On occasion my radio colleagues accuse me of being a “hard worker.” I have a standard reply: “I haven’t worked a day of my life since the last time I cropped tobacco for my Uncle Bobby.”
I spent a long, hot (and, for a pre-teen bookworm, terrifying) summer working on my uncle’s tobacco farm. Uncle Bobby, a Marine who saw combat in Vietnam, taught me to crop tobacco and hang it in barns in the brutal Carolina heat. Today, Bobby is in his seventies and he still sends chills of fear through my spine; the same spine he attempted to straighten when I was a slump-shouldered kid by making me stand with a tobacco stick shoved through the crooks of my bent elbows.
I saw my uncle during a recent family gathering and got an earful about the troubles so many Americans face in the era of Obama. Due to health issues from his military service, for example, Uncle Bobby has to deal with the VA. You know all those stories you’ve heard? My uncle rattled of a litany of bureaucratic idiocies from his life that were even worse.
Bobby’s economic fortunes have been repeatedly buffeted by bad government policy. As a guy who spent years making the math work for a farm, he has no patience for the waste and stupidity of federal bureaucrats.
He thinks the country is run by idiots, most politicians are crooks, big businesses screw their workers and their customers, and that America is one big mess. So when my Dad asked Uncle Bobby who he was supporting for president, I almost fell out of my chair when he said “NOT Donald Trump.”
I pointed out to my uncle that the political smart guys would look at him (southern, blue-collar white guy) and listen to him (mad about the state of America) and just assume he was a Trump man. My uncle swung around in the BarcaLounger and gave me one of the withering glares he’d used on me as a kid and barked “Now why would I be for THAT guy?”
“Trump? Trump!?,” my uncle half-laughed the name. “He’s just like Hillary. They’re both in it for themselves! What has Trump ever done but make deals to take care of Trump? And Hillary’s the same way. She got rich from being in politics. They both are gonna take care of themselves first. They don’t care about us.”
I sat there, ashamed. Ashamed because my “redneck” uncle had just summarized in one paragraph the flaw in the Trump phenomenon I’ve wasted thousands of words trying (and failing) to explain.
Donald Trump brags about how he uses money to have his way in the political system—not for community good or for the “little people,” but for Donald Trump. He loves big government when it’s pro-Trump. He has no use for the Constitution when it gets in the way of “more wealth for Trump.” Every morning Donald Trump wakes up in the White House, he’ll have the same animating principle he has today when he wakes in Trump Tower:
“What can I do for Trump?”
Hillary is worse, if only for the fact that—unlike Trump—Hillary’s never built anything. She doesn’t have a casino or condo or parking space to show for her efforts. Trump got rich selling real estate, neckties and TV shows. Hillary and Bill got rich selling us: our public offices, our public policies, our national interests, etc.
With both Hillary and Trump, the Oval Office desk will still say “The Buck Stops Here.” And with both there’ll be the same fine print: “So It Can Wind Up In My Wallet.”
Trump is right that blue-collar, working-class Americans need a champion. But my Uncle Bobby is also right when he says that guy is definitely not Donald Trump.
