Yes he is. Before I go any further I want to explain exactly what I mean. Trump is a rock star in his persona and his approach to the political machine. He relies heavily on cult of personality: people may not like his positions but they still choose to support him. He is bold and boisterous and he knows how to give the people what they want. Like many rock stars, Trump wears his vices on his sleeve. He makes no apologies for his wealth or past transgressions. He shows no respect for hallowed institutions: see American media, the pope, the sitting president, the former president, general decorum, and pretty much anything else. This is why people love him. This is why people love rock stars.

Counter Culture

One of the main attributes of successful rock stars is the ability to ride a wave of counter-cultural ferver. The Beatles soared atop the warm currents of free love and new drug culture, and the British punks, inspired by the Sex Pistols, dressed in trashy clothes and chose wild haircuts meant to shock and scandalize mainstream folks. Iggy Pop’s wild antics on stage shattered the established concept of a musical performance. It was all defiant, proud and unrepentant. If some square cried out that it was madness or pure savagery, then you hit a nerve. It meant you were hitting all the right notes. Rock and roll has raged against the machine for years, demanding attention while also mangling what is considered acceptable behavior in society. That’s what makes it so damn fun.

We now live in a society where the free-love, break-the-mold antics of these counter-culture movements are socially acceptable. Businesses hire people whether they have piercing, tattoos, dress like the opposite sex or any other attribute of these former avant garde movements. I have worked with all of the above. The tolerance movement folded these things into mainstream society. I’m not complaining or saying it’s a bad thing, but it is a fact of life. The mainstays of counter-culture are now culture. We are told that we have to accept this, and, for the most part, we do. We live out our multicultural, tolerant lives giving a faint smile and a thumbs-up to anything that comes out way. Enter Donald Trump.

Gutter Punks

Look no further than the scandalized reactions from the media when Donald Trump talks about Hispanic illegal immigrants (Sorry, undocumented immigrants). What you are seeing is the same look a square would give a free-loving pot-smoking hippy through his horn-rimmed glasses. It’s the look that says: “You can’t do that” or “You can’t say that.” In short: it is the man telling you what to do. This is a large part of the power that Donald Trump wields. People at his rallies (Not all, but some) call reporters “bitches” and flip off cameras. They roar in approval when he says that he wishes he could punch people in the face. They drown out all other sound in raucous rancor when he disses the media or talks about how stupid the suits in Washington are. His support is ironclad because he has no interest in being a politician. He’s riding a counter-cultural wave, the wave aiming to crash squarely against the man, that man who says that you can’t like Trump and you can’t flip off reporters or say that our politicians are stupid. Look no further than the revolt in the republican party itself. Four years later, the front-runner with all the momentum looks absolutely nothing like Mitt Romney. There is a visceral reaction to what was rammed down the throats of the voter by the establishment or “the man” last time around.

I often hear people wondering at who these fabled Trump supporters could be. I have friends in journalism who shake their heads in disbelieving wonderment at the Trump phenomenon. They try their damndest to figure who the quintessential Trump supporter is. Here is a news flash: they are the discontented and forgotten, they are the invisible. This is why they aren’t so obvious. It’s the guy who runs the register at 7/11 when you’re picking up a power bar on the way to work, it’s the girl who waited your table last night, it’s the drunk guy you purposefully ignored while walking home. Trump has the support of families, college educated people, high-school educated people scraping by, minorities who don’t buy the progressive dream, the religious, the poor who need a hero to cling to, veterans who feel unappreciated and screwed by the broken VA, and all the others who became invisible in the prior eight years of cultural marxism. He has the support of the new gutter punks who have been disenfranchised by the new accepted culture. Every culture has a counter-culture, and the new one looks different from the old.

Caesar’s Thumb Points Down

Many pundits and journalists complain that Trump’s policies are incomprehensible or that he contradicts himself too much to be a credible candidate. They are missing the point. They are looking at Trump as a traditional political candidate and not the counter-cultural figurehead he really is. A vote for Trump is not a vote for Trump. A vote for Trump is an obstinate “no” vote to what is going on in politics and culture. Colleges teach students that being patriotic is a form of oppression. Special interest groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center decry anyone they disagree with as hate groups. Any dissent to the multicultural, globalist dream is shouted down by social moralists. If you disagree with 97% of the scientific community on climate change, then you are declared a nut-job. This is “The Man” now. I’m not approving of the reaction, but I am astounded that people can’t see this for what it is.

To explain it another way: a vote for Trump is a vote against the culturally accepted way of being. A vote for Trump is a grim thumbs-down to the antiseptic, kumbaya approach to race-relations. A vote for Trump is a big “fuck you” to a society that has marginalized large groups of the electorate. Look at recent studies about poor whites killing themselves either intentionally or through substance abuse. They never had a leg up or “privilege” like the mainstream will tell you. They have always been poor, and recently they have been told that they should be grateful for what they have, since they got it all because their “whiteness”. Yet there are pundits who call anger at this “self indulgent”.

Many liberals talk about “The age of Obama”, yet they seem not to realize that there are dissidents left behind in every age. So many people on the right and the left are convinced that we are all moving forward into something better than before. They don’t have the time to look back at who is being left in the background, and the “Age of Obama” has disenfranchised large groups of people. Every once in a while that remnant left behind gets large enough to come roaring back, and Donald Trump is at the head of that wave.