A New York Times reporter ventures into the Heart of Darkness Whiteness, a Trump campaign office in Tampa, and finds …

An Unlikely Melting Pot at a Trump Office in Florida

By DAVID BARSTOW

For a campaign depicted as offering a rallying point for the white working class, volunteers for Donald J. Trump in Tampa are noteworthy for their ethnic diversity and for the variety of their political opinions.

… For a campaign frequently depicted as offering a rallying point for the white working class, the people volunteering to help Mr. Trump here are noteworthy for their ethnic diversity. They include a young woman who recently arrived from Peru; an immigrant from the Philippines; a 70-year-old Lakota Indian; a teenage son of Russian immigrants; a Mexican-American.

They range the political spectrum, too, from lifelong Democrat to independent to libertarian to conservative Republican. To a person, they condemned and sometimes ridiculed David Duke and other white supremacists who have noisily backed Mr. Trump. “I totally do not agree with them,” said one volunteer, Andrew Cherry.

Yet like Mrs. Linsky, many spoke openly about how fears centered on race and ethnicity were at the heart of their support for Mr. Trump. To a large extent, they traced those fears to the scars they still bear from the Great Recession — lost jobs, drained 401(k)’s, home foreclosures, rising debt, the feeling that the country is broken.

More than anything, several Trump volunteers here said, the Great Recession exposed a corrupt, out-of-touch ruling class in Washington that allows big corporations to outsource jobs at will while doing nothing to address millions of illegal immigrants who compete for jobs and drain government coffers.