Making sense of the Trump phenomenon

Watching the Republican establishment running in circles over their worries about the spectacle that is Donald Trump has literally triggered a spasm of schadenfreude.  The Democrats are predicting the collapse of his campaign and a cakewalk for their candidate—presumably Hillary Clinton.  The Stop Trump movement is pulling out all the stops—including physical disruption of campaign events.

Most interestingly, none of the attacks on Trump seem to have inflicted any damage to his growing political support.  Considering that Howard Dean's presidential ambitions were derailed by repeatedly running his joyous victory shout, one might predict that the barrage of professionally-produced negative ads run against Trump in Florida should have blown him out of the water.  Instead, his polling numbers went up with each new ad drop and he won the Florida primary going away.

Since the professional political pundits seem to have no real explanation for such loyalty beyond their slander of racism, we should probably jump in here with a good round of institutional analysis.

  1. Producers vs Predators.  Once upon a time, the Republican party was a party of Producers.  My mother's side of the family were essentially social democrats with one exception—some of her cousins ran a machine shop in Minneapolis and they were loyal, lifetime Republicans.  My guess is that this strain still exists even after more than 40 years of banksters setting the Republican agenda.  Romney was a bankster and the Producer Republicans hated him.  Trump has stuck his neck out to build something—risking his personal fortune along the way. So even though few write political commentaries about Producers vs Predators, Trump's following seems to have an instinctive feel for these matters.
  2. Producer-politicians are usually pretty clumsy politically.  They usually run afoul of some sort of political correctness.  But as Trump has discovered, his following is not impressed by the arguments of political correctness.
  3. The enforcers of political correctness are merely a slice of the Leisure Class who want to rule by manners.  This method is extremely effective for separating the insiders from the rabble.  And so the Trump-bashers take great joy in pointing out that many of those voting for him are poor and poorly educated.  The Producers would point out that one can lack formal educational credentials and still be highly skilled.  They would also point out that before the massive de-industrialization of USA, they were NOT poor either.
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