“A president who'd all but call a senator a whore is unfit to clean toilets in Obama's presidential library or to shine George W. Bush's shoes.” USA Today’s Editorial Board (12/12) after a Presidential Tweet that NY Senate Democrat Kristin Gillibrand would “would come to my office ‘begging’ for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them)…”
Understanding Donald Trump’s balancing act between his populist base and his unwavering commitment to his rich corporate supporters is core to understanding both his vulnerabilities and strengths. The most simplistic analysis, as described in vastly greater detail in my November 26th It’s All About the Rich, About the Rich, Not the Base blog, is that if it is about money, Trump always gives priorities to the rich, and if it is about anything else (from foreign policy to social values), he always plays to his base. Trump’s underlying his appeal to his the base is the mandate to take America back to the days when there was no doubt who was the greatest nation on earth. Before the Vietnam War but after World War II.
America from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s was when segregation was still in effect, particularly in the South (“coloreds” or “Negroes” has their own separate water fountains, bus seats, bathrooms, hotels, restaurants, schools, etc.), and African Americans knew “their place.” Women were homemakers, and men “brought home the bacon.” Our middle class was substantially comprised of skilled and semi-skilled blue collar jobs, dominated overwhelmingly by men flexing brawn. Women? Well, they could sew things in an assembly line. College education also tilted toward the men who has served in the military in WWII and Korea (women were still a tiny minority in the armed services), able to take advantage of the G.I. Bill. Financing for home ownership also created special programs for ex-G.I.s.
So here’s the 30,000 foot view of that era that MAGA followers want back so desperately: Ethnic, racial and cultural minorities were still demographically insignificant, and African Americans were saddled with legally-sanctioned second or third class status. What limited diversity did exist was largely relegated to big cities like New York and Chicago. Women were also second class citizens (they only won the right to vote in 1920), steered away from professional occupations (lawyers, CPS, investment bankers, traders, commercial bankers, etc.) or any attempt to climb corporate or elected/appointed political ladders. That Rosie the Riveter (pictured above) moment from WWII was only temporary till “our boys” came back… soon all-but-forgotten.
White males were perceived the very definition of American greatness. Women who dared to enter into direct competition with men were often thought to be easy sexual targets. Corporate executives were often pictured divorcing their wives (when divorce was even tolerable) and marrying their secretaries. Locker room talk, followed by predatory action when the man actually had the power of money (or at least a cool car), were considered manly traits. Women suffered in relatively silent humiliation. For those who complained, well “honey,” that’s just the way it is. Find a nice husband and stay home to raise your kids. But there were seismic economic forces roiling around the planet, all helping to leverage American power one giant notch upward.
The rest of the developed world, still reeling from the massive war damage from WWII, devoted two decades of efforts toward rebuilding entire nation-states (with help from the United States). The virtually-undamaged United States deployed its post-WWII efforts to reinforcing our industrial and financial capacity. Simply put, the damage-control rest-of-the-world was in no position to compete economically with the American behemoth. We completely dominated the global scene economically, and until the Soviet Union solidified in the 1960s, militarily and politically as well. And then the Soviets fell.
But most of the rest of the world, rebuilding its manufacturing capacity pretty much from scratch, was eventually able to build new plants with then state-of-the-art technology. By the 1960s, we were witnessing a flood of German and Japanese technology, from stereo equipment to cars, replace the “built-in obsolescence” American comparable products. When China opened its economic doors in 1989, it also joined this manufacturing frenzy.
Instead of upgrading to compete, the United States shifted to upgrading its financial institutions to “own the world,” leaving manufacturing (and the workforce that supported it) to compete on a very uneven global stage. We no longer “made stuff,” and our dependence on financial institutional success opened us up to economic rises and falls that played hob with ordinary people. Later, as we shifted into the most recent technology “upgrades,” accelerating social media and global interconnectivity, we began slamming into the “automation driven by artificial intelligence” wall for which this nation is abysmally unprepared. Blue collar skill-values were vaporizing like never before. Trust me, we are not going to go back to replace these automated machines with well-paid Trump-supporters.
So America slowly morphed into a nation where brains, in the aggregate, created more economic value than brawn. Urban economic value simply blew out rural comparables. As the after-effect of male-dominated college educations faded, in sheer numbers women surpassed men at all levels of college education. So naturally, since female brains are at least equally capable of creating economic values, and if more women were garnering super-skills, it not the bit least surprising to watch the ascension of women, still in relatively early stages of our nation’s history, to some of the most important political, educational, scientific and corporate roles in the country. That rise rather directly contradicts the America that the Trump base believes they can recapture. Nothing screams the futility of that movement like Donald Trump’s perception and treatment of women, a losing but horribly unpleasant effort no matter how you look at it.
In my own mind, I have little doubt that if the GOP presidential primary were held today, Donald Trump would have long-since been pushed out of the race. His rather obvious sexual predation would have disqualified him rather dramatically, and it would have taken little more than that “pussy-grabbing” recording to have taken him down. The current “me too” assault against the male predatory bastions of Hollywood, corporate America, political institutions – a pendulum which often seems to rush to judgment based on any level of accusation – only took hold well-after Trump’s election. Many believe, as I do, that it was precisely Trump’s election that forced so many women to take a stand.
But Donald Trump, as he usually does, has doubled-down on taking on women demanding equality. His MAGA mantra wants them to return to the 1950s and, like black Americans (remember Trump’s Charlottesville reaction, a small example), to “know their place.” Under the Trump administration, women have taken it on the chin from the most misogynist president in recent Western political history.
FastCompany.com (December 13th) summarizes Mr. Trump quite well: “Some thought the presidency would change him, but then some people also still think the world is flat. Rather than curb his sexist worldview, being president seems to have codified it, validated it, and provided him with a bigger platform through which to spread it. If nothing else, 2017 has shown us nobody respects women less than Donald Trump…
“According to a widely disseminated Axios newsletter, Trump prefers female staff in his White House ‘dress like a woman,’ whatever exactly that’s supposed to mean. The day the story came out, women pushed back on social media, posting images of themselves dressed in their military garb or whichever non-gender specific outfits their jobs demand.
“Despite giving his own daughter a high-level government position, Trump doesn’t demonstrate a worldview in which women deserve to command the same jobs and salaries as men. There could be any number of reasons why he seemingly refused to shake German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s hand back in March–her cordial working relationship with President Obama, or some random germ fear–but considering his prolific love of shaking hands with world leaders, perhaps he just does not take seriously the one who happens to be a woman. He seems to feel that way about reporters as well, asking CNN’s April Ryan during a February press conference whether she would set up a meeting for him with the Congressional Black Congress. Never mind the problematic assumption that Ryan, a woman of color, would automatically have a relationship with the CBC, but asking her to set up a meeting casts her in the role of a secretary…
“Of course, while Trump’s assault on women sometimes manifests in leaving them out of the picture, literally, he’s often much more direct than that. He can be mildly cheeky, telling a reporter she has a nice smile, or completely inappropriate, telling the French First Lady she’s in ‘such good shape.’ When he’s not flirting with women in a professional setting, however, he’s fighting with them. Trump has a history of butting heads with women. Just try scrolling through his war of words with Rosie O’Donnell on Twitter, for instance, there’s a shocking amount of material. Being in office hasn’t slowed him down in the slightest either
“He’s consistently sparred with Elizabeth Warren, always referring to her by the flagrantly juvenile nickname ‘Pocahontas,’ most recently right to the faces of a group of Navajo veterans. He claimed that he would not allow Morning Joe cohost Mika Brzezinski into his Mar-a-Lago resort because she was bleeding from a facelift. Whether she actually had just had a facelift is irrelevant; Trump’s trotting out this claim to humiliate her for the supposed sin of female vanity belongs on a high school bathroom wall. (As does his nickname for her, ‘low I.Q. Crazy Mika.’)
“Trump attacked the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, when she spoke out against the government’s lackluster response to the Puerto Rico relief effort following Hurricane Maria. (At the time, much of the territory was without water and electricity, and there was a pronounced difference with how FEMA had responded to recent hurricanes in Florida and Texas.)
“The following month, for an encore, Trump feuded with a Florida congresswoman and a war widow. That fight began with the death of Sergeant LaDavid Johnson and three other soldiers during a still-unexplained mission in Niger. In calling to comfort the widow Johnson, Trump reportedly said that her husband ‘knew what he signed up for, but I guess it still hurts.’ You know, like what presidents say? Rep. Frederica Wilson had been in the car with Johnson at the time of the call, listening to it with her. The fight began when Wilson criticized the president for his astounding lack of tact. Trump responded by dubbing Wilson ‘Wacky’ in a string of tweets, and denying both hers and Johnson’s accounts of the event. He has never apologized.” The list is endless and is destined to get so much worse.
So why do so many women in Trump’s base still support him? For most, it comes down to their interpretation of religion, a very fundamentalist view. The anti-LGBT stance married with a commitment to “saving the unborn” are the foundation of that support. The need for there to be a strong Israel to set the stage for the Second Coming, the Rapture and Armageddon (in which all the Jews will die, by the way) and their post-diluvium (think Noah and the great flood) belief that global climate change contradicts what they think God promised in the Old Testament form the next level of support.
With the “Godless” communism bugaboo still on their list of horribles (see my December 13th, The Biggest Political Question on Earth blog), they have married their religious beliefs into Trump’s vision of capitalism, intended to deliver a knock-out punch to the evil People’s Republic of China. None of this will happen, but the anger from those displaced Americans, left behind by progress and reality, will only grow stronger and more desperate as their goals slip away. Without a belief that Trump’s vision of America can succeed, despite mounds of hard evidence it cannot absent a true nuclear apocalypse that virtually destroys the entire planet, it is horrifically fascinating to watch Trump’s base, particularly the women in that base, vote for their own demise.
I’m Peter Dekom, and any woman who supports this unrealistic and “demeaning to women” vision is literally voting for her own destruction… and what’s worse… a world that will crush any children she may have forced into that view of the world.
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