Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
A supporter of President Donald Trump stands outside Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, July 12, 2020.
As general support for Trump keeps sinking, there is one anomaly. According to this July 15 Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, which finds Biden leading Trump by 11 points, fully 54 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the economy.
Really? That would be the corona economy, the worst since the Great Depression, thanks substantially to Trump’s catastrophic policies. How can this possibly be?
I put the question to some leading pollsters and strategists. One person whom I greatly respect told me that in focus groups several people volunteered that they credited Trump personally for the supplemental unemployment checks and one-time $1,200 relief payments because his name was on the checks.
We all laughed when Trump made this happen. Well, the man may be certifiably insane in several respects, but he is also crazy like a fox.
And his desire to get vivid relief to ordinary working people is also behind Trump’s demand for a suspension of Social Security payroll taxes. (Let’s see if he tries to get his name on the rebates.)
Needless to say, the fact that folks fall for this ploy does not exactly speak well of the American people. As H.L. Mencken famously observed, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. (The actual quote was somewhat more convoluted, but you get the idea.)
All of this reminds me of a remarkable book written in 1857, which I know about only thanks to Sidney Blumenthal’s superb new work on the run-up to the Civil War, All the Powers of Earth. The earlier book, The Impending Crisis of the South, by the abolitionist Hinton Rowan Helper, was the first to make the point that poor, non-slaveholding whites, outnumbering slaveholders by more than five to one, were victimized by slavery almost as much as Blacks. “Never were the poorer classes of a people,” Helper wrote, “so basely duped, so adroitly swindled …”
Does this ring a distant bell? The duped poor whites of slavery days, who supported wealthy slaveholders because downtrodden whites at least felt superior to Blacks, were the direct ancestors of those duped souls who believe today that Black lives don’t matter, and who support Trump’s economic leadership because his name is on relief checks.
Jesus wept! God save this Republic.
