by Akim Reinhardt
Donald Trump is a con man. He was that for a very long time before he entered politics. Because he is a con man, it is tempting for critics to describe his presidential victories as successful cons. However, I think that interpretation does not hold up. Because while Trump at his essence may be little more than a sociopathic con man lacking a sophisticated and flexible inferiority, voters and citizens are not simply “marks.” The electorate, especially one as large as the United States’ (over 73 million registered voters), is maddeningly complex. It reflects a stunning amount of views, ideals, fears, and nuance. And the catch is that while the elected government can never hope to fully reflect this complexity, it can unduly influence it.
We become what we set out to destroy. It’s an old chestnut. Oh, the irony of becoming the thing we hate as we dedicate ourselves to its destruction. But for now I am more concerned with a different irony: we become what sets out to destroy us. That we sometimes are buffaloed into thinking our enemy is our friend, mistaking their sneer for a smile, emulating them, falling into their arms, and ultimately doing their bidding. Something like Stockholm Syndrome, perhaps, but even darker, manifested though through thorny seduction instead of hostage taking, and offering little chance for redemption. At best there will be regret, and at worst a permanent transformation.
Why do you end up loving someone who hates you? Because you already hated someone.
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The turn of the 21st century saw the rise of a large, elitist American bourgeoisie. People with college degrees and even graduate degrees, white collar jobs, middle and upper middle class salaries and benefits, urban and suburban homes in “good” (ie. wealthy) school districts, and snobbery to spare. They lionized the coasts, referring to the vast middle, where most Americans lived, as Flyover Country. The internationalist subset of this elite coded their elitism with casual references to NYLon (New York-London), European football, Wes and Paul Thomas Anderson films, and tapenade. The more domestic bulk of this new elite gentrified regional centers such as Chicago, Denver, and Portland.
As is often the case, many in the great two-thirds who were being looked down upon did not initially realize they were being looked down upon. Why would the average person assume they are an occasional punch line for strangers, especially when they’re usually ignoring and being ignored?
But eventually, the new elite’s elitism became impossible to ignore. It was they who largely controlled legacy media: film, TV, newspapers and magazines, and much of the music industry, which were still the main conveyors of popular culture in the 1990s. There was a song with outrageously filthy language and angry, hostile messages. There was a TV show about gay people. There was a commercial with an interracial couple. There was another celebrity voicing liberal (not radical, but liberal) values and ideas that didn’t jibe with middle American culture’s conservative bent. Even in the rare instance when middle America saw itself laudably and honestly represented on the grander stages instead of on ghettoized radio stations and cable TV channels, such as on the ABC sitcom Roseanne, there were pieces that didn’t add up. Yes, the family was relatable and concerned with kitchen table issues, but why was there a prominent gay character? Why was there an episode about abortion? Why did it, more and more, feel like their noses were being rubbed in something?
Yet there was at least one mass medium not controlled by the coastal elites, because they had abandoned it: AM radio. And it produced voices increasingly quick to finger, fairly and often otherwise, the encroaching liberal elites and their foreign values. Rush Limbaugh was not the first, but he was by far the most successful, spawning an army of imitators, angry white men, all seething to one degree or another and raging, articulately or amid a foaming frenzy, about FemiNazis, the Gay Agenda, Libtards, Radical College Professors, Rap music, and other bugaboos they claimed were hell bent on destroying America from the inside out.
Then came the internet, which quickly fractured, then neutered, and ultimately savaged the great homogenizing force of the 20th century: corporate mass media. Now anyone could start a blog, no matter how ludicrous the topic, or share a rumor on social media, no matter how toxic the lie.
A new, post-Cold War, populist anger was brewing among the non elites. The Republican Party was quick to capitalize on it and fan the flames, issuing ominous warnings about death panels and tan suits.
The Democrats? They flushed their own blue collar supporters down the toilet on the swirling current of international trade agreements that sped up the loss of good paying, semi- and unskilled blue collar jobs. They betrayed the unions that had bolstered them since the 1930s. And they thought this would work out well for them as a party because they, in their spectacularly narcissistic and utterly implausible vision of the future, believed a majority of Americans would soon become college graduates who saw the world their way. They also betrayed black voters, confident they would not turn to their only alternative, the openly racist Republican Party. But they couldn’t openly court the rich because that was the GOP’s job. And thus the Donkey Party believed that gun control and abortion rights would carry them forward to a bright future.
Perhaps you’ve heard about how expensive college tuition has become over the past thirty years, factorially outstripping inflation. And perhaps you’ve heard about the crisis in student debt. And perhaps you’ve met people who never wanted to go to college to begin with, so they never finished, or never started.
Here in 2025, barely a third of Americans have a bachelor’s degree.
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When citizens take to the voting booth, they are not simply trying to track the red queen in a game of 3-Card Monte. Many of them are expressing the complexities of their self in relation to society. They probably will not articulate it that way to anyone who asks. Rather, they’ll talk in the usual tropes and cliches that most people employ most of the time. They’ll offer up the pre-fab talking points that don’t fully reflect what they really think, but that’s what they’ve been trained to do. And when they fill out a severely limited ballot, their actions will represent, as best they can, the tangle of their dreams, resentments, fears, dogmas, and values. In the United States, they typically have only two choices about who can best embody their knotty world view, which often means simply hating one if you don’t actually love one.
Some voters, many of them unhinged, earnestly love Donald Trump with all their hearts. Some are rich and greedy. Some gave in to peer pressure. Some really did not like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. Some are fine with Trump despite some obvious flaws, and had little faith in Clinton or Harris to make their lives any better. But all Trump voters have something in common with those of us who did not vote for him: Donald Trump actually hates them.
Donald Trump clearly despises the great mass of Americans, whether they vote for him or not, publicly pandering to those who do, publicly shitting on those who do not, and seeing all but the wealthiest of them (and a few celebrities) as mere peasants to be manipulated and ripped off. Suck his dick and he’ll say nice things about you; don’t, and he’ll come in your face anyway. His need for adulation is endless, and the constitution and its system of checks and balances are little more than obstacles to his kleptocratic goals. The Great Con Man is not swindling just his supporters; he is swindling all of us. But what he does to his supporters is, in a way, much more nefarious. He channels their fear and resentment, using that to grind them down, pulverizing their democratic citizenship and pissing on it to form the thick, sour paste of modern fascism. And the saddest thing of all is not Donald Trump’s cynical manipulations, but the eagerness with which millions of Trump voters are becoming foul putty in the hands of the man who is destroying them.
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Akim Reinhardt’s wesbite is ThePublicProfessor.com