Cartoon by Marian Kamensky

What If Donald Trump Is What America Needed?

The Bulwark: In 2016, Americans were asked to pick their poison.

On the one hand a highly competent, highly qualified mainstream pro-Wall Street pro-corporate candidate who would in most regards hold the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama trajectory—while entirely missing the desperation working Americans were feeling.

On the other hand a corrupt businessman calling bullshit on the entire system, willing to burn everything down to Make America Great Again—meaning give working people back the dignity (and manufacturing jobs) that had been stolen from them by the evil cabal of globalist elites. The fact that he was lying was entirely beside the point for his supporters.

And many Americans were willing to live with his exploiting of resentments and divisions to get anything that wasn’t business as usual.

What was business as usual?

    - Real wages for American workers were exactly the same as they had been in 1980. Upward mobility was a distant memory for most.
    - 49 million Americans experienced food insecurity daily.
    - There were 1.68 million African-American men under state and federal criminal justice supervision, and they were receiving sentences 19 percent longer than white male convicted of the same charges.
    - The purchasing power of the minimum wage had been falling since 1968.
    - 40 percent of Americans could not handle a $400 emergency.
    - 71 percent of young Americans would be unfit to serve in the military if they enlisted because they’d either fail the physical or be unable to read at a sixth-grade level.
    - Our students ranked 26th out of the 34 wealthiest countries in math, despite the fact that we spent the 5th most on education.
    - The prevalence of lobbyists in Washington meant that the percentage of Americans who supported a law had 0 percent bearing on whether that law would pass. Citizens’ impact on public policy was statistically non-significant.
    - Lawmakers in Washington spent 70 percent of their time raising money for reelection. In some Senate races candidates had to raise $45,000 a day, 365 days a year, for 6 years in order to have a shot at winning.
    - America had the most expensive—and infuriating—health care system in the world.

Not good >>>