The Real Reason for Trump Hatred

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
 

The Republicans will do anything to stop Donald Trump from winning their nomination.

On March 19 failed Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney called Trump “repulsive,” and added bigot, racist, and xenophobe for good measure. Let’s say all this is true. So how is it that this man has been on television, a popular figure in the news, and so forth, for decades? 

He was “The Donald,” a celebrity mogul and raconteur. Romney himself was pleased to get Trump’s endorsement in 2012.

Does it mean that Trump has become a completely different person since he began running for office? (Hitler, for instance, hadn’t been a run-of-the-mill celebrity before he “became” the Hitler who was a monster.) Or is this nothing but desperate attempts to destroy Trump by the establishment? 

And if it is the latter, the absolute frenzy is telling – they must be terrified of Trump because they obviously politically and economically have a lot to hide. After all, I don’t recall them being particularly worried about racism and xenophobia in the past.

The networks, which are owned by the same billionaires who hate Trump’s stands on securing the country’s borders, tightening the regulations on entry to the country, and putting an end to so-called globalization, which is destroying millions of American jobs, never have one good word to say about this man.

Such biased reporting is something unprecedented in television news; even Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist, and Ted Cruz, a far-right intolerant bully, get ample positive coverage.

It is now asserted ad infinitum that the populist Trump is “a divider, not a uniter,” because of his stance on immigration. But when did it become illegitimate for a nation to control its borders and determine who can live within them? Why, otherwise, have a sovereign state at all? 

Of course the rich don’t mind having a continuing flow of undocumented workers to keep wages down. One little-known fact: Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower deported millions of illegal immigrants in order to give jobs to returning veterans after the Second World War and the Korean War.

And why have the country’s financiers and industrial barons come to feel it is entirely proper to move their enterprises to wherever in the world they can obtain the cheapest labour and obtain the greatest profits, while leaving behind the very people who worked to make those enterprises the successful companies they had become?

Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital, was particularly notorious, destroying jobs by hollowing out companies and leaving behind huge debts, while he and his partners got fabulously rich.

It involved borrowing huge sums of money from Wall Street venture capitalists to take over existing firms. However, once all that debt was added, the company would fire workers and slash benefits to pay off all its new obligations, leaving it ripe to be resold by Bain at a huge profit.

In his new book Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads, travel writer Paul Theroux visits ruined decaying towns with abandoned businesses. In these depopulated places, manufacturing has fled, outsourced to China, India and Vietnam.

He found the people still there “as hard-up and ignored and hopeless as any I had seen in the world.”

Trump is promising “fair trade,” using import rules, tariffs and taxes, to punish unfair competition by such rivals as China to keep manufacturing jobs in America. He also wants to tax the profits big corporations make overseas. 

As well, he has attacked hedge-fund managers, and wants to rein in the nation’s five biggest banks, whose assets have increased exponentially in the past quarter-century.

His supporters want a new approach to capitalism, in which foreign trade partners must pay living wages and heed global environmental norms.

It was once considered normal that a government’s first loyalty was to its citizens and the national interest. It was also understood in the past that the preservation of a country’s culture and civil institutions was a necessity.

Unlike Romney is 2012, Trump isn’t writing off the “47 per cent” of Americans “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims.” 

The elites in the Republican Party can’t tell the electorate that the real reason they are terrified of Trump is because of their own selfish interests, and would prefer even Hillary Clinton to him.