Trump

The disenfranchised white lower middle class of the USA had found its champion, Donald  J.Trump.

The media may have been dumbfounded, and I admit it, I was too.

Because, the last time I saw it happens, when my fellow Italian countrymen chose Silvio Berlusconi as their rescuing hero, that man virtually complete control of media was an essential part of his ascension.

(Berlusconi has always denied having such control... but, how many time the owner of an American private  broadcasting corporation has ever called the chief of  PBS to get a job to a starlette, that was in turn shagging a supporter of the then-current government, so that said supporter withdraw and let said government topple? S.B. was accidentally taped doing such a call, some years ago...) 


Donald Trump is not Silvio Berlusconi. By his own preferred metrics for success in life, he is just a bit more than half a Berlusconi.

The Italian, son of a mid-level bank manager, went from playing pianos on cruising ships to 6.9 billion $ of personal wealth.

The Donald went from being the son of Trump senior to... 3.7 billion $.

It's a lot... still, merely a 1/7th of what Bill Gates donated ever since he was fed of being singled out as the incarnation of new tech corporations greed. 

So, if someone voted for the guy because they bought in Trump's mythology as a successful entrepreneur... I can concede that he does not suck, but some players in his league could argue differently.

As for, fixing things in the economy so that his voters may have it better?

They may as well forget it.

These Americans are in for a discovery... they just elected as their President a member of that very same 1/1000th that, in the last 30 years, has scooped up that 8% of the national income that went out of the pockets of the lower half of the middle class.

He is also someone that whole-heartedly believes that giving his fellow 1/1000thers more opportunities to do business on their own terms - community needs be damned - will result in improvements.

Is it going to work, this time? 

No - if it did, the Bush era would not have ended with the great recession.

In this four years, we will likely see to a lot of stuff that appeals to the guts of Trump voters - the disbandment of Planned Parenthood, more systematic obstacles on the access to abortion, the repeal of affirmative action initiatives, maybe a push to renew a ban on gay marriage (I don't think it will pass... after all, LGBT are born with the same incidence everywhere and from everybody and, to be honest, given that they seem not better not worse than anybody else at the parenting game, society has little real reasons to renege that right... if the economical purpose of families is to create the next generation of citizens, gay couples function just about the same).

Mind you, it is all stuff that does not cost a dime.

Probably, we'll see Obamacare dismantled, so that insurance companies will be allowed top ditch someone's ass again, whence (s)he became too costly a client to maintain (it was among the reasons why cancer statistics in US were so appalling) and the cost/benefits ratio of the U.S. health system will keep being abysmal.

We'll see it, because many people who contributed to his campaign will gain from it.

It would give healthy dividends to some of the worse rent-seekers on the planet.

We'll see maybe more spending on weapons - which is, really, more a way to subsidize uncompetitive local industries, for the sake of political gains, than an actual improvement of national security - and less on anything that DJT does not care about.

Maybe it will finally be the end for NEA - mixed feeling on that, on my part. I was never going to get a grant from that anyway.   

But, serious policies to try to improve the lot of that white, low middle class America that voted for him?

That costs money and political capital that DJT does not really have.

I expect four years of complaining about the resistance put up by democrats on his proposals- truth is, many of the Republicans in both houses will have their reasons to stop the guy, on this or that issue - and not much more.

But by the end of the term,  nothing will have changed in his voters plights, which is understandable.


It is just about what a bunch of economical has-been should expect from the rule of a social Darwinist. 

Or, if you prefer, what the same kind of Italians got from 17 tears of Berlusconi.