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
I really agree with what you have written. I see how Trump has reached an audience not usually reached during the elections (and what is mostly the working class) and it seems to have made him a vital tool to the Republican Party. We discussed in class how he brought up topics like Mexican immigration in the second debate to make him too valuable for the Republican Party to take away his nomination. When reading your post, I wonder if there would be another topic, instead of Mexican immigrants, that would move the working class and Trump’s base to be active in politics like they are now.