The last time Donald Trump was president, he travelled to Youngstown, Ohio, among the most depressed of America’s rust belt cities, and promised voters the impossible.
The high-paying steel, railroad and car industry jobs that once made Youngstown a hard-living, hard-drinking blue-collar boom town were coming back, he said. “Don’t move. Don’t sell your house,” he crowed to a rapturous crowd in 2017. “We’re going to fill up those factories – or rip ”em down and build brand new ones”.
None of that happened. Indeed, within 18 months, General Motors (GM) announced that it was suspending operations at its one remaining manufacturing plant outside Youngstown, throwing 5,000 jobs into jeopardy in a community with little else to cling to. Trump’s reaction was to say the closure didn’t matter, because the jobs would be replaced “in, like, two minutes”.
That, too, did not happen. People moved away, marriages broke down, depression soared and, locals say, a handful of people took their own lives.
“The Democrats and the Republicans are all a den of crooks. Only one side lies about being crooks, and one doesn’t. If you’re going to be a crook, I’d rather know it than be lied to.”
Yeah, the electorate also punished Carter for being straight with Americans about oil dependence and energy security. And instead of following the path of energy transition, they went with Reagan who promised Americans everything while undermining the middle class.
A lot of voters are basically like children that want to be lied to.
Exactly this. Trump won both times by lying about helping the working class. So did Obama. Promise Americans that you care about the working class and will help them, and the “swing voter” dumbasses are more likely to vote for you regardless of your past record.
This is a great analogy for people to think about: we’re all recognizing Carter as one of the great ones, someone who lived a life of helping people, someone whose heart was always in the right place, someone with a higher sense of morals and ethics than most of todays politicians. All of that’s true, but it’s also true he was voted out of a second term. He told some uncomfortable truths, he was not photogenic, he did not just say what people wanted to hear. And we voted him out. Hindsight makes it easy to see that we voted for the face-eating leopard party all along