Trump voters have a good argument for his reelection. His economy is on fire and anyone denying this is being disingenuous at best. Although Donald Trump’s stock market has never grown at a greater rate than Obama’s, its growth is impressive. Given that Obama started off with an economy depressed by Bush II’s Great Recession, one can argue that Trump’s economy would have higher growth had they both started of level ground. We must consider what America has invested to get both types of growth and the social implications of these expenditures.
Barack Obama invested $831 Billion in the infamous Stimulus Package, which supplemented monies that would usually come from commerce. This kept Americans working and improving our infrastructure. Socially, it prevented the dysfunction that results from economic scarcity, such as crime and infighting amongst countrymen. The Stimulus Package was a success. America recovered, sustained responsible growth began and it lasted until the end of his presidency. Obama also sacrificed the ability to hide war costs when he decided to put it all on the books. Bush II paid for the Iraq war largely through emergency spending measures, which hid the costs and exploded the national deficit when Obama took office. The buck truly stopped with America’s first black president and today, Republicans ignore Bush II’s hiding of the costs and attribute the exploding deficit solely to Obama.
So what has Trump invested? Being a “Conservative,” a party that thinks they can really squeeze water from a turnip, large governmental investments are taboo. Trump has sacrificed America’s unity, choosing to run a candidacy catering to white males’ insecurities. He has empowered them with the confidence to engage in activity the world pressured them to hide. By tacitly endorsing racism and sexism, Donald Trump has estranged minority America from the majority class. This is why the overwhelming majority of Trump advocates are white males. Sure the occasional Kanye West or Elise Stefanik graces the screen in support but Trump’s base appears to be white males.
Trump has also sacrificed our national debt. He promised to eliminate it in eight years but has done the opposite by adding debt. I truly feel the Stock Market continues to grow because the Federal Reserve is pumping money into it. The Republican Party pretended the national deficit was a big deal under Obama but doesn’t even acknowledge it under Trump. What happened? If I were to ask myself what the Republican Party stands for, I’d say money and maintaining the dominance of white males.
The “economy over everything” approach bears a similarity to slave ownership in America’s past. The overwhelming majority of slave owners were white males but there were some white women and black slave owners. The willingness to devalue the quest to eliminate racism in exchange for financial prosperity is the exact thing as early Americans ignoring the evilness of slavery to create a prosperous new world power. The “this is what we have to do” approach makes it seem that there’s no other way but in reality, it’s a cop-out. It’s a hack. As I state in my book “To Pimp a Nation,” there’s no way to escape what I call the “Labor to Benefit Rule.” The Labor to Benefit rule is simply that you benefit from the work you do by having access to what your labors have created. European men, using barbarity, forced others to labor for them and then assumed the fruits of those people’s labor. While it may have seemed brilliant to them, the truth is they only took away from America’s true potential by not laboring themselves. They rationalized their laziness and barbarity by using science, religion and a moral argument that made it seem there was no other choice.
Donald Trump did the same making his followers feel we had to sacrifice cordiality and the pursuit of a just and equitable America to save it from economic demise. His followers’ acquiescence to such a ridiculous idea leads me to believe that had they lived in the 15th, 16thor 17thcentury, they would have definitely been ok with slavery and acquiesced to the notion that God and economists were right in saying black people were put on Earth solely to serve whites. To put it succinctly, Trump voters today would be the slaveholders and slavery advocates of yesterday. I could hardly envision anyone at a Trump rally fighting in the Union army. I couldn’t imagine Mitch McConnell or Lindsey Graham in 19thcentury America giving a speech about the humanity of African slaves and the wrongfulness of the institution of slavery. Quite the opposite. I could easily see them fighting for the institution with slick wording that enable their followers to say they’re not bad people. Just like the Brett Kavanaugh Senate Judiciary committee hearings where Jeff Flake and Susan Collins expressed concerns about Kavanaugh’s accusers but allowed a sham investigation that didn’t even interview two of the accusers. Their true focus was power and they didn’t care one bit about women’s rights or if these women were truly sexually assaulted or raped by the now Supreme Court Judge.
Trump’s Republican party is exactly the same and they don’t care about anything but money. They would gladly reinstitute slavery if it were possible.