You Believed Trump’s Lies
by
John J. Dunphy
(Originally published in The Telegraph of Alton, IL shorly after Trump’s election in 2016)
White working-class voters comprised one-third of the 2016 electorate. They were the foundation of Trump’s victories in the Rust Belt states of Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to Jim Tankersley’s “How Trump Won: The Revenge of Working-Class Whites.” Half of these voters stated that the economy was the most important election-year issue. “Two-thirds said they preferred Trump to handle the economy instead of Democrat Hillary Clinton.” Trump actualy won the union household vote in Ohio 54 percent to Clinton’s 42 percent, according to Harold Myerson in The Washington Post.
My roots are in the white working-class. My late father was a member of IBEW Local 649 and worked as an electrician’s helper in an oil refinery. I’d now like to say a few words to America’s white working-class voters. You got snookered.
Trump promised to make your lives better if you sent him to the White House. Never mind the fact that this billioniare businessman has a long history of treating his employees atrociously and has proclaimed that he supports right to work, which seriously weakens unions. You also ignored the fact that Trump imports foreign-made products to sell in the United States. He assured you that he’ll be your champion in Washignton, DC and you believed him. Well, Trump played you for suckers.
He lied when he said that he can restore manufacturing jobs in the United States. Those jobs vanished when greedy corporations moved their operations to foreign nations, where labor is dirt-cheap and environmental regulations are practically non-existent. Automation is also responsible for lost labor-intensive manufacturing jobs. No politician — not even one with as big a mouth and ego as Trump — can reverse automation.
Trump promised coal miners they’d go back to work if he were elected. He said that global warming isn’t real and might be a Chinese conspiracy, which represented some originality on his part since most right-wing extremists claim it’s a hoax created by American liberals. Scientists and intelligent non-scientists agree that global warming is all too real. Miners and their families should know, however, that coal mining isn’t coming back even if Trump and his Republican Congress gut environmental regulations. As Jordan Weissmann noted in his article “Is Coal Doomed?” for The Atlantic, “Thanks to the deluge of cheap natural gas pouring from domestic shale desposits, the United Staes is burning less of the dirty black stuff to generate power.”
You believed Trump when he said that Muslims and Mexicans are your enemies. Once again, he lied to you. Your real enemies are the reactionary millionaires and billionaires who want to reduce working and middle-class Americans to the level of serfs. Trump can’t keep his promsies to bring back manufacturing jobs and make coal mining profitable again. He will however, keep his promise to cut taxes. The bad news is these tax cuts will benefit Trump’s wealthy cronies rather than you. The Tax Policy Center reports that all independent analyses show Trump’s tax cuts will mostly benefit the wealthiest Americans.Nearly half of these tax cuts will go to the top one percent. Less than a quarter of the cuts will benefit the bottom eighty percent of Americans such as yourselves.
You voted for Trump because he told you our nation is a mess and only he can fix it. He lied to you. He isn’t going to fix it. In fact, he’s going to make it worse — a lot worse. Congress won’t stop him because Republicans hold majorities in both the House and Senate. They’ll gladly slash taxes for the wealthiest Americans because the GOP is committed to making the rich even richer. Trump and the other Republicans couldn’t care less about the white working-class, except when they need your votes to defeat Democratic candidates. My working-class father, who never minced words, would say that you really screwed up when you rejected Clinton and voted for Trump. And he’d be right.
John J. Dunphy is the author of Abolitionism and the Civil War in Southwestern Illinois and Unsung Heroes of the Dachau Trials: The Investigative Work of the U.S. Army 7708 War Crimes Group, 1945–1947.