Pundits and politicians have racked their brains to explain Donald Trump’s persistence as a powerful political phenomenon. What if a large part of the answer has been staring them in the face all along?
President Obama and Bernie Sanders have both applied their amateur psychoanalyses, only to arrive at the lazy and self-serving conclusion that it results from angry white men feeling insecure about their economic situation.
The problem with this is that it ignores much of what we know about Trump’s supporters based on the available polling. For example, although they are only half as likely as the average American to make more than $100,000 per year, they still mostly have incomes that are above average. Only one-third of Trump’s supporters make less than $50,000 per year, whereas about half of Americans do.
What seems unique about Trump backers is that they are much less likely to have college degrees and more likely to be above age 45. So if these middle-class, mostly white, older Americans have a decent if not completely comfortable income, what is motivating them to get behind a candidate whose main policy promise is to exclude as many people, Muslims and Mexicans preeminently, from the United States as possible to keep Americans safe?
What if the answer is just that, the promise of physical safety?
This month, a new CNN poll revived an old question which (for some odd reason) hadn’t been asked in more than four years. When asked, “Who is winning the war on terrorism?” only 18 percent of respondents said they believe the United States and its allies are winning. This is much the lowest result in the history of this question, going all the way back through 35 different CNN surveys to 9/11. By the same token, 40 percent now believe “the terrorists” are winning the war, by far the highest result ever.
Meanwhile, 45 percent are either “very” or “somewhat worried” about falling victim to a terrorist attack, the highest result in more than a decade. Fifty percent say they have little or no confidence at all in the Obama administration “to protect U.S. citizens from future acts of terrorism.” Again, this is the highest number that have answered the question this way since it was first asked about the Bush administration in 2003.
The pronounced lack of confidence in the current administration comes despite another historic result from the same poll: For the first time since the question was first asked in 2002, a majority now believes that “the U.S. government can eventually prevent all major attacks if it works hard enough at it.”
So why has Trump caught on in this election cycle? His message of pessimism and decline resonates with people at a time when they’re seeing their worst fears come true. They feel unsafe and, after two major terrorist attacks on soft Western targets, think their elected leaders are incompetent to protect them. They believe their nation is losing the war against terrorism. They strongly disapprove of how Obama is handling both terrorism (60 percent disapproval) and the Islamic State (64 percent disapproval).
They also see Obama filling the air with happy talk about the Islamic State’s weakness, about how it’s the JV team and public fear about its power is the result of media hype. They see him talking about wars receding and terrorists having already been defeated. They see his State Department claiming credit for “bringing peace, security to Syria.” Perhaps they’re even aware of intelligence reports being manipulated in order to produce rosier news about progress in Syria and Iraq.
They have noticed that the Obama administration will not level with them about the situation, despite how badly things are going.
The bottom line is that if 39 percent of Americans have a favorable view of Donald Trump now, even after the things he’s said lately, Obama deserves at least some of the blame for it. Support for Trump is indeed born of desperation, but not of the economic variety as Obama and Sanders would have it. Rather, Trump has become less unpopular (only 57 percent unfavorable) because he is running against what more and more Americans view as an age of unprecedented physical danger to themselves and international humiliation for their country.
