Donald Trump is an effect, not a cause
Charles Spivak reveals, perhaps unwittingly, a major contributing factor to the rise of Donald Trump: smugness and condescension. (“Trump is an entertaining mud wrestler in an era of uncertainty,” Sept. 3).
Mr. Spivak calls Trump supporters “people without the time or education to grasp the complexities of the world,” labels them as “irrational,” claims they are ruled “fears and uncertainties” and analogizes that they are vulgar rubes who support Mr. Trump for the same reasons people find mud wrestling “entertaining and mesmerizing.”
While I never voted for Mr. Trump (nor witnessed mud wrestling), I know many educated and thoughtful people who did. As did millions of similar others. But what many people fail to understand is that Mr. Trump was, and is, an effect not a cause.
His rise was largely caused political parties who have for years patronized, condescended to, and ignored the wishes of millions of Americans. Every election cycle, these politicians deign to walk among the great unwashed. Post-election, most of them retreat to the disconnected reality of their Washington D.C. bubbles.
Did millions of people who could have been better informed vote for Trump? Undoubtedly, just as millions did for Joe Biden. (Many would have been better informed had Big Tech and Big Media, and it appears the FBI, not deliberately suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story). Is Mr. Trump truly a man of the ignored people? Probably not, but neither are most politicians, including Mr. Biden, who has done almost nothing else but hold elected office for the past 50-plus years, becoming a multimillionaire in the process.
So, the so-called “smart set” voted for Mr. Biden. How has that worked out? Considering the litany of problems we face that were exacerbated by or are directly attributable to Mr. Biden’s policies and executive orders, perhaps the “smart set” is not as smart as Mr. Spivak would have us believe. And if you truly wish to convince people not to vote for
Mr. Trump, you will not persuade them by calling them uneducated, uninformed or déclassé (or semi-fascists or extremist threats.) People rarely respond the way you want them to when you talk down to them from your high horse. Even, or maybe especially, when you call yourself a “unifier.”
Mr. Spivak says of Trump that “though he has no competence in anything, he cultivates the notion that he’s insuperable.” And while that may be true, Mr. Spivak has, ironically, also given the perfect description of Joe Biden.