Donald Trump Anger Rises From the Black Morass of the Culture Wars
The chaos and frustration being expressed at Trump rallies is like some giant roar from the id of the forgotten American middle class
Sharon Waxman | March 15, 2016 @ 11:17 AM
Last Updated: March 15, 2016 @ 11:24 AM
Getty Images
The anger unleashed by the Donald Trump campaign is not merely the result of the Republican Party’s pandering to bigotry and intolerance over a decade although, yeah, it’s that too.
It’s the direct result of the culture wars in America, which the right wing has been losing for decades and continues to lose, bit by bit. Now they’re losing their minds.
The chaos and frustration being expressed at Trump rallies is like some giant roar from the id of the forgotten American middle class, and particularly the put-upon white male. It makes me think of the Michael Douglas character in “Falling Down” — a laid-off defense worker whose wife has left him and whose life then goes even further downhill. That was 20-plus years ago and things have only gotten worse for middle-class men since then.
What happened to the America of yore? Have “New York values” — or even “Hollywood values” — won out?
Well, yes, they have.
Terrifying but true: Women are sexually liberated. They can have sex with whomever they want. And what happens when you can’t control people’s sexual habits? Nothing terrible, it turns out, but that’s infuriating too!
The gays are out of the closet. Hell, they’re getting married and having children.
A black man has been in the White House for eight years along with his black wife and children. Not that there’s anything wrong that, of course, but does he have to be such a p…..rofessor?
Recreational marijuana is an accepted drug. Some guy named Lin-Manuel Miranda was rapping in the Rose Garden this week. All this claptrap about global warming when jobs have disappeared to China and Vietnam and the government bails out the banks who foreclosed on all those mortgages.
And more: The Catholic Church is discredited, its authority and finances crippled by the exposure of pedophile priests and the attendant cover-up. The evangelical church should be a haven, but try not to notice the many leaders there who were convicted of fraud, or gay-bashers who turned out to be gay.
And what about all those boys coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, with scar tissue for faces and prosthetics in place of their limbs?
When those bedrock institutions — the government, the church, the banks — fail you, what can you count on anymore?
Hillary Clinton? Hell no!
The country has changed and parts of the country are rebelling against those changes. The culture wars are not over, certainly, but the prospect of a Democratic appointment filling Antonin Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court may cement the progressive realities that have taken hold over the past 30 years.
Women will not give up the right to make choices for their own bodies, though yes, abortion-rights battles are being waged in Texas, Louisiana and a dozen other states. Gays aren’t going back in the closet. People of color and those who support them are in the streets demanding reform in police departments nationwide.
So Trump has come along and validated the base instincts of those who feel disenfranchised and betrayed. I understand it. The New Yorker’s David Remnick called it the result “of a long process of Republican intellectual decadence.”
And he’s right.
But you can also blame “All in the Family,” “Seinfeld,” “Will and Grace” and “Modern Family.”
It’s an “I Dream of Jeannie” genie that’s not going back in the bottle.
9 More Donald Trump Fudges and Lies From Primary Season (Videos)
Donald Trump seems to be on an unstoppable charge to the Republican presidential nomination, even though there's been a plethora of news reports challenging various claims he has made in the past two months alone. Here are some of his greatest hits.
During the CNN South Carolina town hall debate, Anderson Cooper asked Trump about a interview posted on Buzzfeed in which Trump voiced support of the Iraq invasion. Trump responded by saying that he opposed the Iraq invasion by the time it started, but Buzzfeed countered with a clip from another taken the weekend after the invasion started, in which he said the invasion looked like "a tremendous success."
On Jan. 29, Trump said that he "never once asked" for Fox News' Megyn Kelly to be removed as a moderator for a debate that he boycotted. While Trump didn't directly request the removal, he did question Kelly's qualifications. On Jan. 23, he tweeted: "Based on @MegynKelly's conflict of interest and bias she should not be allowed to be a moderator of the next debate."
During his New Hampshire victory speech, Trump claimed the unemployment rate of 5 percent was false, and was actually somewhere between 28-42 percent (fast forward to 12:00). While the unemployment rate most commonly reported does not count people who are not actively seeking jobs, there is another which includes more people attached to the labor force. Under this, the unemployment rate only rises to 10 percent.
Another claim from the N.H. victory speech is that Trump is the only candidate who self-funds his campaign. A check of documents from the Federal Election Commission shows that as of the end of 2015, Trump had put in nearly $2 million to his campaign, but he had received just over $6.5 million from donors.
During a Jan. 20 town hall in Iowa, Trump said that he could make Mexico pay for a border-spanning wall by using the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico to cover the cost. Politifact debunked it, citing several economic experts who noted that the trade deficit is based largely on private trading, and that Mexico's trade surplus does not mean that they have the resources to fund such a wall.
This attack ad against Ted Cruz that aired in South Carolina this past month is one of many examples of Trump claiming that illegal immigrants are "pouring in." The hyperbole ignores a 2015 Pew Research study that shows that the illegal immigrant population in America has actually declined by about 1 million since the start of the recession.
At a rally on Feb. 19, Trump claimed that General John Pershing captured 50 Muslim terrorists in the 1920s and executed them via firing squad with bullets dipped in pigs' blood. The truth is that while Pershing fought against Muslim swordsmen in the Philippines to stop the massacre of Christians, he only sprinkled them with pigs' blood -- which they considered to be unholy -- to strike fear. He never ordered such an execution.
Trump continues to insist that torture techniques like waterboarding work. He does this despite the fact that just two years ago, a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA's use of enhanced interrogation techniques made headlines when it called them "not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees."
In a Jan. 14 debate, Trump claimed that there were very few women and children among the Syrian refugees. Two surveys by the U.N. count the number of Syrian refugees in the Middle East and North Africa as well as the number of refugees that have crossed the Mediterranean Sea into Europe. In both surveys, women and children make up approximately 50 percent of the total refugee count.
1 of 10
In just the past two months, the GOP frontrunner has raised many red flags with fact checkers
Donald Trump seems to be on an unstoppable charge to the Republican presidential nomination, even though there's been a plethora of news reports challenging various claims he has made in the past two months alone. Here are some of his greatest hits.