Trump and Noonan, a match made in heaven
by digby
On the trail today Donald Trump praised Peggy Noonan's latest column. He felt it really hit the nail on the head. It acknowledges that he's the likely nominee and explains why that is: the country is divided between the "protected" and the "unprotected". The protected are those who don't fell their lives in in danger. The unprotected are those who hate immigrants:
The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.
One issue obviously roiling the U.S. and western Europe is immigration. It is THE issue of the moment, a real and concrete one but also a symbolic one: It stands for all the distance between governments and their citizens.
It is of course the issue that made Donald Trump...
If you are an unprotected American — one with limited resources and negligible access to power — you have absorbed some lessons from the past 20 years' experience of illegal immigration. You know the Democrats won’t protect you and the Republicans won’t help you. Both parties refused to control the border. The Republicans were afraid of being called illiberal, racist, of losing a demographic for a generation. The Democrats wanted to keep the issue alive to use it as a wedge against the Republicans and to establish themselves as owners of the Hispanic vote.
Many Americans suffered from illegal immigration — its impact on labor markets, financial costs, crime, the sense that the rule of law was collapsing. But the protected did fine — more workers at lower wages. No effect of illegal immigration was likely to hurt them personally.
It was good for the protected. But the unprotected watched and saw. They realized the protected were not looking out for them, and they inferred that they were not looking out for the country, either.
The unprotected came to think they owed the establishment — another word for the protected — nothing, no particular loyalty, no old allegiance.
Mr. Trump came from that.
[...]
What marks this political moment, in Europe and the U.S., is the rise of the unprotected. It is the rise of people who don’t have all that much against those who’ve been given many blessings and seem to believe they have them not because they’re fortunate but because they’re better.
You see the dynamic in many spheres. In Hollywood, as we still call it, where they make our rough culture, they are careful to protect their own children from its ill effects. In places with failing schools, they choose not to help them through the school liberation movement — charter schools, choice, etc. — because they fear to go up against the most reactionary professional group in America, the teachers unions. They let the public schools flounder. But their children go to the best private schools.
First, the idea that "Hollywood" is among the elite institutions that doesn't protect the people from its pernicious effects is a little bit much when you're talking about a Reality TV star named Donald Trump whose starring role is someone who ruthlessly fires people on television. I'm going to guess that his Hollywood celebrity is one of the things they like best about him. And yes, kindergarten teachers are destroying everything we hold dear, we know that. Both of those things are standard issue right wing orthodoxy, neither of which have anything at all to do with Trump.
Immigration though --- yes she is correct about that. It's the central promise of his campaign. Except, of course, that they haven't actually taken much of anything from American workers and they aren't a threat to anything except the notion that we should have crops rotting in our fields.
But these Trump fans do feel threatened by lies and fear-mongering from white wingnuts about crime, destruction of our "culture", and the belief that immigrants are stealing government benefits from deserving Real Americans:
[Liberals] like this mass immigration of peasant cultures to America but it shows they really don’t care that much about the war on women.Normal people, whether that’s PC or not, recognize that we have in amazingly successful culture, thus we have a successful country. That’s why so many people want to come here but if we dump millions upon millions of people from backward cultures, as different from ours as possible, incredibly poor. Not only are you getting just a shocking war on women but — why do the democrats want it? — because post-1970 immigrants are voting 8 to 2 for the democrats and nothing Republicans do is going to change that. In addition, specifically with the Hispanic vote, which you mentioned, only Democrats and the RNC seem to think all brown people are are alike.
That's Ann Coulter. Here's the "protector" Trump:
When do we beat Mexico at the border? They're laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they're killing us economically.
The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else's problems.
Thank you. It's true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we're getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They're sending us not the right people.
It's coming from more than Mexico. It's coming from all over South and Latin America, and it's coming probably, probably, from the Middle East. But we don't know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don't know what's happening. And it's got to stop and it's got to stop fast.
This is how he put it in his 2011 book called "Time to Get Tough"
“I actually have a theory that Mexico is sending their absolute worst, possibly including prisoners, in order for us to bear the cost, both financial and social. This would account for the fact that there is so much violence and crime.”
To the extent this feeling of being "unprotected" from immigrants is real, it's about xenophobic bullshit peddled by cynical conservatives looking for a hook.
