Alexander Zaitchik - The Gilded Rage: A Wild Ride Through Donald Trump’s America

Copyright 2016 by Alexander Zaitchik

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Brian Peterson

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-1428-1

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-1430-4

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

For Hayde, Fabiola, and Juanita

The more those elitist eggheads shouted, The Dead Are Walking, the more most real Americans tuned them out.

Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

Do you know so much that you call the slave or the dullfaced ignorant?

Do you suppose you have a right to a good sight and he or she has no right to a sight?

Do you think matter has cohered together from its diffused float, and the soil is on the surface and water runs and vegetation sprouts for you and not for him and her?

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Foreword

T he opinion class in this country has been so wrong for so longblowing it badly on the Iraq War, the crash of 2008, the growing crisis in race relations, the inevitable wisdom of the new global economic order, and nearly every other major issuethat it came as no surprise when these experts also failed to get the significance of the Trump uprising. The media elite initially greeted Trump with glee, as an uproarious ratings and circulation boon, a showman who would soon give way to the next circus act. When instead he pulled off an unfriendly takeover of the Republican Party, the media giddiness turned to fear and loathing. But as the mood of the media elite shifted suddenly from merriment to panic, little light was actually shed on the meaning of Trump. By focusing almost exclusively on the strangely hued candidate himselfand exposing his manifold flaws and eccentricitiesthe media establishment clearly hoped to restore reason in the land. But our professional explainers have once again failed to understand the popular bitterness and rage underlying the Trump phenomenona fury that is directed in no small part at elites like them, and that will continue to burn long after Trump has disappeared from the spotlight.

So it comes as a relief to read independent journalist Alexander Zaitchiks report from Trumpland. As he crisscrossed America, going to the political rallies, bars, and diners where Trump supporters gatheredand sometimes being invited into their homesZaitchik was not setting out to explain these men and women who so confound the political commentators but to listen to them. The Gilded Rage gives these voters a chance not just to spit out a sound bite or two but to express themselves at length. These are the discarded veterans of the endless wars in the Middle East, the blue-collar workers who will never again match the money they made when they were young, the residents of rural hamlets and suburban outposts that are always overlooked by the media radar. They emerge in this book not as bigoted and ignorant caricatures but as people with deeply legitimate grievances and with riveting stories about the underside of the American Dream.

This is the kind of probing and surprising journalism that Hot Books was intended to showcase. Launched in 2015 in partnership with Skyhorse Publishing, Hot Books offers an ongoing series of short, powerful titles on the most burning topics: the fragility of black lives in America ( The Beast Side ), the campus rape crisis ( The Hunting Ground ), the moral and legal challenges presented by post 9/11 US war crimes ( American Nuremberg ), the untold story behind the Edward Snowden case ( Bravehearts ), the dangerous rise of Islamophobia ( Scapegoats ), and the CIAs subversion of the media ( Spooked ), among others. We see Hot Books as part of the great revival that is now starting to spread across America and the world, as long sluggish democracies begin to rouse themselves. These books are meant to provoke and to spark debate. Please spread the worduse them in your book clubs, classes, and social media forums.

Its time to light a fire under this slumbering giant, American democracy. Its time to think new and dangerous thoughts. Welcome to Hot Books.

David Talbot

Hot Books Editorial Director

Introduction

Who Are These People?

T wenty-sixteen has been a disorienting political year for us all. Insurgents stormed both party establishments in primary-season offensives that few saw coming. The Democratic fortress held, but just. The Republican castle burned, and how. A real estate warrior king in orange face paint arose from the east and sacked it, backed by a long-simmering internal revolt. Nobody knows yet what this sacking portends. The party could absorb Donald Trump or deflect him; it could disappear altogether in the rubble of a high-Richter realignment. We do know theres no going back. Months before completing his GOP body count on a May evening in Indiana, Trump had blown the old order and its stale wisdoms sky-high. Bits and globs still rain down across the land, nowhere harder than greater Miami, where they splatter on the political headstones of Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio.

This book is not directly about any of that. Its not about how Donald Trump humiliated the Republican establishment, turned presidential debates into high-stakes roasts, or represents the deathbed gasp of American democracy. Trump is the looming and unifying presence, but this book is not really about him. It is about the everyday Americans who love, support, and believe in Donald Trump, who see him as a savvy patriotic businessman and tough-talking savior, the last hope for reviving the blue-collar middle class and getting America back to being great, a Rorschach-blot adjective many Trump critics read as white, and which many fans read as a place with decent jobs, tight borders, and please stop calling me a fucking racist.

For Trump voters, too, this has been a disorienting year. But theirs is a giddy disorientation. After decades of mounting disaffection with both parties, they cant believe they scaled the castle walls and now have a chance to hang the last Clinton with the guts of the last Bush. Even better, they get to follow a brash celebrity who talks like Andrew Dice Clay and says exactly what they feel and (they hope) means every politically incorrect word: about trade, the vets, Social Security, Mexicans, Muslims, busty broadsabout so many things.