Valiant Dan Balz, king of the pack in the Washington Post’s newsroom jungle, has ventured into the heart of Trump country and brought back good news.
The fascists aren’t here. The sky isn’t falling. Trump hasn’t injected a strain of moral contagion into our bloodstream that nothing will ever expunge.
He wasn’t elected by racists and rednecks in a reaction against our first black president, but by former Democratic voters in the upper Midwest, in counties that had voted Democratic for president since time immemorial, and indeed had voted for Obama himself.
“Nationally, about 100 counties voted Democratic in at least five consecutive presidential elections, and then flipped to Trump,” he tells us, selecting a cluster of four dozen in four different states — Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa — 24 of which had voted for Democrats in at least seven straight president elections, all of which had shifted, swinging 15, 20, 30, and 40 points toward the Republicans between 2012 and 2016.
The cause wasn’t racism, sexism, or fear of the “other,” but economic decline. Balz cites among other examples “the night in 2001 when Northwestern Steel and Wire, which employed more than 4500 workers” shut down; “a plant in Knox County that had gone to Mexico … jobs lost through multiple company closings;” the loss of a factory “that was the lifeblood of a town.”
No one in either party had paid much attention. Trump’s voters had reasons to vote for the one man in the past 30 years who seemed to know or to care what had happened, which makes this less a nihilistic response than a loud cry for help from an unserved demographic. And those backers are not all they seem.
While some of Trump’s base has an alt-right complexion, that was never enough to win the election, and it couldn’t have gone all that far on its own. It had to be helped by what Balz calls the “Trump Triers,” those under stress who took a flier of sorts on the “nonpolitician;” but are now having doubts of their own.
Their complaints are much the same as those in the Resistance: the tweets, taunts, and tantrums, the attacks on war heroes, the “controversy and shouting”; the chaos and stress. They are disturbed by the fact that Trump hasn’t united his party.
“I find myself drawing back a little … in some respects Trump has been damaging,” Balz quotes one Trump Trier as saying.
“I’d give him a C. I’d give him a B if his approach to people and things was different,” another one said.
“I don’t think he’s grown,” said a third.
They worry “that those who voted for Trump are … viewed by others as being like Trump,” they admitted. They are behind him, but they think he should change.
Far from conquering the country at large, Trumpism is being rejected by many Trump voters, even as they tentatively continue supporting the things they believe he has done. Right now, the Trump Triers hold the balance of power, between the Trumpists who prefer Trump’s style itself to even his policies, and the Resistance, which, though it abhors his beliefs, find his manners more hideous still.
At any rate, it is still a far cry from the Il Duce sort of mindless obedience the Resistance believed had infected the modern Republican Party. There are good reasons Trump was elected, which have nothing to do with dark forces. The resistance is there, in some of his followers. His effect on the culture will not be long-lasting. The news from the heartland is good.
