The Not-So-Deplorable Truth of Donald Trump

Donald Trump will go down as one of the most enigmatic Presidents in American political history. It makes little sense for anyone with endless piles of money, social status, celebrity, and skeletons to bother with politics. For those like Trump, who are seemingly born with a yen for wealth acquisition, the time and money required to win political office is clearly a shabby investment. Trump had the capital to make him a powerful political grifter; to pull the strings of Washington from the shadows without getting his hands dirty, as most self-serving billionaires do.

It’s hard to believe now, but Trump and mainstream media were once members of a mutual admiration society. In retrospect, it is a scathing indictment of mainstream media given the zeal by which Trump has shamelessly, consistently, and freely shared the fatal flaws in his character. Arguably, in high-stakes business Trump’s vices are virtues; in politics they usually spell doom for a would-be candidate — at least for anyone who isn’t Donald Trump.

Obama’s infamous roast of Trump at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner set the stage for Trump’s ascendancy. Before that night, Trump’s political ambitions were likely tempered by the lousy economics in the endeavour. Post-roast, wounded vanity and hubris made his Presidential run a virtual inevitability. No matter how fervently Trump denies it, it’s clear to anyone with a working set of eyes how the switch got flipped that night. As the Washington political establishment lapped up Obama’s scathing parody, seething visions of clawing his way into the Oval Office crystallized in Trump’s mind.

The spiritual side of me felt a little sorry for Trump — Obama unleashed a savage roast. If it had been directed at anyone else, it would have betrayed Obama as uncharacteristically vindictive and mean-spirited. But Trump really had it coming; he spawned and perpetuated the “birther” nonsense, fueling racist speculation about Obama’s citizenship and religious affinities. Despite Trump’s crass attempt to prevent it, Obama got the last laugh: his putatively Kenyan, Muslim black ass was sitting in the White House for a second term, which gave him the mantle he used to pillory Trump to masterful effect.

In his settling of accounts that night, Obama poked a frightful bear with a fragile ego. The rest, as they say, is history. Trump won the White House by touting hateful, misogynistic rants against a candidate vastly superior in every meaningful measure, and his term in office was a farce from start to finish. The travesty of events instigated by him on January 6, 2021 should have been the definitive, pathetic end to Trump’s chapter in U.S. presidential history.

Fast forward to today: Trump is running again and millions of disgruntled and disaffected Americans are willingly lining up for a second helping of President Trump’s three ring circus.

Dismissing Trump for all the reasons most have done over the last several years glosses over the very real political sentiment that exists in America right now; that Trump seems uniquely able to capitalize on. The level of vitriol Trump arouses among Democrats and dissenting Republicans alike betrays a key failing of the American political establishment right now – on both right and left. They are in denial of what Trump’s broad popularity represents: profound disenchantment with America’s political elite. Like Trump, average Americans genuinely feel the Washington establishment has been mocking them, has been garnering laughs at their expense.

The habit of Trump’s opponents has been to demonize Trump the man because it is so easy. Trump represents a sad paradox of America. He is exactly what Americans have been extolling for decades: a shameless, avaricious, a-moral, win-at-all-costs huckster. He’s just not as polished as other hucksters of his ilk – like Ronald Reagan. Those in the political and economic establishment who propped him up for decades but now ridicule and deride him for pandering to the angry mobs of average Americans come off as extremely hypocritical.

It would be an understatement to say I’ve never been a fan of Trump or the toxic masculinity he embodies. But I’m not American either. It’s a perplexing feature of American culture how the Trump persona is so appealing and so successful in that society. In many other societies a man like Trump would have been ridiculed from the start and would have no profile to capitalize on. People who are legitimately successful shouldn’t feel the need to keep saying, every chance they get, “I’m so successful,” but in America this sort of bluster has been the rule, not the exception.

Anyone who seeks office in America must deftly walk a performative tightrope in the political circus that is an American election campaign. Not only must the candidate exude gravitas and competence commensurate with the office they seek, but they must also stack up favourably against a benchmark of countless tropes that define the “Rugged American” ideal; a collage of hollow, feckless bromides that are irrelevant to any thinking-person’s job and dangerous attributes for a leader of the world’s most powerful nation to possess.

That said, I empathize with where the grievances that Trump is politically capitalizing on are coming from: people from all walks of life are brimming with frustration, fear, and uncertainty about their economic and political fortunes. People are working their asses off to get ahead and getting nowhere. They are drowning in debt and sinking further just to pay their bills.

Since the middle of the twentieth century working hard was the way to get ahead. All of a sudden it’s apparently not enough. Regular people want to know why not. They need real answers and real solutions to improve their dire situation. To many of these people, a self-assured strong man who exudes confidence and charm is what they believe they need. It isn’t, but such beliefs are a sad manifestation of human frailty that blossoms in times of crisis and uncertainty. Americans need a person of substance, intelligence, ethical conviction, and compassion; someone who genuinely cares about other people and is committed to the idea of public service as a mission to better the lives of everyone.

In America “liberals” (which in many countries is called the “progressive left”) have been obsessed of late with political correctness; what many folks stuck in the past readily dismiss as “woke” politics. Though these detractors of ethical progress are dead wrong, the liberal obsession with immediately righting all the ethical wrongs of the last several centuries has shifted the focus away from more salient, more immediate political and economic issues that need traction. I firmly stand behind the so-called “woke” ideals of the progressive left. As a person of colour I know too well the ill effects of a WASP culture that has decidedly not been politically correct.

But I am also a political realist. Western societies were purpose built to not churn out individuals with politically moderate views. They intrinsically marginalized “others” and systematized the unconscious white male biases in all its structures, which were oppressive to those on the outside. All true. All of this needs to change. But we have to accept ethical change comes incrementally and doesn’t come through force of political will.

I am also mindful that the scope of democracy isn’t to legislate shifts in morality; to impose the views of one political segment of society over the other. The framers of the American constitution saw to that. They were wary of the fact that, throughout history, political imperatives to induce rapid moral shifts among a population often came on the heels of tyranny. In liberal societies we forget how the law is still a blunt instrument. We are so enamoured of our legal processes and institutions as themselves reflective of “justice” that we fail to see beneath all that juridical veneer is a swinging hammer; one that compels and punishes rather than persuades and forgives; that places people in opposition and conflict rather than harmony and compromise. The law too often prescribes winners and losers.

All that is to say, legislating a moral shift in the collective consciousness isn’t the job of politicians or blunt legal instruments. Moral and ethical progress isn’t top down, it is bottom up. The fact American elections become perennially bogged down in divisive moral debates is highly suspicious. There is a clear benefactor from the pointless political stalemates such discourse instills: the rich grifters pulling the strings. The strings they pull are on both sides of the house, Republican and Democrat alike.

On the other side, diminishing all the things that give average Americans comfort in the face of their fears and worries – God, Guns, and love of country – has been a sport of American liberals in recent decades. Republicans have lapped up countless electoral victories playing on this cultural divide. Liberals too readily make average Americans feel deplorable for being who they are; the person who, until very recently, American culture shaped them to be.

Liberals are mocking average American values and it isn’t winning them elections anywhere. They don’t have to pander to or affirm the knee-jerk chauvinism as Republicans have been cynically doing for decades. But they do need to speak to Americans where they are and stick to discussions of economic policies to improve their lives – whether they’re rednecks or tree huggers. They have to stop calling average Americans “deplorable”; those who were educated and acculturated in a curriculum written by elites, and instilled with misogynist, atavistic, chauvinist, white supremacist values American Democrats and Republicans venerated for decades.

It’s not the average American’s fault for drinking the only Kool Aid available. It’s the fault of political elites – Democrat and Republican – for valourizing this toxic cultural ideal to politically capitalize on it. They stumped to secure economic and political power and then did nothing substantive for the regular Americans who put their faith in them. American Democrats have to stop allowing themselves to get drawn into the “cultural divide” narrative, because they lose average American voters every time.

Only Trump is telling average Americans they’re okay for being who they are and having the fears and aspirations they have. Whether Trump really believes what comes out of his mouth is anyone’s guess. He’s always known how to ingratiate himself with the crowd, and in this case he does so by speaking the language of everyday people. He doesn’t lecture them; he doesn’t wag his finger at them for being regular folks with simple worldviews. On top of that, and unlike other Republicans before him, he’s also attacking the heart of the political establishment that has screwed working Americans for decades; that laughed at him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and laughs at regular working folks every day.

Here’s the truth: The system that is screwing over most Americans – that has disenfranchised white and blue collar working class men, women, LGBTQ, white, black, Muslim, Christian, Jew, American and immigrant alike – is crony capitalism. The Corporation. The answer to this isn’t Stalinism or communism. The answer lies in more democracy and real capitalism, not more of the robber baron capitalist façade that has beset the American economy in varying degrees since its inception.

Today, America barely counts as a true capitalist country. Its economy is profoundly, almost irrevocably dominated by oligarchs and monopolists who spend a significant amount of economic and political capital undermining free and fair economic markets to fatten their bottom line. And it has worked. They have concentrated far too much of America’s extraordinary, productive economic capacity in fewer hands. At the same time, America is very close to jumping off a cliff away from democracy into the abyss of something more sinister as citizens are forced to endure the consequences of the political collapse engineered by Corporate interests whose zealous pursuit of their economic agenda was at the expense of its democratic institutions.

For decades America’s democracy and all the institutions that safeguarded it, has been slowly eroded by a cabal of extremely powerful economic actors: Corporations. The “Corporation” here refers to business entities that make hundreds of millions or billions in revenue annually. These are enterprises whose owners and executives are far removed from the day to day concerns or cares of average Americans.

The PR campaigns launched by these Corporations has been successful at selling the delusion among small and medium-sized businesses that their interests are the same, which is a total fiction that any small business owner ought to see through. Make no mistake: the Corporations view the opening of markets and widening of democracy as antithetical to their economic interests. They use their extraordinary economic power to gain political power, which they then use to undermine the competitiveness of economic markets (making it harder for small and medium sized business to prosper) and undermine democratic initiatives they deem a threat to their long term economic interests.

In a functional democracy, where politicians are not in the pockets of Corporations, such political agents do not represent a huge threat. Political actors and political institutions are robust against these fascist impulses. There are built in mechanisms to assert the primacy of broad political concerns above all else; that promote legislation benefitting a broad majority of interests. As a Canadian I may be biased in saying this, but this is one area where the Parliamentary system, grounded in “big tent” party politics, enforces legislative virtues that are lacking in a Republican system like the US. The prerogative of party cohesion in Parliamentary systems is severely absent in the U.S – there is less of a stick to prevent individual legislators being lured away from supporting the broad interests their party represents for sake of self interest.

America isn’t a functional democracy and everybody knows it. It has been corrupted and perverted, in terms of who its political actors serve, by Big Money. Average Americans know it, or rather they feel it in the increasing struggle of their daily lives, which legislators repeatedly ignore or worsen with their political choices. Citizens are rightly angry about it. Their concerns have been ignored for decades because they aren’t the ones funding election campaigns or Political Action Committees that buy influence with legislators. As a result, regular working citizens are getting poorer and struggling more than their Boomer parents, who were lucky to live in a time when legislators still governed mostly with their interests in mind. Today’s unlucky throngs of working Americans are the ones who, despite their hard work, are falling further behind because Washington abandoned them and their interests decades ago when they started pandering to Corporate interests.

The problem is Democrats are calling Regular Joe and Jane deplorable because they aren’t politically correct, because they love their Christian God, they love their country, they are in the dark about the historical legacy of slavery, and are wary of newcomers who don’t fit the American cultural mold. They are lampooning regular Americans for being acculturated as the they were meant to – until very, very recently. In so doing, Democrats are subtly suggesting most of America’s problems lie squarely at the hands of working folks and their outdated worldviews. It’s a huge political blunder. Legislating a shift in outlook is not within the ambit of politicians in Washington. The framers of America’s constitution saw to that as well. No matter, the Corporations have paid to give Democrat and Republican politicians their speaking points, and they tout the message to voters that cultural wars are the most pressing of all political issues in America right now. This narrative is a complete fiction and any self-respecting American legislator knows it.

The Corporations have seen to it that cultural wars are the focus of every election. They have reduced the discussion about education, health, and welfare to tropes: “we can’t afford it”, “The Government” can’t be trusted to deliver it, and the Corporations will provide everything Americans need. They’ve masterfully shifted the focus of Americans’ political ire away from them, the real architects everyone’s increasingly dire economic circumstances, and pit them against each other for their differing worldviews. They’ve created and perpetuated the political sleight of hand that has Americans chasing their tails in a culture war that has embroiled the country since Ronald Reagan and his Corporate stooges and political fixers unleashed it.

Today, Democrats and Republicans alike tacitly agree that “The Government” is bad and the Corporation is good. Instead of debating policies that make the lives of working people better, Americans supporting either party argue about guns and abortion, Christianity and identity politics, black versus white (literally and figuratively). Every election campaign is a side show that does nothing to curtail the continuing theft of the proceeds of America’s extraordinary economic productivity by Corporate interests. It’s a fraudulent waste of the hard work of white collar, blue collar, small business owners, and public sector Americans.

No matter who gets elected, the policies and programs enacted will continue to serve the Corporation and screw most average Americans. The Corporation will ensure their politicians legislate against mimimim wages and call it “Right to Work”. They will divert people’s attention away from the fact that the Corporation would make only two percent less net profit by increasing everyone’s wages twenty per cent.

The Corporations agitate for policies that take money from the hundreds of millions of Americans’ pockets and put it into the pockets of the few hundred at the helm of the Corporations. They also direct their lackey politicians to legislate tax subsidies that increase Corporate profit margins and bleed the Treasury of much needed revenue. This erodes the ability of “The Government” to make everyone’s increasingly economically imperilled life easier. There is no money left to fund programs like post secondary education, universal day care, and universal health care, programs that are desperately needed because of the gross economic disparities perpetuated by the Corporation. The Corporations dispatch their political spokespersons perpetuate the myth that this is all “The Government’s” fault.

This is only partly true. True, “The Government” has done less and less for the people but this is at the behest of the Corporations who paid off the politicians to enact policies ensuring this would be the case. The Corporations and their elected shills are the problem. Curtail the Corporations and the problem disappears because the government becomes, once again, responsive to the people.

In his twisted way, Trump and some of his spineless, obsequious patsies in the Republican Party are the only politicians talking about this ugly truth. Politicians in both parties have been on the Corporate payroll for decades. Make no mistake, Trump and his Republican ilk don’t really care and are not going to do anything to change this reality when they get elected, but at least they’re speaking the language that validates the anger felt by so many Americans. They aren’t vilifying Regular Joe and Jane for not being Harvard educated and liberal-minded – they are capitalizing on the Democrat party’s elitist bent, which comes off as contempt for wide swaths of real Americans.

I hate to admit it, but political correctness matters little when it comes time to legislating tax and other policies that serve every American, whether they’re a redneck racist or misogynist or whether they identify as black and LGBTQ. Corporations were the ones who got American political discourse in this rut and Trump, the Presidential candidate, is talking to regular people about this on their terms. He’s not making them feel like assholes because they aren’t “woke”. Being “woke” on gender politics is irrelevant to discussions of tax policy fairness and the provision of health care, social security, and education.

Over the past several decades, Corporations used their economic power to do two crucial things that turned the tables in their favour to the detriment of everyone else in America. First, they influence-peddled their way into the hearts and minds of legislators. Almost every American legislator – save for a select few – is in the pocket of some corporation (or a corporate-funded PAC). Co-opted politicians seized control of their party’s political agenda; they perpetuated the political rhetoric that served corporate interests; they convinced fellow citizens their interests and Corporate interests were the same. Second, the Corporations used their economic clout to erode, or redirect, what was once a very conspicuous feature of American political culture: a deep scepticism of entrenched power structures. The first American settlers and their system of democracy was rooted in a profound revulsion for systems of elitism, like the Church and Monarchy, which curtailed the political freedoms and economic opportunities enjoyed by the widest berth of citizens.

The Corporations and their paid political shills in both parties seized on that scepticism, twisted it, and duped the American people into believing Corporations were the good guys; that they weren’t key players in American power dynamics; that “The Government” was the “power” and by that token were the bad guys. Somehow, they convinced Americans they were more free and had more opportunities if governments divested from their lives, subsidized Corporations (with preferential tax policies), allowed them to launder Corporate profits away from the economy where they made them, pay people less for producing more economic value, and make a smaller cadre of owners more wealthy than everyone else. In this perverse version of American democracy, the Corporations – who aren’t people, don’t vote, and are legally and economically shielded from the implications of their actions – are the paragons of American virtue while “The Government” are the powerful villains.

America began this descent decades ago; since President Reagan and his cabal of Corporatists seized on a moment of immense prosperity in America’s history and began gutting systems of democracy that were paramount to its survival. At the time, most Americans, whether Harvard educated or not, were affluent enough to be immune from the ill effects of the Government’s systematic retreat from their lives; they were not so politically disenfranchised in relation to the Corporations. Back then, average Americans had money and they had power. In the eighties this all changed: the Corporations had their man Reagan who went along with their plans to swing the balance of political power firmly in favour of Corporations.

The irony isn’t lost on me: “The Government” has been, since the eighties, in the pockets of the Corporations. They have been doing their bidding. There is no discussing “The Government” without first discussing the Corporate agenda that gives them their marching orders. If there is disenchantment with government there MUST BE disenchantment with Corporations. In America, for the last several decades Corporate interests and government are far more closely intertwined than they should be. There should public outrage for both. But thanks to savvy Corporate PR spokespersons (that is, the politicians whose electoral victories they funded) most Americans see only one side of the problem: “The Government”.

The focus of legislators has been to enact policies, laws, and programs that do not, in any way, threaten Corporate interests. The result is obvious to any political scientist (like me); a narrowing of political priorities that are safe for government to pursue. It has led to the gradual disengagement of government from the life of the average American. No surprise, the current cultural narrative is that this is a good thing. This was a mindset spoon fed to regular Americans by politicians and political parties paid for by Corporations.

Today, most Americans have less money in their pockets and, by that token, far less political power. For decades, Washington legislated for Corporate America and enshrined a political culture of utter contempt for the economic cares and concerns of everyday working Americans. Americans are now feeling the effects of that posture in their daily lives. Prices for staples have gone up exponentially as their wages and living standards have stagnated.

At the same time, Corporate profits and executive salaries exploded. That was no accident and it wasn’t because “hidden market forces” made it so. It wasn’t because Corporations and Corporate executives were economic geniuses, as the New American Fable tells it (the one written by the Corporations and their PACs). The Corporate windfall at the expense of regular Americans was a direct result of intentional government policies that produced these grossly inequitable outcomes. Monetarism, deregulation, and countless other tropes touted in the chimerical logic of “trickle down economics” brought this about. Washington gave the Corporations a legislative leg-up and kicked the ladder out from under the economic ascent of hundreds of millions of regular, working Americans.

Americans are rightfully angry about this. They’re looking for a political candidate who validates their anger and purports to offer solutions. Trump appears to be speaking to them. He’s focusing on their fears rather than their cultural attitudes (which reflect exactly what Americans were taught). He’s not calling them deplorable, he’s affirming their fears and speaking their language without offering them anything of substance politically, which is, sadly, all it takes to win many of them over.

To their detriment, Trump’s detractors – Democrats and Republican – because they are bought by the Corporations, are unwilling to speak truth to Americans to win their vote. They have both been drawn into the logic – instilled by political hacks stumping for Corporate interests – of the “culture wars” framed by Republicans. In that narrow framework, candidates avoid talking about how to make real, lasting, positive changes in the every day life of average Americans. Instead they engage in attacks of the values held by many regular working people, which seem like an attack on their values as Americans.

The truth is, America isn’t really a capitalist country. For decades – since FDR – it’s been a paragon of social democracy, a fact that made America the most economically prosperous and productive nation in the world. It’s not really a Christian country either. The framers of the constitution feared the tyrannical potential of power and organized religion; their ancestors fled it and they made damn sure to curtail its possibility in the new Republic. Despite that, in the twenty first century the constitutional underpinnings of America have been distorted and perverted by Republican wedge politics spawned in the eighties; one that has fueled red herring religion-inspired debates about abortion, gender issues, sexual orientation, and so forth. It’s infuriating. De Tocqueville must be turning in his grave. Every election gets side tracked by this Republican chicanery and the economic and political fortunes of average Americans continues its decline.

America is a Corporate state today and may very well be, if things continue this way, a fascist state in the future. Average Americans need a candidate who is willing to say that in bold terms, without making them feel like assholes because they aren’t tripping over themselves to participate in the local pride parade. Deep down, Americans are smart enough to know it isn’t “socialist” to say working people deserve more money in their pocket for their hard work; that quality health care isn’t inaccessible to them; that their kids should not be barred from getting the education and skills they need to secure their future. The Corporations made everyone believe these things were impossible and blamed “The Government” for making it so. It was always bullshit, and Americans are smart enough to know this – but they won’t hear that message if you’re calling them, or the kind of guy who appeals to them “deplorable”.

Right now, Trump seems to understand this, and it is translating into electoral support. It’s time his political opponents understood it too. The future of American democracy absolutely depends on someone’s, anyone’s ability to rise in American politics and embrace Regular Joe and Jane as they are – as America made them out to be – and tell them straight up the Corporation and “The Government” they bought screwed them over. Only certain fringe elements around the Trump camp are properly diagnosing this problem (but then proceeding to offer off the wall solutions).

The solution to America’s problems requires legislators who are genuinely committed to protecting the sanctity of American democratic institutions; who want Congress to reflect and legislate not just for Corporate interests, but for the interests of the broadest spectrum of Americans – irrespective of their religion, creed, sexual orientation, or outlook. The strength of American democracy does not hinge on whether the average American’s worldview aligns with those of the elites they are preternaturally inclined to mistrust. When the majority of Americans from all walks of life feel economically secure, when they are confident their efforts will secure a bright future, they will be more open to confronting the changes demanded by social justice.

Right now, average working Americans are focused on the immediate future; on what’s right around the corner for themselves and their families. Their chief political concern is economic justice; not social justice. They don’t need a politician telling them how to think about issues that don’t pertain to keeping their day to day lives afloat. They need a politician to tell them what they’re going to do to restore economic justice to their lives; to make it so they get ahead from all their hard work. Trump isn’t doing that, but he is winning many Americans over because he is speaking directly to their day to day fears; he’s not telling them they need to care about issues that don’t immediately affect them.

American liberals need to get back to basics; they need to re-gain the ear of average Americans by avoiding Republican provocations that drag them into the nonsensical “culture war” debates of the past decades. When they’ve stopped insulting average people for their worldviews, liberals can win them over with policies that restore economic justice to everyone; that will make the lives of working people better – whether they’re waving a confederate or a rainbow flag. Even if their values differ widely, their basic needs and interests are the same. The solution to reverse the trend of their declining economic fortunes is the same: mandating “The Government” to focus on the priorities of delivering more and better public goods and services for everyone’s benefit. This must absolutely begin with policies to reverse the legalization of capital flight from the American economy perpetuated by Corporations over the last several decades. When that ceases, the money to pay for programs that directly benefit working people won’t require an increase in their income taxes.

This is just one example of policies aimed at putting regular Americans first; that don’t prioritize the agenda of increasing the fortunes of American aristocrats from the Corporate class, who use their wealth to instil religious devotion in Americans for the same ends as the old aristocracy in Europe – to secure the acquiescence of the masses to their iron grip on all of society’s money and political power. America’s original settlers – the Quakers – would be appalled at the corruption of religion by Corporate political agendas, by the preponderance of religious charlatans who preach the will of a Corporate God to their flocks, rendering scores of Americans unconscious to the marriage of convenience between evangelicals and Corporations.

The folklore of America’s “Christian Conservatism” was written by Ronald Reagan’s henchmen in the eighties, disseminated by the Corporations, and abetted by their political and so-called “spiritual” minions ever since. According to this fable, white, hard working, God-fearing, gun-loving, patriotic Americans share a common fate and a common foe with the Corporate Courtesans – the “others” who look, speak and, worst of all, pray to a different God (or none at all). It’s a total fraud committed on regular Americans, and it has been brutally effective in convincing them to support, as an act of faith, a Corporate agenda to rob them of their economic and political power.

American liberals need to focus their political discourse on the ethical failings of the thieves, not the cultural affinities of the victims: everyday, regular Americans. Only when liberals are able to hold the political attention of average Americans can they can hope to win a clear mandate to put those interests ahead of the Corporation’s. Only then will Americans see the end of the Corporate gravy train that took trillions of dollars out of their pockets. That money could have been used to make the lives of working people better; could have paid for their health care, education and social security.

Instead, the Corporations used the money to buy the political influence that helps them undermine a fair, well-functioning capitalist economy; that helped them create monopolies, fix high prices and freeze low wages, legislate unfair tax policies, procure government subsidies, and legalize the laundering of the grotesque profits attributed to all that market fixing behaviour to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. The anger Americans feel about this isn’t deplorable, and Trump is capitalizing on that truth. The problem is, Americans need a real leader who doesn’t just stoke their anger for the votes needed to win elections, as Trump did his first time in office. Americans need a leader with real convictions who really cares about regular Americans; who will summon that righteous anger into Washington, use it to take back the power from Corporations, and legislate in ways that improve their fortunes.