Donald Trump, class traitor par excellence

If there is one data point above all that suggests Donald Trump and JD Vance are headed for a resounding victory on Nov. 5, it is this: By a nearly 40-point margin in the polling average, Americans are more inclined to believe the country is currently on the wrong track than the right track. There are other reasons to believe the 45th president is peaking at the best possible time and that dimwitted California commie Kamala Harris is cratering at the worst possible time, but the stubbornness of the right-track/wrong-track polling has surely led to many sleepless nights at Harris-Walz campaign headquarters. It defies common sense for Americans to reelect the vice president from the administration responsible for so much misery. At some level, Democrats surely know this.

But if Trump’s campaign was already on the up and up, his brilliant, pitch-perfect stop to serve hamburgers and French fries last Sunday at a Bucks County, Pennsylvania, McDonald’s might have sealed the deal. The 45th president of the United States ditched his signature suit for a chef’s apron, manning the fryer and dishing out Happy Meals to drive-thru customers. Trump, a longtime McDonald’s aficionado, was affable and came across as genuinely thrilled to be interacting with the fast-food franchise’s employees and customers. The main photo of the visit that went viral, which saw Trump smiling as he waved goodbye to a drive-thru customer, has emerged as this presidential cycle’s second-most iconic image – following only Trump’s mesmerizing raised fist and bloodied face in the aftermath of his brush with death on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Once again, Trump has proven he is the people’s billionaire – someone who, as I wrote for TomKlingenstein.com earlier this year, “may hold ‘elite’ ruling class credentials, but whose hearts, minds, concerns, and general sensibilities are decidedly with the country class.” Trump, who has been an outlier among his fellow wealthy industrialists ever since his nationalist views on trade began to clash many decades ago with the free-trade absolutism of the neoliberal establishment, is the most formidable class traitor in American politics today. And at a time when Americans bewail the state of their republic and bemoan the decadence of their ruling elites, that class-traitor status increasingly looks like a ticket to victory.

Once upon a time, Democrats were the working-class party in America. Those days are long over. At some point between the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama presidencies, the Democratic Party decided to mount a full-scale war on the economic and cultural interests of the working class. Manufacturing and supply-chain resilience went out the window, as the “New Democrats” ditched the American heartland and outsourced countless jobs – and many entire industries – to our communist Chinese arch-foe in the name of “efficiency.” Elites routinely belittled biblical morality as bigoted, disparaged respect for the rule of law as a vestige of “white supremacy,” denigrated advocacy for immigration restrictions as xenophobic, and lambasted support for locking up hardened criminals as racist.

In came – or rather, descended down a gilded escalator – Trump to tell regular, salt-of-the-earth Americans that no, you actually are not that terrible. No, you are not a horrible person simply for being white (or having any other particular skin color). No, you are not an irredeemable troglodyte simply for thinking the Bible is the inerrant Word of God. No, you are not a relic of a bygone era for believing that cops do an important job, and that secure and stable national borders are necessary for a nation to, well, actually be a nation in the first place. No, you are not a crypto-fascist for flying the red, white and blue on your porch and for being proud of America’s historical legacy.

Many have observed that Trump is like a “comment section come to life.” What they mean by this is that Trump says, and does, irreverent things that others would typically shy away from doing. There is some truth to this. But it would be more accurate to say that Trump is the silver spoon-fed scion who never much cared for his presumptive social and economic peers. Trump is “outer-borough” to his core – the boy from Queens who never thought very highly of the well-heeled Manhattanites who sipped their brandy and smoked their cigars across the East River. Trump was involved with Ross Perot’s populist Reform Party and outspoken in his opposition to NAFTA at a time when virtually everyone with a seven-figure net worth was an ardent free trader.

Donald Trump, in short, has always been a class traitor. And following his large helping of French fries and Happy Meals in Pennsylvania, that class-traitor status may well win him a second term in the White House come Nov. 5.