester, Pa. One tactic was taking down a public basketball court that kids from Chester came downriver to play on.
“Marcus Hook has its problems but at least they’ve kept the Blacks out,” one relative confided to me.
But it didn’t stick. Black money spends just like white money and now African Americans make a big part of the Hook’s population and public school. On recent evenings, two black men have been fishing off the Hook’s tiny municipal pier.
I chat them up about their catches, gear and bait. After the Trump election, we commiserated about the results. I shared the old maxim, “Steal a little and they throw you in jail, steal a lot and they make you king.”
The older of the two men said, “Well, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”
To that, the younger one replied, “Aw, fuck that shit.”
But the older fisherman was onto something, an insight into the election. Either a lot of new voters cast ballots for Trump this election or many people changed their minds about the Criminal-in-Chief.
Trump won over voters, particularly low-educated, blue-collar workers and minorities who voted for Biden last election.
To do this, he used the politician’s cheapest trick: Fear. The campaign signs here said simply: “Trump = Safety, Kamala = Crime” and “Trump = Low Prices, Kamala = Inflation.” Because it was a simple message that appealed to our basest weakness, it worked.
Blue-collar men in America are scared and angry. The world has left them behind, socially, financially, and emotionally. The suicide rate for non-college educated, blue-collar, middle-aged white men is soaring.
It’s understandable. Their unions are gone. Their bowling leagues are gone. The mainline churches they grew up in are empty. The world has moved on and left them behind, as it does every generation.
With macho posturing, Trump reached out to them. He told them he would protect them from illegal immigrants, from LGBTQ people, from unmarried women with cats, from all those things they can’t understand and fear.
It was a lie, of course. Trump did little for blue-collar men during his first term but he lavished a giant tax cut on his rich buddies. Trump is nothing if not a liar. He has a portfolio of failed marriages and soured business deals to prove it.
Like Chilkoot Charlie, Trump said, “I’ll rip off the other guy and pass the savings on to you.” It’s a sucker’s line. But like stinky, old bait, it drew them in and they took the hook deep.
Like others Trump has swindled, they so wanted to believe.