THE GILDED RAGE: A WILD RIDE THROUGH DONALD TRUMP’S AMERICA
By Alexander Zaitchik
There has been much written over the past few years about the Trump voter. The trouble with defining this semi-mythical beast is that people had different motivations for supporting Trump and it’s difficult to come up with a single, if necessarily composite, portrait.
That said, Alexander Zaitchik’s interviews with various Trump supporters while following the candidate’s campaign in 2016 allow us to make some generalizations. A few of these reinforce what has become a stereotype. The Trump voter tends to be older. Most of the people Zaitchik interviews are middle-aged or retired. They are white. They are male (the women we hear from are mostly just echoes of their partners). While some of them are casualties of economic disruptions, many others are relatively well off. A number of them run their own small businesses.
This is the demographic. As far as the psychology goes, it is dominated by feelings of anger, resentment, bitterness, and hate. “What you’re seeing is an angry America,” one West Virginian Trump voter explains. The first interviewee we meet is described as “affable” but immediately said to be “twice angry” because of having to walk so far to a Trump rally and because his mother’s house had been blocked in by Trump protesters (an inconvenience that has, in turn, sent her directly into the Trump camp). Then, when he finally arrives at the rally, he gets a full dose of the candidate’s “hot and burning hatred.”
As is the case with most angry people – that is, people who aren’t upset at one specific thing but who are just angry – their anger is unfocused but invariably directed outward. The two favourite targets are government and the media. We meet one fellow who blames Obama for his marriage breaking down, and another who blames Jimmy Carter for the auto accident he was in. What government and the media represent are the “elites,” meaning groups that should represent, reflect, and be responsive to their rage but which instead are seen as at best uncaring and at worst mocking them.
Racism and misogyny, two of the more popular accusations made against Trump voters, come across as secondary, if present at all. Instead, what they most despise is the government, and the public sector more generally. They are true believers in capitalism and markets, despite what those forces may have done to them. Hence the importance to them of Trump’s status as a businessman. Even acknowledging his many failures and multiple bankruptcies doesn’t change this. It’s not important that Trump be a successful businessman; it’s enough that he has market values at heart, that he understands the world of business and isn’t someone just feeding at the public trough.
Meanwhile, what these people have really been betrayed by is the ideology (the preferred term these days is neoliberal) that they so want to believe in. They’ve indeed been screwed, just not by the people they blame the most. Trump the failure becomes, in turn, the perfect vehicle to express their misdirected rage.
Notes:
Review published online October 15, 2019. The diagnosis of anger has been so well analyzed now that I think it stands as more fact than theory. The literature is vast. See, for example, my reviews of Gavin Esler’s The United States of Anger and Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger. When Bob Woodward came to write his second volume on the Trump administration he simply titled it Rage. Enough said.
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