Donald Trump has proven once again that he represents the exact opposite of a working-class individual. Recently, the release of his 1995 tax records (or lack there of) has come to show something that is unusual to tax-paying, working-class people.  The release of Trump’s 1995 tax return shows that Donald J. Trump declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, a tax deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years according to the records obtained by the New York Times. Tax experts have stated that the filing of Trump’s apparent $916 million loss could be to cancel out his equivalent of taxable income for the past 18 years. This means that for almost two decades, Donald Trump has not known what it means to perform one of the major duties of a working-class individual in America.

Every working member of society knows the feeling of excitement when you receive your first paycheck only to be let down about ten seconds later when you see that a percentage of your hard-earned money goes to taxes. Not only do these taxes reach the federal and state level, but they also go towards funding programs like Medicare and Medicaid. If Donald Trump did in fact evade these civic duties, then is it even fair to consider him good representation of the working-class.

Due to his lack of compliance to comment on the subject, he left many voters confused. Does this mean he admits to the accusations? Since he probably does not do his own taxes was he aware of what was going on? Trump’s lack of rhetoric in this sense leads voters to believe that he might be hiding something. Usually, Trump is very vocal, opinionated, and quick to respond. With a lack of response on this subject, voters will probably be suspicious about Trump and his distrust among voters will probably grow. This should occur for voters to realize that maybe he is not a man of his word, or rather the words he tweets blasting others for evading taxes.

The stereotypical working-class voter is someone we all imagine wearing jeans, working boots and a t-shirt. Donald Trump is a business man who is always seen in a very sharp suit and what is unusual, is that his main base are those jean-wearing working class voters. Trump is the wealthy, suit-wearing man, much unlike the group he has recruited strongly during this campaign.

The Republican Party has used Reagan as a rhetorical strategy, as something a candidate aims to be and represent. Reagan appeared to wear clothes that represented the “average American voters” to appear more on their level, a technique continued by more recent presidents like President Obama. As Trump has not been the usual candidate, it is not that unusual that he is not following the “presidential love of denim.” With such a large part of Trump’s rhetoric being towards and all for the working class, showing a similarity, like jeans, would be expected. It has not seem to matter, seeing as his base is still the working class, with the suit and all.

While the working class is swayed by the rhetoric Trump utilizes about immigration, trade policy and the economy, the suit technique does not seem to matter. With social media being such a large part of campaigns these days, images and nonverbal components of the candidates play a larger part in their campaigns. Murray in a chapter on political gaffes said that “audiences now see” the politicians and it just adds to the actual verbal communication. Seeing that articles have been written on the attire of presidential candidates is one example of this.

Though Trump’s suit might put more between him and the working class, the suit could make him appear more as a business man than a politician. This could set him apart from the usual establishment and continue his anti-establishment rhetoric. While one would usually argue that the non-jeans route would not help a candidate with the working class, Trump has had such a strong rhetorical strategy with important topics that jeans might not be necessary and might be helpful in the end.

 

The only image of Donald Trump in jeans…playing volleyball.

If no one is completely over Donald Trump yet, President Obama definitely is. Lately, President Obama has been doing everything in his power to make sure that Hillary Clinton is the frontrunner in this debate. For most of his speeches that he’s made lately, he has been targeting the working class to ensure that they do not place Donald Trump in the Oval Office. “This is a guy who spent all his time hanging around, trying to convince everybody he was a global elite … and flying around everywhere and all he had time for was celebrities,” Obama said. “Suddenly he’s going to be the champion of working people?” “Come on, man,” Obama said with a sardonic laugh.. Although Donald Trump may very well not be the best candidate to become our next President, he is definitely a rhetorical pro. His rhetoric skills have by far been his biggest asset in this election and could very well be the reason why he has majority of the white working class on his back.

What Trump does very well in this election is his use of rhetorical skills and figures of speech to sound like a real person. This has helped him by far in the election because he has been able to grab and keep the attention of the people, especially the working class, whether they are for him or not. The best speeches are memorable and persuasive, and whether or not one agrees with Trump and his ideas, it cannot be denied that he does just that whether the things he says evoke the worst or best emotions in people.

 

Image: http://www.usnews.com/cartoons/donald-trump-cartoons

Republicans have long marketed (and from my experience, successfully) themselves as the party of tax cuts. This establishes a narrative of Republicans supporting small businesses, the middle/working class, and the common people. In the third and final presidential debate, Trump capitalized on this narrative by not only claiming to want to cut taxes, but by framing the issue in terms of how “disastrous” Clinton’s tax policy is. He claimed that she will “raise your taxes, even double your taxes,” and that you will see a “massive, massive increase in taxes” under Hillary Clinton. Whether or not this is even true doesn’t seem to matter – he is trying to establish himself as a working class champion and Clinton as an enemy of the working class by drawing a distinct difference between the way viewers will perceive their tax policies.

It’s difficult to tell whether or not Trump’s claim that Clinton will “double your taxes” is a claim of fact or a use of hyperbolic rhetoric. The statement itself clearly not literally true, but from the viewer’s perspective, it can simply be a rhetorical device used to emphasize just how high Clinton’s tax increases will be. Personally, I hear it as a claim of fact, but this doesn’t necessarily matter – what matters is how the audience perceives it, and many of his supporters will either believe it to be literally true, or just hear it as reasonable hyperbole used to emphasize how extreme Clinton’s tax policy is. This is one of many examples of Trump’s rhetoric that demonstrates that the audience reaction to political rhetoric is often, as discussed in class, an “interpretive act.”

 

Time and time again Donald Trump has appealed to the Republican working class by claiming he is a “working-class hero”. He claims to be just as hard-working and dedicated as the working class. He uses this to act as the so-called voice of the people who spend their living working every day to make ends meet for themselves and their family. People say Trump’s “got balls” because he brags he’ll “bring the jobs back” without any clear course of action. Recently, this all has began to change.

Many people, whether they be everyday working people or even prestigious political leaders, have began to debunk the grounds of Donald Trump and his claim to fame within the working class. In President Obama’s first solo public appearance in support of Hilary Clinton, he was shocked to hear Trump’s increasing support from the working class. He goes on to question “This is the guy you want to be championing working people? This guy who spent 70 years on this Earth showing no concern for working people? This guy’s suddenly going to be your champion?”. He puts Trump’s entire career into perspective when it comes to the way he has treated the working people of America.

In the blue-collar city of Youngstown, Ohio, Trump supporters are rare. The NY Times featured this town to get its perspective on how the working class people of Youngstown view Trump’s “hero” identification“Does Mr. Trump, a Manhattan billionaire, really deserve to be the voice of the beleaguered American working class?“. Trump is famous from his status and that is not a status that is familiar to the people of Youngstown and working-class people in general.

Donald Trump believes he is the ideal example of the “American Dream” with the ideals of hard work, determination, and responsibility which made him into the successful businessman he is today. Hilary debunked this myth in the third debate when she called out Donald Trump to having had the upper hand being born into such a wealthy family. What will probably happen in this election will be the gradual realization of how different Trump has become successful to the everyday struggle working class people wake up and face. Voters will soon realize that Trump is no hero but more of a “damsel in distress” when it comes to climbing the economic ladder straight from the bottom.

 

 

While Donald Trump has been standing up for himself and fighting back against the Access Hollywood tape and the aftermath, he has changed the topic to bring back his base and resume his campaign. Trump has been bringing the topic of discussion back to causes that matter to the working class and has been doing so by utilizing the term “Clinton Machine” to point the finger of blame to Clinton.

The Democrats have a corrupt political machine pushing crooked Hillary Clinton. We have Paul Ryan, always fighting the Republican nominee!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 16, 2016

The working class voters care about immigration and trade because that is where they are suffering in this day and age. In a speech in Florida, Trump said “Just look at what this corrupt establishment has done to our cities like Detroit and Flint, Michigan – and rural towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina” which not just highlighted the problems that mattered to these working class voters, but pointed straight to battleground states. What Trump did next was bring it full circle to the Clinton Machine and saying that it “is at the center of this power structure” and is pitting the “economy against the working class.” By turning the tables to topics that matter to his base and giving them a person to hate, Trump took the discussion off of his scandal and spoke of the wrongdoings of Clinton. He spoke of everything she has done against the working class, how she has control of the media and even mentioned the WikiLeaks in great detail.

By shifting the topic to not just how Clinton works against the working class, but how she has complete control and is in the hands of even bigger players, Trump is speaking to his working class voters once again and seems to have gained back his support. Though this seems to be working at the moment, seeing as Republican support has inched back to him, it is also leading to a few laughs with the help of Stephen Colbert (video below).

 

In late 2014, far before Donald Trump announced his candidacy, Professor Noam Chomsky did an interview where he described his view of the current state of the Republican Party. While his analysis will strike even moderates as controversial in its sharp tone, his comments are strikingly predictive of a phenomenon we have observed with Donald Trump.

Chomsky details an effort by establishment Republicans to mobilize a base, but their fear that this base could overtake the party. Listing subgroups of the base in question, Chomsky describes “nativists, who are afraid that ‘they’ are taking our country away from us, white racists…” Trump capitalized on this group, sprinkled in some economic populism and pro-working class rhetoric, and thus became the Frankenstein monster that establishment Republicans feared.

Perhaps the most prominent example of this mixture of populism and nativism are embodied in Trump’s comments about Mexicans. Trump’s referral to Mexicans immigrants as “criminals and rapists,” his calls for the deportation of all illegal immigrants, and his demanding a border wall paid for by Mexico all demonstrate that there is extremely strong anti-immigration sentiment among his supporters. Some of this is likely due to racism and xenophobia, while much of it is due to legitimate concern about immigration policy. Much of his anti-immigration policies are directly tied to his protectionist rhetoric. He famously called for penalties via tariff on a company shipping its jobs to Mexico. He targets working class voters who feel that they have lost their jobs to illegal immigrants in the United States and foreign workers in their own countries. He has tied his anti-immigrant rhetoric to his protectionist rhetoric to form an “American first” style of rhetoric directly targeting working-class voters.

When Trump demonized Mexican immigrants, he appealed to two demographics – xenophobes, and those who are legitimately concerned about losing their jobs to illegal immigrants. Establishment Republicans are likely turned off by this rhetoric, as they want to achieve support among those afraid of job losses, but not those who are bigoted. Trump directly ties bigoted rhetoric and populist rhetoric together. This partially explains his success among his base and the disapproval of him by establishment Republicans, who have distanced themselves from their own nominee in a historic manner.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-utx-idUSMTZSAPEC2EIWOEVW

During the first debate between the two presidential candidates, Clinton mentioned a number of instances where Trump degraded women by humiliating a teenage beauty queen and fat shaming Alicia Machado on FOX News. Not only did she call him out on these things but, she also appealed to the working class by doing so by discrediting the fact that Trump is worth billions because of his tax returns. With that, it’s been very interesting to witness Trump and his attempt to come back from this Clinton Trap. Trump’s rhetorical style is highly visceral where he responds to things by coming from strong emotion and not from a logical standpoint. This doesn’t put Trump in a strong place when trying to appeal to voters because voters are looking for content in the things that he says in order to be able to trust him.

Trump definitely has some of the white-working class on his back, but in order to completely get people on his side he’s definitely going to have to expand his rhetorical range. He’s a hothead and it shows with specific instances where he lashes out, but he may need to tone it down a bit in order to be looked at as a more trustworthy candidate. Many working class voters and voters period fear that he is not going to be able to be handle the demands of this country because of his temper. Once he makes changes in the way he comes across to white-working class voters, he may have all of them on his side.

 

 

Image: http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-10-04/hillary-clinton-is-wooing-donald-trumps-base-of-white-working-class-voters

Donald Trump is heading down a deep, down-ward spiral when it comes to working-class voters. Not all, but about a third of them. In the recent reveal of Donald Trump’s sexist past, he is facing a major problem when it comes to appealing to his female audience. Recently it was discussed how Donald Trump’s majority vote stems from those in labor-heavy jobs because of Trump’s support of domestic production. Even though this may seem like a lot voters, due to recent activity, these numbers are about to diminish.

Within this week, multiple claims have come forward accusing Donald Trump of sexual assault. This was followed by many sexist remarks made by him in the past and currently on twitter. There are so many negative comments over the past thirty years that they have been placed in a timeline of his offensive language. So how does this affect Trump?

Even though the people who make up the working-class that categorize themselves as Trump supporters are mainly male, there are still a good amount that are female. Females are more likely to have minimum wage jobs and it is still unclear where Trump stands on this issue due to his flip-flopping of views on this matter. By having his matters become public of disrespecting women, it is highly likely that he will lose the support of women in the working-class. This is especially a strong matter due to the hardships women continuously need to overcome in order to prove themselves in male-dominated industries.

Not only have these comments caused him the respect of many women, it led to a questioning of character from individuals in general. Since the release of the vulgar comments, 20% of Republican governors, Senators, and House members have renounced their party’s nominee. This includes both men and women. The rest of the 2/3 of the working class (males) that support Donald Trump won’t let this go as easy as well. The Republican representatives state their disassociation due to the fact that they would not their wives/sisters/daughters to be under a Trump reign.

It is still unsure what will happen this November. It looks like Clinton is taking a good lead as of now. What should happen is that those who had supported Trump to be affected by the comments and allegations that have come forth. Voters should think twice and realize that if Trump is elected as president, his attitude will reign over the lives of their wives, sisters, daughters, and/or themselves. As for working class individuals, men might vote for Trump to get ahead of their female counterparts. At the same time, women might choose not to vote for Trump so they will have an easier path to success in the working world. This is not an American Dream, but a Nightmare. 

Donald Trump has proven time and time again to make incredibly sexist comments. From the nineties calling women “beautiful pieces of ass” to the recent video leak from 2005 , his views can be described as misogynistic, objectifying, and vastly inappropriate for anyone (but especially a presidential candidate) to say. His comments also set an example that is extremely dangerous for his supporters to hear, encouraging sexual assault- and in a more broad sense, viewing women as subservient objects rather than active members of society.

Nate Silver released a graph that showed that Donald Trump would win if only men voted, emphasizing the polarization of genders in this election. The response to this graph was incredibly alarming. Supporters of Trump, many of whom being the working class, began tweeting about how if women were standing in the way of a Trump victory than they should not be able to vote at all, and thus the #repealthe19th was born. This hashtag alludes to the 19th amendment that granted women the right to vote. The calls to repeal this amendment, at first may seem unrelated to the sexist Trump comments addressed earlier in this post, but in fact echo the exact same theme, women should not be treated as equals.

Trump supporters view him as having some sort of credibility (or ethos), therefor his remarks that are against women validate their remarks because they see what he says as (if not okay) excusable given his position of power and potentiol for even more power. These supporters voices will be trickled down into their communities and if Trump wins, also be validated creating a dangerous waterfall of female objectification.