A comic colossus who trades on Americans’ fading dream
Estranged from the establishment, and desperate for a saviour who ’speaks their language‘, disaffected US voters flock to Donald Trump, writes Ruth Sherlock
ROBERT Holmes says he will give free tattoos of Donald Trump to any willing customer, so enamoured is he of the Republican frontrunner.
Holmes, 48, hasn’t voted in decades, but now his tattoo parlour — done out in bachelor-pad style complete with leather sofas, dragon statues and a stripper’s pole — proudly bears Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan on the door.
“I think he is going to help the country in huge ways,” Holmes said, looking out at the depressing row of adult video shops and liquor stores that are his neighbouring businesses in the New Hampshire town of Exeter.
With the Iowa caucus taking place tomorrow, when the first votes of the 2016 presidential elections are cast, panic has set in among the Republican establishment.
The real estate mogul is leading with 37% of the Republican vote, a full 11 points clear of Ted Cruz, the evangelical Texas senator. Marco Rubio, the Florida senator seen by the Republican establishment as their best chance of beating Trump, is languishing woefully behind.
Their scrambled efforts to beat the man they once wrote off as a political joke are being thwarted by a resurgent movement of furious, mostly white, voters they thought had checked out of politics long ago.
For the first time since at least the ’60s, the majority of Americans are no longer in the middle class (a term that in the US often includes blue-collar employment). According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, less than half the country is in the middle-income bracket, down from 61% in 1971.
“I don’t even know what the middle class is any more,” said Holmes. “Every time somebody tries to do a little better for themselves then they get more screwed.”
Even in New England, white poverty is on the rise.
Just five months ago, Holmes’s friend Aleigsha Welch, 32, was living the life of a normal American mother. She and her partner, Nathan Rogers, 34, spent their days working and taking care of their four children. They lived in a comfortable home, along with the family dog. But after Rogers injured his back, their problems quickly spiralled: he lost his job and they were evicted.
“This past year has been hard for us,” said Welch, speaking from a shelter in Exeter. “We tried to survive on the wages from my job — I was a garden landscaper — but we couldn’t make the rent.”
Then Welch, too, was fired. She found another job, working in a petrol station, but the pay, less than $8 (R130) an hour, was not enough: “We had to move to a camping ground. We lived in a tent.”
Taken in by a nonprofit organisation that houses homeless families in churches, they are trying to rebuild their lives. Welch works as a maid in a hotel chain and Rogers as a labourer.
Across the country, millions of once-comfortable Americans are now living pay cheque to pay cheque.
“Family homelessness is the fastest-growing homelessness in the country. Families are not making it,” said Pati Frew-Wa- ters, the executive director of the nonprofit.
The statistics are bleak: Exeter, a picturesque town that houses the Phillips Exeter Academy — a US answer to Eton — has a population of about 13 800, but more than 2 000 are in need of food aid, according to a local charity.
In the face of this stark decline, disaffected voters have found solace in Trump. They cite his experience as a businessman and his promise to “bring jobs back from China”.
Yet loss of wealth is not the only determining factor of his support. The US’s changing demographics — whites will no longer be the majority by 2040 — is leaving segments of a once-privileged population feeling they are losing their prowess.
For conservative whites, changes, such as the legalising of gay marriage and the increase of non-white population, are leading to a sense that the “moral fabric” of the country, as they define it, is being lost.
“This country was made great by the white American male and now it’s being given away to others,” said one Trump sup- porter, who asked not to be named, as he lounged in a cigar shop.
They revel in Trump’s clear eschewing of political correctness. At his rallies he whips up crowds by pitting “us” — the people in the room — against an undefined enemy. Sometimes the “they” are Mexicans; other times Muslims.
Past elections have also thrown up radicals like Trump, but as voting day nears they have fallen away and the establishment choice has won.
But just days away from the first votes, there is little evidence that that is how the chips will fall this election.
“Americans have decided not to vote for a career politician,” said Tom Dimasi, 51, a taxi driver. “Sure, Donald Trump is controversial. But when you are looking for someone to fight for you, you don’t choose a priest.”
This country was made great by the white American male and now it’s being given away to others