There's a great piece by Tucker Carlson* in Politico about the roots of the Trump insurgency:
It turns out the GOP wasn’t simply out of touch with its voters; the party had no idea who its voters were or what they believed. For decades, party leaders and intellectuals imagined that most Republicans were broadly libertarian on economics and basically neoconservative on foreign policy. That may sound absurd now, after Trump has attacked nearly the entire Republican catechism (he savaged the Iraq War and hedge fund managers in the same debate) and been greatly rewarded for it, but that was the assumption the GOP brain trust operated under. They had no way of knowing otherwise. The only Republicans they talked to read the Wall Street Journal too.
On immigration policy, party elders were caught completely by surprise. Even canny operators like Ted Cruz didn’t appreciate the depth of voter anger on the subject. And why would they? If you live in an affluent ZIP code, it’s hard to see a downside to mass low-wage immigration. Your kids don’t go to public school. You don’t take the bus or use the emergency room for health care. No immigrant is competing for your job. (The day Hondurans start getting hired as green energy lobbyists is the day my neighbors become nativists.) Plus, you get cheap servants, and get to feel welcoming and virtuous while paying them less per hour than your kids make at a summer job on Nantucket. It’s all good. [Emphasis added because it made me lol.]
Carlson's essay echoes some of the points made by my boss in these digital pages a few months back. Those in "the radical middle," as Matthew Continetti termed Trump's base, "don’t give a whit about corporate tax reform or TPP or the capital gains rate or the fate of Uber, they make a distinction between deserved benefits like Social Security and Medicare and undeserved ones like welfare and food stamps, their patriotism is real and nationalistic and skeptical of foreign entanglement, they wept on 9/11, they want America to be strong, dominant, confident, the America of their youth, their young adulthood, the America of 40 or 30 or even 20 years ago."
They're the sort of voter that might be moved by a flick like 13 Hours, as I noted in a piece examining the rise of the Trump-Sanders supporters. Mostly, though, these voters care about immigration, about the flouting of our borders and our laws and the insouciance with which their concerns about little things like citizenship and visas and, oh yeah, jobs are treated. Immigration has never been a terribly salient issue for me, but I can understand the appeal of Trump every time I read a story like this one, in which an illegal immigrant from El Salvador says that he and his sister don't "identify ourselves as American" (because it would be "disrespectful to disregard all the values that my home country has taught me"!) but "still thinks he deserves a vote."
That passage made my blood boil. It's one thing for DREAMers to say "hey, I've lived here my whole life, I love America, let me stay." I feel pity for them and understand that they are in a difficult situation. It's another thing for the jackass above to not only discuss being in the country illegally but to also say that he doesn't feel like an American and oh by the way I also think I should get to vote.
He's not my first choice for president (or second or third or even fifth or sixth). But if The Donald pulled that IJR story up at his next rally and announced that his first move as president would be to order the deportation of those two people, I would strongly consider voting for him, disgustingly short fingers or no. And I'm guessing I'm not alone in that regard.
*One of the great tragedies of the journalistic world is that Tucker Carlson writes so infrequently.