Should-Read: Gin and Tacos: RESOURCE HARVESTING: "Before entering politics, it would be hard to imagine Donald Trump spending much time in places like Youngstown, OH or Huntington, WV... http://www.ginandtacos.com/2017/08/23/resource-harvesting/

...Now he can’t get enough of them.... By any measure, places like upstate New York, the Ohio River Valley, central Illinois, and Michigan have been down for decades. In Huntington and Youngstown, for example, population has fallen in every census since 1950. The story of the decline of manufacturing and extractive industries like coal in these places is one Americans know by heart today. What the Rust Belt offers Trump, then, is a segment of the population that has been on the brutal receiving end of every negative social and economic development since the early Seventies.... As long as Trump gives voice to their passionate anger, they will be there to support him even as his actions in office do nothing to help the most downtrodden areas of the country (and, in some cases, actively worsen their problems).... Racism, “economic anxiety,” distaste for Hillary Clinton, and susceptibility to false information distributed via social media are partial explanations at best.

To understand why so much of Trump’s Rust Belt base will never turn on him requires understanding the sense of malaise, of giving up, of a step beyond hopelessness, that pervades places that have been sliding downhill without interruption for more than half a century.... Rresidents no longer care what policy prescriptions candidates promise; they firmly believe that nothing will work anyway. These voters are unlikely to care that Trump often flip-flops on issues, does things for which he vocally criticized Barack Obama, and fails to deliver on promises made during the campaign.... Pointing out that he has nothing but bile-laced Tweets to show for his first half-year in the White House is not persuasive.... He continues to give them a vicarious outlet for their anger toward... urban elites, immigrants, gays and lesbians, the media, ivory tower academics, the Clintons, and so on.... After five decades of bad news, Trump feels like a breath of fresh air. Rather than offering them economic or social policy proposals they have heard before and in which they have no more strength to believe, he offers them an opportunity to extend a middle finger....

The people of Huntington, WV are not dumb enough to believe that the Mexican gang MS-13–the President’s new obsession–is responsible for the shuttered factories, soaring unemployment rate, stagnant wages, and addiction problems that plague their community. But when all of those problems exist for so long that they are viewed as simple facts of life no more controllable than the weather, venting anger at a sinister, foreign Other is cathartic.... Trump is not dumb.... He knows that... people in rural Ohio, upstate New York, central Pennsylvania, and other declining areas of the country... don’t expect him to solve their problems.... They only want him to keep up the Trump Show, to... to rile the establishment even when doing so is pointless and unproductive....

Against enemies real, imagined, or distorted, Trump and his most loyal voters will feel comforted that if nothing else, they are in the fight against the liberal media and MS-13 together.

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