Blow’s column hits on several key issues, starting with the nature of Trump’s base, why it is responding to him, and what that means.
You should read the entire column which you can access here.
What is the nature of that base?
His whole campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” is in fact an inverted admission of loss — lost primacy, lost privilege, lost prestige.
And who feels that they have lost the most? White men.
Blow notes that in the recent CBS / New York Times poll Trump was beating Clinton among white men by about 2-1 margin, and UPSHOT blog had noted last month that she was outperforming President Obama among all groups except white men without college degrees.
Here I note that demographic is not only a shrinking share of the electorate, but is also decreasing in absolute numbers. As I recall, in a four year period it dropped from 107 million to 103 million.
Blow write
He appeals to a regressive, patriarchal American whiteness in which white men prospered, in part because racial and ethnic minorities, to say nothing of women as a whole, were undervalued and underpaid, if not excluded altogether.
White men reigned supreme in the idealized history, and all was good with the world. (It is curious that Trump never specifies a period when America was great in his view. Did it overlap with the women’s rights, civil rights or gay rights movements? For whom was it great?)
Obviously, those questions are not rhetorical for this base. Some have noted that Trump’s attitude seems to match what one saw of the likes of Don Draper in “Mad Men.”
What these men want is “a wall around their cultural heritage” which they view as concurrent with American heritage. Their America is
white, Christian, straight and male-dominated. If you support Trump, you are on some level supporting his bigotry and racism. You don’t get to have a puppy and not pick up the poop.
And for Blow,
acceptance of racism is an act of racism. You are convicted by your complicity.
He refuses not to confront the issue directly, and there is a sentence that bluntly states what he thinks apply to all who support Trump in any fashion:
Supporting Trump is indefensible and it makes you as much of a pariah as he is.
Blow offers a quote from Toni Morrison, then closes with two very powerful paragraphs.
But since I want you to read the entire piece, I am NOT going to provide those two paragraphs.
Go read them in context.
You will then see how accurate and powerful this column is.