Trumpy-The-Clown, Agent Of Change? Nope, Though Much Of The Establishment Doesn't Especially Like Him

I want to go back to today's early morning post-- the one about coming to grips with an unpleasant truth, namely that the candidate of the status quo is, in the current presidential race, significantly less horrible than the candidate who has embraced some kind of change. Trump is trying to pass himself off as an agent of change, wholesale. New Yorkers aren't buying it; New Yorkers know a con man when they see one. But, aside from the self-loathing deplorables who are so miserable in life that they just want the world to end, Trump's fan-base is largely made up of folks in the hinterland who don't recognize a hustler when they see one and are buying into his "what do you have to lose?" rhetoric. Mussolini, Franco and Hitler were all "agents of change." Largely because of the content of the characters of the men, the changes didn't quite work out the way their supporters expected them to.

Yesterday Ken Vogel, writing for Politico pointed out once again that Trump is trying to lure working class whites and Bernie supporters with this false message of change and a twisted, somewhat paranoid version of an establishment conspiracy against him. Vogel reported that a campaign insider acknowledged that Trump's phony populist rhetoric is intended to appeal not just to life's losers-- his base-- but also to college-educated middle-class voters who tell pollsters that they believe there are "two sets of rules-- one for insiders, another for the rest of us." The deplorables may not quite have the brain-power to grok it but there are few better exemplars of the beneficiaries of the two sets of rules than Trump and his revolting family. Like all the issues he tried to filch-- at least superficially-- from Bernie, "Trump’s recent condemnations of the elite pillars of American society-- which the source traced to the influence of Trump’s new campaign executive chairman Steve Bannon and the campaign’s policy director Stephen Miller-- at times echo Sanders closely. During a Thursday rally in Bedford, N.H., Trump called out 'the special interests, the lobbyists and the corrupt corporate media that have rigged the system against everyday Americans, and they’ve rigged it for a long time.'"

In a variation of a line he’s been including in every speech since his shaky performance in Monday’s debate, Trump told a crowd Wednesday afternoon crowd in Council Bluffs, Iowa, that his campaign “is taking on big business and big media and big donors. We’re taking them on for you.”

And, in a Friday evening speech before a raucous crowd in this suburb of Detroit, Trump added that “the wealthy donors, the large corporations and the media executives” are “all part of the same corrupt political establishment. And they nod along when Hillary Clinton slanders you as ‘deplorable’ and ‘irredeemable.’ ”

Taken together, it represents the fullest and most concise expression-- and certainly among the most consistent-- of an evolving class-based appeal from an unlikely messenger.

Not only is Trump a billionaire real estate developer who has spent his adult life consorting with the types of big-shots he’s now spending much of his stump speech disparaging, but he has been ramping up his outreach to wealthy donors down the homestretch. He held closed-press fundraisers at hotels in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Friday evening, and in New York on Thursday.

Trump has even hinted at the irony in his recent speeches, telling the Council Bluffs crowd that the big donors and corporate and media chieftains “go to the same restaurants, they attend the same conferences, they have the same friends and connections, and some of ‘em even like me, I’ll be honest with you, but that doesn’t matter.”

The discordance aside, the campaign official said recent internal polling suggests that the message is resonating “big time,” among both working class and college-educated voters, who see 2016 as a “change election.”

...And Trump called Hillary Clinton “an insider fighting only for herself and her donors. I am an outsider fighting for you. We have a movement like they’ve never seen in this country before.”

I can understand the poor schnooks with 2-digit IQs (God forgive me) falling for this heaping platter of steaming bullshit, but college-educated Bernie fans? I don't think so.

Shiny