How Donald Trump Courted White Americans to Victory
It was June 26, 2015, 10 days after the mogul and showman had announced his bid for president and just after I’d written a piece for Newsweek that my editor had given the alliterative headline “Donald Trump: The Billionaire for Blue-Collars.” In it, I’d argued that although the media and most Republicans were dismissing Donald Trump’s chances of winning that party’s nomination, his opposition to multilateral free trade agreements and demands for much tighter immigration restrictions made him a perfect fit for the white working-class men who now made up a large share of the Republican electorate. I also noted that Trump broke with Republican orthodoxy by adamantly insisting he would never cut Social Security and Medicare—another position that put him more in line with working-class white voters.
“I thought that piece was great,” Trump said over the phone from his office at Trump Tower, then digressing in Trumpian fashion to let me know he’d been on the cover of before. (“I always loved the magazine,” he said.) I was a little surprised by his enthusiasm, since I had accused him of “bloviating,” among other things, and I’d cringed a bit as well, as any reporter does when the subject of a piece seems too happy. Later, I learned that he refers to
