The rise of Trump

"I will huff, I will puff and I will build a big beautiful wall to keep all of you Mexicans, Rapists, Muslims, Chinese and all other non-white folks out of the Nirvana that is America. I especially hate the Muslims and I will stop you from polluting my Nirvana on day one".

Thus goes the current Republican frontrunner Donald Trump. At the beginning of his improbable run for the highest office in the US and arguably most powerful office in the world, lot of us sidled next to the fireplace and turned on the cable TV. It was entertainment for free. We did not need pay-per-view to watch a political version of MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) fights. We all thought it was going to be short-lived, so get as much fun as you can while the show is on. I distinctly remember when during the first televised debate Trump refused to pledge that he will not run an independent campaign. I almost came out of the couch with laughter.

That was then and this is now. Something odd has happened to that entertainment show that started on a June day while The Donald came down the escalators, along with his Slovenian wife, and declared Mexicans are rapists and he will build a giant wall. It was supposed to end and he was supposed to go back to his gaudy man cave somewhere in Manhattan.  What has happened instead is this – a good 40% of the Republican Primary voters support Trump. That probably translates to about 30% of the total American electorate. That is a far cry from a TV show. A total of 22 million votes have been cast so far in Republican primaries. Trump has won 8.2 million of those. Remember, unlike the Democrats the Republicans had something like 18 candidates at the start of the process. So, let us put the blinders away for a minute, hold our noses and accept that Trump is winning. That gives him a fair shot at becoming the next US president. Mainly because Hilary is a flawed candidate and the opposition has managed to cast her as an untrustworthy apparatchik. In a contest against Trump, Hilary will need to energize the Obama Coalition of minorities, liberals and the educated. So far she has failed to ignite this torch. Lo and behold the romp that Bernie Sanders is on! The Obama Coalition is feeling the Bern!

Who supports Trump then? The Atlantic magazine has identified the following attributes based on surveys and in depth analysis. Here goes:

• They did not go to college: "The single predictor of a Trump vote in the GOP primary is the absence of a college degree". White men without college degrees are being left out of the New Economy that is more skill and knowledge based. Year-round employment of men without college degrees is only 68%. The brunt of it is felt in the industrial sector.
• They don't think they have political voice: This is an interesting data point. The folks that vote for Trump feel that their concerns are not being heard. This group feels that "immigrants threaten our values and culture". The seeds of the current xenophobia is well nurtured in this group.
• They want to wage an interior war against the outsiders: Trump voters feel like they have not been able to stop the slow erosion of power and privilege. Now, most of these people are willing to take actions, violent if necessary, to bring back the privilege and powers of the 1950s.
• They live in parts of the country with racial resentment: Trump voters populate the race belt of the country. The South is still fighting the Civil War, as evidenced by Confederate flag controversies and the shooting of innocent churchgoers for being black.

So, these are those who vote for Trump. In the fifties through the seventies, these people held down factory jobs, got hired right out of high school, and there was an informal referral and hiring system that preferred to hire within the family. The jobs were in auto, farming, landscaping, mining and other "blue collar or grey collar" arenas. They paid well enough to afford little luxuries. All of these jobs are under pressure. They are moving to countries with cheaper labor and laxer tax environment. The bloated tax code of the US has also put incentives on big corporations to move to places like Ireland. These deals are called "inversions", a fancy name for tax dodge. So yes, the resentment is real.

What the Republican Party never realized is this, by being conservative and trying to preserve the old ways of living they have become the party of the dispossessed. A proletariat party of sorts. The leadership kept talking about tax cuts for the "job creators" whereas there is no evidence that jobs are based on tax codes. The leadership was too busy catering to the top 1% when the ground shifted and the party became a party of the people with real fear of the global and skills based economy.

Assuming that a Trump Presidency is a real possibility I think it is high time we examine his positions even if they are ill defined and at times undefined. Let us take them one at a time.

• Build the wall: this is a terrible pandering to the segment of the population that feels that they are being displaced by the Mexican workers. This shows up in something as mundane as a landscaping project. The established native companies cannot compete with the truck full of people who come and do a good job of looking after the lawn, watering etc. for about half the price. Same goes for domestic help, restaurant and other low paying jobs. There are farming jobs like picking oranges, almonds etc. that most Americans will simply not do or cannot do at the rate that the Mexican transient workers can. Unless we are willing to pay ten times the current price for produce, the big wall will continue to be a fantasy. By the way, there has been zero net inward migration from Mexico in the last three or four years. So, this wall thing is simply catering to a fear that is more imagined than real.
• Ban the Muslims: I have some sympathy for Trump in the ban the Muslims cry. He and his supporters are reacting viscerally to the constant barrage of murders and mayhem by ISIS and other thugs. If 9/11 would happen in Bangladesh and was say, carried out by 21 Britons, we would have hunted down every Briton in the country and burnt them at the stakes. The situation is even more exacerbated by the lame response by the Muslim leadership in the US. They come out after every incident and repeat the worn down line, "Islam is a religion of peace". This is so stupid it boils my blood. While these morons are saying "Islam is peaceful", the split screen shows the the shooting of people having dinner in a Paris Café or some other mayhem. So, I can sympathize when people say ban the Muslims. Not all Muslims are bad, but some of us are. By refusing to take on the bad guys we simply feed the Ban the Muslims narrative. Remember, Trump is tapping into the fearful so this is an easy applause line for him.
• No more being the World's cop: For all his bluster, Trump has a surprisingly cogent and well thought out foreign policy. He is the only one that has questioned the need to spend American blood and treasure to defend the likes of the Saudi thugs, the marshmallows of Europe and so on and so forth. He brings up the question as to what purpose does NATO serve after all these years and do we really need it. We keep thousands of soldiers in Europe to defend against whom exactly? Russia is a capitalist country many times over. So, the old communist boogeyman is no longer a valid excuse for spending money that could be used to build roads and bridges in America. Why should the US support the Wahhabi thugs in Riyadh? They are killing people by the thousands in Yemen, prolonging the Syrian civil war, funding the killers of the bloggers in Bangladesh and destroying what is left of that miserable country, Pakistan!

The rise of Trump has given all of us pause. However, we are simply deriding the guy without looking deeply as to why he is resonating and why he may very well become the next President. Bangladeshis comprise a small minority of voters in the US. The Muslims are about 3% of the American population. However, if the Muslims would put together cogent outreach programs that aim at understanding why Trump resonates, maybe, just maybe, we can avoid a Trump Presidency and the banning rhetoric!