The first time I got an idea that former President Donald Trump was popular among Hispanic males, it was 2018 and I was working as a dishwasher. I had spent most of my life as a journalist, but as a political conservative, the jobs in the field outside of freelancing were scarce. So I washed dishes, did elder care, and worked at Home Depot — all odd jobs. It was at these jobs that I met real people.
Every profession has periods of tutoring to sharpen skills. Professional athletes practice in the offseason, studying strategy and doing drills to master the fundamentals. Airline pilots have to take tests to make sure their senses stay sharp. Doctors bone up on the latest illnesses and their treatments.
But journalists are required to take no such training — to give any kind of accounting that they are engaged in the real world. As a result, they tend to isolate among similar types, hanging out at the same New York and Washington parties or network green rooms, never leaving the small radius of their beat. They lose touch with the people they claim to cover. Their coverage becomes a tape loop, repeating the same talking points for hours on end. It becomes unreadable.
The jobs I’ve had have been good for my journalism. It was while washing dishes at a bakery in 2018 that I met a young Hispanic man. He used to cruise past me in the kitchen, give a big thumbs up, and say “Go Trump!” He explained that Trump didn’t take any garbage, had a beautiful wife, and had built a major empire.
This was two years before the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other places ran think pieces about why Latino males are part of Trump’s base. Hispanics, the journalists complained, saw the president as “unapologetic and the symbol of an economic success story,” according to the New York Times. That was old news to me — I was seeing it at work long before the New York Times.
And this isn’t even always a Left-Right thing. There are plenty of conservative pundits who have clean fingernails.
Journalists can get jobs working with real people. They can work manual labor part time or for a few months over the holidays. A job in a restaurant kitchen. Or at a home improvement retailer or hardware store. Maybe a steel mill or a coal mine or in a construction crew or nursing home. Any of those gigs could reintroduce journalists to the people they claim to cover. It also might remind them of the concept of humility.
I’ve committed much of my career to journalism. But the combination of my turn toward conservatism and the decimation by the digital revolution on media jobs meant that I always had to keep a foot in the working class. I’ve worked in mulch pits and waited tables. It was a way to make a few extra dollars but also to keep connected to the people of America.
Engaging with the world doesn’t always have to require manual labor — it can be something fun. A couple of years ago, for example, a venerable conservative newspaper sent me to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, a favorite spot of President Joe Biden. I did that story, but while attempting to surf, I found a fascinating character, a DUI lawyer who helps alcoholics get sober in Alcoholics Anonymous and who is also a daily surfer. This guy is a real American helping others while dispensing sage life advice and riding the dawn waves. My editor, a conservative, was not happy. Where was the politics? He could not conceive that I wanted to write about real people.
His attitude is why journalism is in such trouble. When I started in the profession in the 1980s, I would often be given assignments to write about something I knew little about — a radical teacher, a swing band, a legendary black sportswriter. You were forced to interact with strange new people and unfamiliar surroundings. You didn’t live in the romper room of Capitol Hill.
If journalists spent any time with working people, they would realize certain things very quickly. The first is that most people are not race (or Trump) obsessives the way Hollywood and the media are. I once worked in a large home improvement store, and my co-workers were from Africa, Ireland, Mexico, and the Middle East. We were all focused on various tasks and made friends with one another easily, usually bonding in the break room over which professional sport was playing on TV. People did care about politics, but it was nowhere near the extent of the wall-to-wall liberal obsessives on CNN and in the New York Times and Washington Post.
Liberals dependent on a crisis culture (BREAKING NEWS!) to give them things to do may not like to hear it, but the American experiment is working fine. We all respect one another. Now leave us alone.
Also: Most working people have a visceral and authentic distrust of political and social coercion. We dislike politicians, celebrities, and professors raising our taxes. We don’t want to be lectured on whether a man can become a woman, that police are racists, or that illegal immigration is not a problem. It’s an often-overlooked irony of history that Poland’s Solidarity movement, a working-class party, helped topple communism.
A couple of years ago, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins made a fuss when the Trump administration tried to move her seat to the back of the White House press room. If she, CNN, or the fourth estate had any hope of relevance again, the seat would have been moved even further back, joining the rest of us at the dishwashing station.
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Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
