The Real Americans

A sobering post from Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo, one how Trump has landed the working class vote:

Don't go looking to Matt Taibbi for hope this Labor Day. Taibbi's jaundiced eye is particularly yellow in his examination of the cult surrounding the acting president. "The average American likes meat, sports, money, porn, cars, cartoons, and shopping," he writes at Rolling Stone. Democrats need to worry their 2020 pitch is relentlessly negative about all that.

What makes MAGA cultists love their hero is not his absent appeals to their better selves. Rather, Trumpism means never having to say you're sorry for being like him:

Ronald Reagan once took working-class voters away from Democrats by offering permission to be proud of the flag. Trump offers permission to occupy the statistical American mean: out of shape, suffering from gas, poorly read, anti-intellectual, treasuring things above meaning, and hiding an awful credit history.

It's a pretty depressing picture, and veers awfully close to stereotype, but then, Trump himself is a stereotype. (Stray thought: Considering his notable lack of success as a "businessman", is it any wonder that his administration is occupied by losers?)

However, there's a bit of uplift at the end:

Meanwhile, 94-year-old Jimmy Carter is back to building homes for Habitat for Humanity after hip surgery in the spring. The former president and his wife Rosalynn Carter head to Nashville, Tennessee in October to help build 21 new homes.

In MAGA America, because people are not selling merchandise emblazoned with his face or rude taunts, that makes Carter a loser. But in Jackson Mississippi, Habitat and $1,000 a month, no strings attached from a local guaranteed-income pilot project — Springboard to Opportunities — are transforming Cheryl Gray's life:

Gray’s relationship with money changed dramatically. She used to want to put her children in the hottest clothes to prove that she was providing for them, but now saw the value of visiting the clearance racks. She paid off $4,000 in credit card debt. She found an $11-an-hour teaching job at a preschool and another part-time job, so she could save more money. As her new bank account grew from zero to $1,000 to $2,000, she began looking to leave the projects.

And she's sending $60 a week for her children's tutoring.

Sullivan notes that "You won't hear that celebrated at a Trump rally."

The irony is palpable: Cheryl Gray is the icon, so beloved of conservatives, of the American lifting herself by her bootstraps -- she's the real American the right has worshipped -- until Trump. But Sullivan's right: you won't hear them cheering her on any time soon, or Carter, for that matter.

Maybe that stray thought wasn't so stray after all: Trump's cultists are really just a bunch of losers.