J.D. Vance

I remember the exact moment I realized a reality TV star might become president. It was Sept. 16, the twilight of the Summer of Trump. Until then, I saw Donald Trump as little more than the fling of the white working class. And just as Republicans grew out of their Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann phases in 2011, so too would they come to their senses in 2015.

The presidential debate that evening pitted Trump against nearly a dozen would-be nominees, with donor favorite Jeb Bush taking a prominent position on stage. Though I hadn’t chosen a candidate, I liked Bush: a conservative problem solver, a good governor and a man of first-class intellect. I had even briefly considered working for the former Florida governor. But during an exchange about former president George W. Bush, Jeb said something that made me want to scream: “As it relates to my brother, there's one thing I know for sure: He kept us safe.”

My anger sprang, not from a difference over policy, but from somewhere more primal. I wanted, as Walt Whitman might say, to sound my “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” Whatever I thought about Jeb's education plan or record as governor, he had touched a raw cultural nerve. His defense of his brother ignored and insulted the experiences of people like me, and he was proud of it.

In an instant, I became Trump’s biggest fan. I wanted him to go for the jugular. I wanted him to inquire whom, precisely, George W. Bush had kept safe. Was it the veterans lingering in a bureaucratic quagmire at the Department of Veterans Affairs or the victims of 9/11? Was it the enlistees from my block back home, who signed their lives on the dotted line while Jeb’s brother told the country to “go shopping” — something kids like me couldn’t afford to do?

Though Trump held his fire in the debate, he lit into George W. Bush on social media and in interviews afterwards. Other candidates defended the former president. They, too, failed to understand Trump’s appeal, how something so offensive to their political palate could be cathartic for millions of their own voters.

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I quickly realized that Trump’s actual policy proposals, such as they are, range from immoral to absurd. But as a Marine Corps veteran who grew up in a struggling Rust Belt town, I understand why many adore him — why I, if only briefly, cheered him on. He tells America’s rich and powerful precisely what we wish we could tell them ourselves: that many of the things they view as accomplishments suck for people like us.

What unites Trump’s voters is a sense of alienation from America’s wealthy and powerful. People with Ivy League degrees lord over our business and political institutions, yet literally zero graduates of my high school class attended an Ivy League undergraduate college. People in my hometown voted for President Reagan — for many, like my grandpa, he was their first Republican — because he promised that tax cuts would bring higher wages and new jobs. It seemed he was right, so we voted for the next Republican promising tax cuts and job creation, George W. Bush. He wasn’t right. We’ve seen little in the way of higher wages in nearly 20 years.

Politicians of both parties told us that free trade with Asia and Latin America would spur economic growth, and maybe it did somewhere else. In our towns, though, factories continue shutting down or moving overseas. We might have sympathy for the Mexican immigrant trying to make a better life for his family, but many see those immigrants primarily as competition for an ever dwindling supply of jobs. We watch our sons go to war, disagree with the rationale for sending them, loathe the men who ordered them to battle and then, when the veterans come home, beg and plead with the local VA to ensure they have access to proper care.

This alienation separates Trump’s voters from the constituency of another firebrand insurgent, Ted Cruz. Cruz draws from married voters, evangelical Christians, the elderly and those who identify as “very conservative.” These folks might be angry about the political process, but their anger is ideological and their lives — filled with family and church — are fundamentally intact.

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Trump’s voters, instead, wear an almost existential sense of betrayal. He relies on unmarried voters, individuals who rarely attend church services and those without much higher education. Many of these Trump voters have abandoned the faith of their forefathers and myriad social benefits that come with it. Their marriages have failed, and their families have fractured. The factories that moved overseas used to provide not just high-paying jobs, but also a sense of purpose and community. Their kids (and themselves) might be more likely to die from a heroin overdose than any other group in the country.

Cruz’s voters dislike Jeb Bush because he has strayed from conservative orthodoxy. Trump’s voters loathe Jeb Bush because their lives are falling apart, and they blame people like him.

Last Saturday, in the most recent Republican debate, Jeb again defended his brother’s national security record. This time, Trump’s rejoinder came immediately: “The World Trade Center came down during your brother’s reign, remember that. ... That’s not keeping us safe.” Many pundits pronounced Trump the debate’s loser and Jeb one of its winners, noting that Trump had harshly criticized a former president still very popular in Republican circles. But in a scientific poll of debate watchers, nearly one-quarter indicated that Trump won; Jeb came in dead last with 5%.

These folks won’t abandon Trump because he insults other candidates or tells a joke about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue. They won’t simply move to another candidate, especially not one promising the same concoction of policies that Republicans have promised for decades with disastrous consequences. And they won’t penalize Trump for telling political elites something they wish they could say themselves.

This doesn’t mean Trump will win the nomination. He could implode in some online fit. His voters, withdrawn from institutions of work and faith, might avoid the ballot box, too. They may be lured by an aspirational economic message, one that recognizes the failures of the modern economy while offering more than great Mexican walls to fix it. Unfortunately, the most natural communicator of such a message, Marco Rubio, seems uninterested in talking about his pro-working class proposals.

But these Americans are not going away. And short of an act of God or another political candidate who understands their grievances, neither is Donald Trump.

J.D. Vance is a National Review contributor and the author of the upcomingHillbilly Elegy.

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