How to Fight Trump: Part One

Long term strategy

This is the first in a three-part series describing what ordinary people can do to oppose Trump.

First, I need to describe the assumptions that underlie my strategic thinking. No general begins a fight without gathering lots of information, including how the enemy recruits and motivates troops, and how those troops could possibly be talked out of fighting.

When Trump appeared on the scene in 2016, he burst out of nowhere like a bloom of overnight mushrooms. Back then, I saw Trump as nothing but an expression of toxic masculinity, a kind of political Andrew Dice Clay. I knew he would attract many voters with his combative persona, but you don’t have to have a majority to win primaries and become a presidential candidate. I thought his victory in 2016 was due to traditional Republican fears of Democratic governance as much as it was support of Trump. The Democratic Party and I did not recognize that there was an army of discouraged Americans just waiting to be recruited in a campaign to reverse their economic decline. These Americans were desperately looking for a Messiah in 2016, and they found a false one.

Paul Krugman has laid out a valuable historical perspective on the economic history of the United States in the last 100 years: for six decades (1920-1980), poorer states were catching up to richer states, but that welcome trend was reversed in 1980. The chart below depicts per capita income in Mississippi versus per capita income in Massachusetts.

Per capita personal income in Mississippi compared with Massachusetts (1930-2020)

In 1940, per capita income in Mississippi was 30% of per capita income in Massachusetts. In 1980, it peaked at 70% of income in Massachusetts. This amazing increase in prosperity happened within the working lifetime of a single individual. In 1980 the trend reversed— per capita income in Mississippi sank to 55% of income in Massachusetts. Again, this happened within the working lifetime of a single individual. To summarize, Mississippi residents know that their grandparents lived in a booming economy, and they know that they are now living in a declining economy.

And it’s not just Mississippi. It turns out that wages have been stagnant or declining for all men who are not college graduates beginning in 1980. When people think about income inequality, they generally think about the yawning gap between the average American and the super-rich, while a far more impactful gap is the one between college-educated Americans and everyone else. Based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Table 19, in 1979 the income gap between college educated American men and the least educated American men (those who never finished high school) was 38%. In 2022, the gap had increased to 59%. Not even men with some post high school education escaped this decline. In 1979, they were 17% behind men with a college education and in 2022 they were 37% behind those with a college education.

And this is not just relative slippage—it is an absolute DECREASE in earnings. In 2022 men without a high school diploma earned 18% less than they earned in 1980 in constant 2022 dollars and men with education beyond high school were earning 7% less. During this period, the wages of non-college educated women rose, but they were simply catching up to the declining wages earned by men.

In 2022, there were 141 million Americans over the age of 25 who did not have a college degree, in other words 64% of the adult population. These 141 million Americans also parent most of America’s children. Thus, the largest group of DISADVANTAGED Americans turns out to be the MAJORITY of Americans. This disadvantaged majority includes more than half of every ethnic group: White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian. This is where Donald Trump found 78 million votes in 2024, and this undoubtedly includes most of the 90 million people who did not vote in the 2024 election.

Bottom line: The majority of Americans have undergone a slow but steady immiseration since 1980. This has produced a devastating psychological impact.

• The non-college educated realize that they are less prosperous than their parents and grandparents and have little prospect of changing that fact.

• In a country where too many measure worth by wealth, the non-college educated realize that they will be regarded as worth less and less as time goes on.

• The non-college educated have seen lifestyle downgrades. Deferred maintenance has made roofs leak and porches rot. Dinners have been downgraded from steak to hamburger and hamburger to chicken. And where do you go after that? Rice and beans? And then a college-educated voice chimes in, “Well, that’s healthier anyway—just be sure to make the rice brown.”

A careful survey of 35,000 Americans reveals that 70% of them think that “The system is rigged.” Clearly, opinions will differ among them regarding the locus of malign control. But when the income of most Americans is slowly declining, it is not surprising that 70% feel that there is some dynamic making it all but impossible to get ahead.

Democratic senatorial candidate Lucas Kunce described the impact of a declining economy on the politics of less educated Americans:

In politics, the [changing] economy has caught up to us and created two things: a group of people who are primed to rage against the institutions that squeeze and betray them every day, and an apathy among younger generations who see no hope as the system continues to snowball out of control…[O]ur younger generation doesn’t think that they will ever be able to buy a home. Literally. And they’re not wrong. The median age of a home buyer in the 1980s was 31. Today it’s 56.

Indeed, Democrats don’t even have a name for this economically underprivileged group that includes a majority of Americans and a majority of every racial group in the country. If they don’t even have a name for the group, how can they credibly claim to be focused on its needs?

The first step towards solving a problem is naming it. Below are some that occur to me. Do you have other suggestions?

• The Flyover Majority

• The Forgotten Majority

• The Destroyed Majority (gives a nod to the toxic downside of the creative destruction that is inseparable from capitalism)

• The American Majority (positive and honorific; it recenters the nation’s attention)

The Destroyed Majority has the advantage of being dramatic and highlighting the pain so many millions have experienced.

The Actions We Need

This post will focus on the long-term steps that must be taken if the Democratic Party is ever to recapture the trust of the Destroyed Majority. Short-term strategies will be described in the next two posts.

STEP One: Realize that the Democratic Party will never become a stable majority party until it has a clear plan for meeting the needs of the Destroyed Majority. All national leaders of the party must support this priority continuously and loudly as our nation’s most pressing need. Realize that taking care of the needs of the Destroyed Majority is the most effective way to improve the situation of every racial group in the country without any need for racial preferences. Realize, until the Democratic Party shifts its focus to the Destroyed Majority it may win off year congressional elections, when Democrats vote in larger numbers, but it will never have consistent success in presidential elections. Personally, I would happily support just about any Democrat as a presidential candidate who would prioritize the needs of the Destroyed Majority.

STEP Two: Joe Biden sought to bring economic revival to the Forgotten Majority by building infrastructure and factories in economically depressed parts of the country. However, this failed to seize the imagination because the payoff from such investments takes years to fully develop and there is no guarantee that it will benefit any given individual. The effort that Biden started needs to continue. We need more smart people thinking about what kinds of activity can be stirred up in economically depressed areas: factories? tourism? remote work neighborhoods where residents can enjoy some of the benefits of urbanity combined with cheaper housing prices? There must be other good ideas. If enough such new opportunities appear, they will eventually penetrate the consciousness of the Destroyed Majority.

STEP Three: On top of continued development, the most important new policy needed is a commitment to free and supported lifetime job retraining. This means that any American who qualifies for a job training program will receive free tuition and support for their family while making successful progress in that training opportunity. Perhaps the program could be funded by a 1% payroll tax in addition to Social Security and Medicare. The American population already recognizes the necessity of those investments. (BTW, all wages should be subject to payroll deductions, not just the first $176,100.)

Junior colleges are partially fulfilling this need, but we have noted that the wages of those who complete junior college are sinking in real and relative terms compared to those of college graduates. Besides, how many parents in their 20s and 30s working hard to support their children can realistically fit job retraining into their busy lives? Also, note that businesses are increasingly reluctant to fund complex training for highly technical jobs. They fear that competitors will poach trainees with the bait of slightly higher salaries, which is far less costly than making the large upfront investment for training.

Free and supported lifelong job retraining would make a dramatic increase in the psychological and financial welfare of the American Majority. The program must be easily and reliably available: program counselors should be located in every junior college to guide those interested to opportunities available locally and throughout the country. Counselors should also do outreach at churches and high schools. Of course, access would also be available on the Internet. The economic stimulus efforts described in Step Two should be integrated with this job training program. Factories built with federal seed money should be required to hire from these job training programs.

This new right for all American citizens, free and supported lifetime job retraining, could instantaneously change the belief that “the system is rigged against me” to “the system gives me a chance.”

BTW, the historian in me is shouting to tell you about the times in the last 250 years when governments have recognized the need to support new forms of education. The first two countries to support universal free primary education (reading, writing, and arithmetic) were North Germany (Prussia, 1768) and the United States (Massachusetts, 1798; Pennsylvania, 1834), an innovation widely recognized as assisting the rapid development of both countries from agricultural to industrial powers. Free public high school became available in the United States between 1870 and 1920, but it wasn’t until 1940 that most Americans were high school graduates. In the 1950s, the federal government began to give serious support to college education. I remember TV shock ads in the 50s that boomed a lugubrious pronouncement, “The closing college doors!” Well, the college doors did not close. The number of college students in the United States rose from 1.5 million in 1940 to 8.6 million in 1970.

So, it’s time for history to repeat itself. It’s time for government to recognize that it must support a new educational opportunity for Americans.

It can be done intelligently and not profligately. The lazy won’t apply. Care will be taken to match applicants to an opportunity that is within their capacity. Those who cannot complete a course may transfer to something more suitable or perhaps come back in 3 years and try again. When I shared this idea last November, someone commented, “But what if that job disappears in five years?” All the more reason to have free and supported job retraining always available.

BOTTOM LINE: When the needs of the majority of the country are not met or even recognized, what surprise is it when people turn to a false messiah?

The Final Irony

A crushing irony occurred because Hillary Clinton clearly recognized and eloquently expressed the problem I am describing but did not make it the cornerstone of her 2016 campaign. In the same speech where she described one half of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables,” she also described a second basket:

But that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything [Trump] says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.

“These are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”

I wish every one of us did understand and empathize with them . . .