If, after everything we’ve seen for eight years, you currently have a Trump sign in your yard, I think I might understand. Of course, many of your fellow Americans find it perplexing that you can still support a serial liar, malignant narcissist, adjudicated rapist, and convicted felon. They find it alarming that you continue to believe his Big Lie that the 2020 Election was stolen from him by fraud, while denying that he instigated an insurrection to try and stay in power after losing that election. And neither his spewing conspiracy theories on national TV nor felony convictions, with possibly more coming, seem to bother you.
But I get it, I think. Like many Americans, you have felt alienated, abandoned, walked all over, and taken for granted by both Democrat and Republican politicians, special interest groups and powerful corporations, for decades now.
You rightfully seethe at the compensation of CEOs and obscene profits of big corporations, while employees’ wages stagnate and fail to keep up with inflation. Your contempt for the corrupt government of elites in Washington, that ignores the dire plight of the common workingman of the heartland – is justified. You feel like you are competing with immigrants for jobs and benefits.
You see an economy where the wealthiest one percent of families in the United States hold about forty percent of all wealth, and the bottom ninety percent of families hold less than one-quarter of all wealth. According to Ruchir Sharma, chairman of Rockefeller International and founder and CIO of Breakout Capital, author of “What Went Wrong With Capitalism,” the economic system is not working for people, and it has created a fierce anti-establishment mood. 70% of Americans today say the economic and political system needs major reform or “to be torn down entirely.”
I get it, and your anger is warranted. You’ve been waiting desperately, and for too long, for someone to rally around – someone to take up your cause and throw a brick through the plate glass window of the Washington establishment, expose the “deep state,” “drain the swamp”, and “lock her up.” You are “The League of Forgotten Men” whom Sinclair Lewis wrote about in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here.
Capitalizing on your collective angst, Trump seems to offer the type of ultra-nationalist, populist message that resonates with the nation’s economically struggling, left-behind and dispossessed.
But Trump is not the answer to the nation’s problems. And if you believe what he is selling, you’ve been manipulated into misplacing your desperation and hope in a liar, a criminal, a conman. Trump is a demagogue opportunist.
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A demagogue is a political leader who seeks support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than using rational argument; it’s someone who offers simple propaganda slogans as answers to complex problems. It’s why Trump and Vance keep using the tired and ugly anti-immigrant trope, a favorite scapegoat out of the far-right playbook.
In Lewis’ novel, the Forgotten Men were easily enraptured by the lies of Lewis’ populist, right-wing, presidential candidate, Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip. Notably, Lewis describes Buzz Windrip as “vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic”.
Like Buzz Windrip, Trump has no interest in fixing anything, or helping anyone. Just like he deliberately de-railed the bipartisan immigration bill earlier this year solely so that he could campaign on that issue, Trump’s self-serving agenda is only ever about him. Repeating himself at the debate, and at campaign appearances since, his worn out schtick is only ever about the politics of hate, divisiveness, and fear.
According to Trump, his second term would be all about “retribution” and “settling the score” and “going after” anyone who has opposed him. He speaks of becoming “a dictator on day one,” of invoking the insurrection act, weaponizing the Department of Justice for vengeance, and of mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and political adversaries in what will be a “bloody story.” Although he tries, he cannot now distance himself from Project 2025, which would consolidate more power directly with him in a second term.
“Make America Great Again” is the empty slogan of an American demagogue, a real-life, present-day Buzz Windrip, who is hoping enough of you will continue to fall for American history’s biggest and most dangerous con game – to put him back in the White House.
