The thing I can't figure out is why so many people couldn't see through him immediately like I did. I've lived many of the stories in this piece. In 1980, 2 weeks before getting married the company broke our union and laid us off. The company that took over the warehouse operation offered me my old job back at half what I'd been earning. I drew unemployment and worked under the table for several months before I found another job. In 2006 the same thing happened again with a much larger company. 600 Operating Engineers out of work overnight. Then came 2008 and it wiped out 30 years of building and remodeling houses in addition to my regular job. Along with a divorce I got to start over at 50. But I never fell for the republican propaganda that blamed everything on immigrants and non white people. Maybe because I always read extensively and only watched TV for entertainment and listened to the radio for music. I'd always voted for the person, not the party until Trump came along and turned the GOP into a modern day Nazi party. Now I'll never vote anything but Blue. They sure as hell aren't perfect, but compared to the alternative they're the only choice.
John-thank you for this. 1980, 2006, 2008, starting over at fifty. You lived the whole arc.
Your opening question is one I wrestle with too, but I think the piece actually answers it: the same wound lands differently on different people. For you it clarified who the enemy was. For others, fifty years of carefully aimed propaganda had already filled that slot with somebody else. The information environment you describe - reading widely, using TV only for entertainment - meant the funnel never got you. A lot of people never had that, or lost it, or were too exhausted and too hurt to maintain it.
That's not a defense of the choice. It's an explanation of the machinery. The men who built it were counting on exactly the dynamic you managed to escape.
You’re naming something most people still dodge: Trump didn’t invent this dynamic, he exposed it. His rise only looked “sudden” to people who hadn’t been paying attention to the long arc of white backlash politics since the civil rights era. The birther lie wasn’t a sideshow,it was the signal. A majority of white voters recognized it as an attack on Black legitimacy and rewarded him for it.
That pattern didn’t start in 2016, and it didn’t end with Trump. It’s been the electoral backbone of national politics for two generations. If anything, Trump just stripped away the polite language that used to cover it.
The real problem isn’t understanding Trump,it’s understanding the country that made him possible.
Most Black people saw through Trump immediately. Most white people (yes, I mean most, as in a majority of white Americans) saw something different: the anti-Black racism that Trump advanced by his birther conspiracy theory against President Obama. And they liked that. White Americans have not given even one Democratic president their majority vote since 1964, the year Trump graduated from high school. That majority of white Americans who are Republicans are part of the white backlash against civil rights that's been raging for two generations. This pattern has existed for decades - it's nothing new, and Trump didn't come out of nowhere. I tried to explain the major problem in this Substack:
I want to send this to friends who say they’ll never forgive Trump’s base for voting for him. It’s not an excuse… but maybe it’s a window into how this could happen.
Yes thanks for your support. I supervised interns in a wide range of small communities in Iowa, Missouri and Illinois. Many hollowed out a few lucky ones still viable.
Wow what a powerful story. You really humanized the events of the past 50 years in a way that makes you understand why/how MAGA was created and how they were conned by the system. Very smart system that found their conman circus ring master who pulled it all together. Thank you.
Thank you, Lori. 'Conman circus ringmaster' is exactly right,but he didn't build the tent. That's the part that matters. The tent was fifty years in the making and he just walked in and read the room. Understanding that is the only way we stop the next one.
You’ve done it again, Tom. Thank you for translating what needs to be seen into impactful prose for a necessary narrative for those who choose not to speak or can’t find the words. Such skill and talent.
Thank you,that phrase, 'those who choose not to speak or can't find the words,' is exactly who I'm writing for. If the piece does that work for even a few people, it's done its job.
Yes - I am literally "a kid from Georgetown" and I see that this is 100% true. What I have finally learned is that unfettered capitalism -- and maybe capitalism *at all* -- is irredeemably flawed. Like the patriarchy (of which it is just another manifestation) it has to go.
The self-awareness in that opening line matters. One of the ways the con sustains itself is by making people like you feel implicated enough to stay quiet.
On capitalism: I'm not sure I'd go all the way to irredeemable, but what we have now isn't capitalism in any textbook sense. It's an extraction machine that uses the language of markets to justify outcomes actual competition would never produce. These aren't markets working. They're markets captured.
Whether you fix that from inside or burn it down is worth arguing. Whether something is deeply, structurally wrong is not.
Splendid post, Tom. I spent twenty years in Iowa and saw this firsthand.
Dollar General and Family Dollar are the new company‑store bellwethers of a stripped‑out Midwest, real‑estate machines dropped where the last union grocer died, their leases and profits wired straight to distant landlords who will never set foot in the parking lot.
Edward Jones storefronts and payday lenders bloom in the same dead downtowns, selling “advice” and triple‑digit APR where the factory and the community bank used to be, their ownership chains ending not on Main Street but in a private‑equity slide deck.
You can draw a straight line from Earl Butz’s “get big or get out” and Reagan’s farm‑crisis austerity—shredding the old FSA safety net and driving families off diversified farms—into a landscape of Roundup‑soaked corn and soy, Smithfield hog lagoons, and Dollar General food deserts where the only thing that grows reliably is cancer, debt, and shareholder yield. What used to be Walmart as the cruel metric of hard times is now a cluster of dollar stores and cash‑advance windows circling a town like vultures, because private equity figured out you can securitize the ruin of a county the same way you securitize a mortgage pool—just turn the town into a product and strip‑mine the cash flows. Remember that Dollar General and Family Dollar are owned by the same group.
Until Trump’s ICE turned into a roaming local Gestapo, the one exception in a lot of those small towns was the migrant strip—Mexican bakeries, carne asadas, tiendas, little businesses that rebuilt a sliver of local economy for the Latin‑American community—but now that too has been smashed, because in this model even the people who try to live in the wreckage are treated as a problem to be removed, not neighbors to be rooted in.
Now we have collapsing education, faster production lines in the meat plants, cheap booze, massive amounts of prison spending, and fentanyl. No more vaccinations, lies about the reason for the cancer increase (blame the booze) and awful characters like Brenna Bird, Ashley Hinson, Joni Ernst, and the godfather of shit who dates back to the origins of this, Chuck Grassley. Did I also neglect to mention the suicide epidemic? These people are so desperate they believed the con man over and over again.
The midwest was the driver of what was great about America and Americans. It was the America Norman Rockwell painted (and by doing so, largely invented). Now it is the blistering sore on the dying patient's face.
The worst thing is that whether you spend your money at O’Reilly Auto Parts, Walmart, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Dollar General, or Chevron, all that money goes into to the same select set of pockets. None of it goes back to the community, not even in federal taxes. It doesn’t support roads or schools or local infrastructure; in fact, quite the opposite. The sameness and awfulness saturate every aspect of life, eroding what hope is left and replacing it with bitterness. We see massive spikes in domestic abuse, alcoholism, drug overdoses, and suicide. I have to believe this is by design.
I would suggest that the system has been in place far longer than 50 years. Herbert Hoover tried "trickle down economics" at the start of The Depression and Will Rogers correctly pointed out that wealth actually "trickles up." In essence, Rogers said, "if you pay the poor man (vernacular of the time), the rich man will have it by nightfall, but at least the poor man will have gotten some use out of it." The quote is inexact, but the gist of it is there.
What has changed over the decades since is the "marketing" of the strategy.
You’re absolutely right,the structure is far older than the last fifty years. Hoover didn’t invent the idea so much as inherit it, and Will Rogers saw straight through it even then. His point still holds: money doesn’t trickle down; it moves upward, and the only real choice is whether working people get to use it briefly on its way.
What’s changed isn’t the strategy but the marketing. The language got smoother, the promises bigger, and the distance between the pitch and the lived reality wider.
Appreciate you reading,and for bringing the long view into the conversation.
The orange con man knew the hunger is real and lied about his largess…leaving us to scrabble after leftovers when the alpha hyenas have taken the best cuts.
You write so beautifully Tom. I know I always say it but I always feel it!
Did you ever see this series? It’s based on true events and has never left me. It’s from five years ago - the prescribing of Oxy, the dr who got addicted and the pharma drive behind it all.
I remember dad telling me, when I was a kid, that he and mom always voted Democratic, cause they were for working people. Then Nixon went to China and we all swooned over the possibilities.
Here in Massachusetts there is not much open space anymore.
I used to go to Cape Cod in winter as less expensive. Went for years in the 80’s.
Over that time , the topography , the building of homes and businesses it was a different less beautiful wild place. We used to pick out wildlife. There isn’t any anymore. Or few. Which might as well be none.
The building of homes and strip malls and older stately homes turned into Airbnb and restaurants.
No more Mom/Pop type shops.
I loved those old Yankees who were of the sea and in old age bought a small shop selling souvenirs kids could afford.
Now it is Gucci outlets and Beard winning chefs. Gross.
When will the over rich have enough of our beautiful wild places?
When will we take care of the farmer, soldier,
In Massachusetts your average normie family cannot afford to go to major league sporting events, museums, ballet, opera. The country fair has a 15.00 bucks admission.
We cannot go to a movie in a theatre.
15.00 a ticket x 4 = 60.00 a family of 4. Popcorn, a drink, candy Dream on young child. Yes it smells good!
I could go on. I digressed.
My point was we have lost so so much.
We have lost all that made us who we are .
The first time I clearly saw America turn from our farmers I was shocked. Made no sense. They feed us!
I came up in the 60’s I saw America turn on military and protestors. Later America turned on working folks- farmers, unions, and forever blacks, browns, gays and “ agitators”.
This is America treating the people who made America the “ Breadbasket of the World “.
The final fight of the World will be food and water . America will wish for healthy and happy farmers and miners for water.
Excellent as always Tom!
The thing I can't figure out is why so many people couldn't see through him immediately like I did. I've lived many of the stories in this piece. In 1980, 2 weeks before getting married the company broke our union and laid us off. The company that took over the warehouse operation offered me my old job back at half what I'd been earning. I drew unemployment and worked under the table for several months before I found another job. In 2006 the same thing happened again with a much larger company. 600 Operating Engineers out of work overnight. Then came 2008 and it wiped out 30 years of building and remodeling houses in addition to my regular job. Along with a divorce I got to start over at 50. But I never fell for the republican propaganda that blamed everything on immigrants and non white people. Maybe because I always read extensively and only watched TV for entertainment and listened to the radio for music. I'd always voted for the person, not the party until Trump came along and turned the GOP into a modern day Nazi party. Now I'll never vote anything but Blue. They sure as hell aren't perfect, but compared to the alternative they're the only choice.
John-thank you for this. 1980, 2006, 2008, starting over at fifty. You lived the whole arc.
Your opening question is one I wrestle with too, but I think the piece actually answers it: the same wound lands differently on different people. For you it clarified who the enemy was. For others, fifty years of carefully aimed propaganda had already filled that slot with somebody else. The information environment you describe - reading widely, using TV only for entertainment - meant the funnel never got you. A lot of people never had that, or lost it, or were too exhausted and too hurt to maintain it.
That's not a defense of the choice. It's an explanation of the machinery. The men who built it were counting on exactly the dynamic you managed to escape.
You’re naming something most people still dodge: Trump didn’t invent this dynamic, he exposed it. His rise only looked “sudden” to people who hadn’t been paying attention to the long arc of white backlash politics since the civil rights era. The birther lie wasn’t a sideshow,it was the signal. A majority of white voters recognized it as an attack on Black legitimacy and rewarded him for it.
That pattern didn’t start in 2016, and it didn’t end with Trump. It’s been the electoral backbone of national politics for two generations. If anything, Trump just stripped away the polite language that used to cover it.
The real problem isn’t understanding Trump,it’s understanding the country that made him possible.
Most Black people saw through Trump immediately. Most white people (yes, I mean most, as in a majority of white Americans) saw something different: the anti-Black racism that Trump advanced by his birther conspiracy theory against President Obama. And they liked that. White Americans have not given even one Democratic president their majority vote since 1964, the year Trump graduated from high school. That majority of white Americans who are Republicans are part of the white backlash against civil rights that's been raging for two generations. This pattern has existed for decades - it's nothing new, and Trump didn't come out of nowhere. I tried to explain the major problem in this Substack:
https://olgabourlin.substack.com/p/white-americas-obama-myth
I want to send this to friends who say they’ll never forgive Trump’s base for voting for him. It’s not an excuse… but maybe it’s a window into how this could happen.
I think there is a window right now,where things are changing.
Awesome and so sad. My oldest went down the drug path, prison
And death by drugs and injury. He was a sweet boy. The kind that went to football practice and then biked to club soccer. He loved dogs.
I'm so sorry. Football practice and club soccer and a boy who loved dogs,that's who he was. That's who they took.
Yes thanks for your support. I supervised interns in a wide range of small communities in Iowa, Missouri and Illinois. Many hollowed out a few lucky ones still viable.
Wow what a powerful story. You really humanized the events of the past 50 years in a way that makes you understand why/how MAGA was created and how they were conned by the system. Very smart system that found their conman circus ring master who pulled it all together. Thank you.
Thank you, Lori. 'Conman circus ringmaster' is exactly right,but he didn't build the tent. That's the part that matters. The tent was fifty years in the making and he just walked in and read the room. Understanding that is the only way we stop the next one.
You’ve done it again, Tom. Thank you for translating what needs to be seen into impactful prose for a necessary narrative for those who choose not to speak or can’t find the words. Such skill and talent.
Thank you,that phrase, 'those who choose not to speak or can't find the words,' is exactly who I'm writing for. If the piece does that work for even a few people, it's done its job.
Yes - I am literally "a kid from Georgetown" and I see that this is 100% true. What I have finally learned is that unfettered capitalism -- and maybe capitalism *at all* -- is irredeemably flawed. Like the patriarchy (of which it is just another manifestation) it has to go.
The self-awareness in that opening line matters. One of the ways the con sustains itself is by making people like you feel implicated enough to stay quiet.
On capitalism: I'm not sure I'd go all the way to irredeemable, but what we have now isn't capitalism in any textbook sense. It's an extraction machine that uses the language of markets to justify outcomes actual competition would never produce. These aren't markets working. They're markets captured.
Whether you fix that from inside or burn it down is worth arguing. Whether something is deeply, structurally wrong is not.
Splendid post, Tom. I spent twenty years in Iowa and saw this firsthand.
Dollar General and Family Dollar are the new company‑store bellwethers of a stripped‑out Midwest, real‑estate machines dropped where the last union grocer died, their leases and profits wired straight to distant landlords who will never set foot in the parking lot.
Edward Jones storefronts and payday lenders bloom in the same dead downtowns, selling “advice” and triple‑digit APR where the factory and the community bank used to be, their ownership chains ending not on Main Street but in a private‑equity slide deck.
You can draw a straight line from Earl Butz’s “get big or get out” and Reagan’s farm‑crisis austerity—shredding the old FSA safety net and driving families off diversified farms—into a landscape of Roundup‑soaked corn and soy, Smithfield hog lagoons, and Dollar General food deserts where the only thing that grows reliably is cancer, debt, and shareholder yield. What used to be Walmart as the cruel metric of hard times is now a cluster of dollar stores and cash‑advance windows circling a town like vultures, because private equity figured out you can securitize the ruin of a county the same way you securitize a mortgage pool—just turn the town into a product and strip‑mine the cash flows. Remember that Dollar General and Family Dollar are owned by the same group.
Until Trump’s ICE turned into a roaming local Gestapo, the one exception in a lot of those small towns was the migrant strip—Mexican bakeries, carne asadas, tiendas, little businesses that rebuilt a sliver of local economy for the Latin‑American community—but now that too has been smashed, because in this model even the people who try to live in the wreckage are treated as a problem to be removed, not neighbors to be rooted in.
Now we have collapsing education, faster production lines in the meat plants, cheap booze, massive amounts of prison spending, and fentanyl. No more vaccinations, lies about the reason for the cancer increase (blame the booze) and awful characters like Brenna Bird, Ashley Hinson, Joni Ernst, and the godfather of shit who dates back to the origins of this, Chuck Grassley. Did I also neglect to mention the suicide epidemic? These people are so desperate they believed the con man over and over again.
The midwest was the driver of what was great about America and Americans. It was the America Norman Rockwell painted (and by doing so, largely invented). Now it is the blistering sore on the dying patient's face.
The worst thing is that whether you spend your money at O’Reilly Auto Parts, Walmart, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Dollar General, or Chevron, all that money goes into to the same select set of pockets. None of it goes back to the community, not even in federal taxes. It doesn’t support roads or schools or local infrastructure; in fact, quite the opposite. The sameness and awfulness saturate every aspect of life, eroding what hope is left and replacing it with bitterness. We see massive spikes in domestic abuse, alcoholism, drug overdoses, and suicide. I have to believe this is by design.
"Learn to code", now "learn AI, 'cuz AI has learned to code". The downward spiral moves on....
So very sad, and so very true. You're breaking my heart. Tom! But thank you for laying it all out like this. I will be sharing.
Thank you so much for sharing!!
I would suggest that the system has been in place far longer than 50 years. Herbert Hoover tried "trickle down economics" at the start of The Depression and Will Rogers correctly pointed out that wealth actually "trickles up." In essence, Rogers said, "if you pay the poor man (vernacular of the time), the rich man will have it by nightfall, but at least the poor man will have gotten some use out of it." The quote is inexact, but the gist of it is there.
What has changed over the decades since is the "marketing" of the strategy.
Excellent article, as always.
You’re absolutely right,the structure is far older than the last fifty years. Hoover didn’t invent the idea so much as inherit it, and Will Rogers saw straight through it even then. His point still holds: money doesn’t trickle down; it moves upward, and the only real choice is whether working people get to use it briefly on its way.
What’s changed isn’t the strategy but the marketing. The language got smoother, the promises bigger, and the distance between the pitch and the lived reality wider.
Appreciate you reading,and for bringing the long view into the conversation.
The orange con man knew the hunger is real and lied about his largess…leaving us to scrabble after leftovers when the alpha hyenas have taken the best cuts.
That’s for sure!!
You write so beautifully Tom. I know I always say it but I always feel it!
Did you ever see this series? It’s based on true events and has never left me. It’s from five years ago - the prescribing of Oxy, the dr who got addicted and the pharma drive behind it all.
Dopesick:
https://youtu.be/lUVR63ZHLV4?si=IbIXHBzSipGKerTl
I will certainly check it out!!
Most eloquent ~ Thank you
Thanks for reading!!
I remember dad telling me, when I was a kid, that he and mom always voted Democratic, cause they were for working people. Then Nixon went to China and we all swooned over the possibilities.
Thank You Tom
In April 2027 my daughter is building a tiny house for me.
I will have room then to purchase a paid subscription.
No you never told me.
I liked NB a lot.
The land and sky is so big and so beautiful.
Here in Massachusetts there is not much open space anymore.
I used to go to Cape Cod in winter as less expensive. Went for years in the 80’s.
Over that time , the topography , the building of homes and businesses it was a different less beautiful wild place. We used to pick out wildlife. There isn’t any anymore. Or few. Which might as well be none.
The building of homes and strip malls and older stately homes turned into Airbnb and restaurants.
No more Mom/Pop type shops.
I loved those old Yankees who were of the sea and in old age bought a small shop selling souvenirs kids could afford.
Now it is Gucci outlets and Beard winning chefs. Gross.
When will the over rich have enough of our beautiful wild places?
When will we take care of the farmer, soldier,
In Massachusetts your average normie family cannot afford to go to major league sporting events, museums, ballet, opera. The country fair has a 15.00 bucks admission.
We cannot go to a movie in a theatre.
15.00 a ticket x 4 = 60.00 a family of 4. Popcorn, a drink, candy Dream on young child. Yes it smells good!
I could go on. I digressed.
My point was we have lost so so much.
We have lost all that made us who we are .
The first time I clearly saw America turn from our farmers I was shocked. Made no sense. They feed us!
I came up in the 60’s I saw America turn on military and protestors. Later America turned on working folks- farmers, unions, and forever blacks, browns, gays and “ agitators”.
This is America treating the people who made America the “ Breadbasket of the World “.
The final fight of the World will be food and water . America will wish for healthy and happy farmers and miners for water.
If America makes it that is…
No worries!! Reading and sharing is fine!! Thank you!!
I know though quite concretely that times are tight. Art is ultra important now so we need your art.
Did I ever tell you I have spent time in Bennington NB