UNDERSTANDING WHY DONALD J. TRUMP MADE IT TO THE WHITE HOUSE

….A young Illinois blue collar Trump supporter’s car window sign

 

A 24 year old, single father, living paycheck to paycheck, became Trump’s Illinois social media coordinator.

 

For those of us that were surprised and disappointed when on November 8^th, we watched normally Blue states streaking into Red and elevating a congenital liar to the most powerful office in the world.  We will now start living with the results of that dark day.

 

But as to why we will now be living with all those results, I can say that the reason for today’s President Donald Trump, it all started becoming very clear to me more than 20 years ago.

 

For some background on this and my family, after my mother had passed away, my father had decided to return to his small home town in eastern Kansas to live out his final years with his long-time family members.  Up to this return to the mid-west, my father had formerly been a vagabond American construction worker and he dragged our family all over America, landing wherever the work was calling.  In the late 1950's, we finally settled on the West Coast in the area that was later to become California’s technical arena known as Silicon Valley.

 

Being that I was raised in this area of California, going through high school, then college, and eventually I joined in the local work force.  With an engineering degree, I entered the world of high-tech.  Being in that business, I traveled the US, Asia and Europe for years, finally retiring in that same California valley.

 

However, I have to admit, that with all of that traveling through-out my business career, most of the business areas I visited, here and abroad, had been blessed with major business growth and full employment.  The one issue that came along with the high-tech world, was that wherever you went, there was always an atmosphere of growth and a growing, prosperous future.

 

But as this was all happening, in the early 1990’s, I received a call from a Kansas doctor saying that my father had become very ill and we had better get ourselves to Kansas if we wanted to see him alive.

 

Needless to say, we got ourselves to Kansas and we made sure we got the grandkids there as well, and it was just in time.

 

My father passed away, and some of us stayed in Dad’s Kansas house for handling all the various affairs that come with the loss of a family member. 

 

But what we saw by staying in that small, middle-American town, were the circumstances that also eventually brought on the voters that ended up putting the latest occupant in the White House.  And it was the same voters that gave Trump’s cronies, all the keys to the running of our nation’s government.

 

While we were staying in my father’s house, we occasionally drove down the town’s main street where most of the businesses had closed and had been boarded up.  As it is today in many other small, middle-American towns, just outside their local city limits, there is now a giant Wal-Mart, a Home Depot and a modern Walgreens Drugs.  Why should anyone go to a store in town when at one stop, you could buy everything from groceries, to nightgowns, to lumber, and even ammo for your shotgun or your assault rifle?  And all of that available new merchandise was from foreign countries at much lower prices.

 

When we talked to the other local family members, we learned that most of their kids had already left home to attend college or to find work in Kansas City or Chicago or points further east or west.  However, very few had stayed local.  That is, unless they had a local municipal job, or unless they were involved in the local corporate farming community.  It also became very clear that, what I had witnessed in that trip to Kansas, that same phenomenon had and has been occurring in small towns all over middle America. 

 

Now, let's bring all of this into today’s world.

 

Just last Summer, my wife and I went on a long vacation road trip for visiting some family, and to see even more of our beautiful country.  What we found on that trip were the same situations we had encountered in my father’s small town in Kansas.  Many of the small communities and villages we drove through or visited had boarded up stores and businesses.  There were also large numbers of homeless on the streets.  We came across many older cars, trucks and vans where it was obvious the occupants had been living in their vehicles for some time. 

 

The reality that was so stark was understanding the truth of what we had previously been told.  That being that for years, both the Left and the Right coasts of the country had been doing much better than those middle American states.  Other than drought or some of the other effects of global climate change, both coasts have shown much better results in the areas of adult education, available jobs and economic progress. 

 

 

With the exceptions of a few key middle American cities, the high tech, medical, and aeronautical industries have been focused on the east and west coasts.  The losses of jobs and factories in America has been mainly focused on the "rust belt" and those states and territories of middle America.

 

Today, California alone would be the 7^th largest economy in the world if it were to be looked at as a separate nation.  But as additional proof of why Donald Trump is our new president, there was a recent article in The Post that documented a perfect example of this national phenomena and the rise of Trump.  The subject of the article is a young blue collar worker from Illinois who is a strong supporter of Donald Trump.  This individual is a perfect example of the voters who put Donald Trump in the White House. 

This young man was a 24 year old, former night watchman and a single father, living paycheck to paycheck.  But as a strong Trump supporter, he went from delivering signs for Donald Trump’s campaign to becoming its volunteer social media coordinator of Illinois.

 

For all this work, the young man earned an invitation to an inaugural ball occurring in Washington DC.  He also planned to attend the inauguration itself. But unfortunately, this young man was faced with one major obstacle as he prepared to head for Washington.  How was he going to afford a proper suit and shoes to attend a ball?

 

With the ball invitation in hand, he had gone through his wardrobe looking for something to wear. Oh, he had some old suits, but nothing appropriate for an evening ball, let alone the proper shoes. He even thought about using some of his meager paycheck. But that was when a former teacher and local politician from this man’s part of Illinois decided to help out his former student.  “I’ve known him long enough that when he told me he was going to an inaugural ball, I knew he would not have a proper suit and shoes,” the teacher commented. “So, I took him to Men’s Wearhouse.”

 

The shopping trip was a big success as they not only got a new suit, they were able to secure a donation of a pair of Allen Edmonds dress shoes for the ball.

 

Hundreds of visiting buses would be converging on Washington filled with these same kind of blue-collar well-wishers.  The streets were filled with the many rural voters who had flocked to the polls, and who put out all the signs or donated a few dollars in an effort that added up to a winning President Trump. And today, they are still dazzled by his words as they earned that front-row seat for Trump’s ascension to power.

 

Among all the throngs in DC was this same 24 year old from Illinois. 

 

He eventually had piled into a car with his friends and they began their drive to Washington and a stay at a Days Inn in Arlington, VA.  “This is pretty much the biggest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” the young man said of the inauguration. “I don’t get out much. I’m a small-town, blue-collar guy. But I get tired of seeing people hit rock bottom.  If you go to the local coffee shops, the old guys talk about the good old days when the nation’s engines roared and things weren’t only built in China. Trump is going to stop all that!” 

 

Well, that remains to be seen.

 

But this is a perfect example of why Donald J. Trump is in the White House.  Now, Donald Trump says he is “just the messenger” for all the people like this 24 year old American.  That also remains to be seen.

 

But for this young supporter, Donald J. Trump will now have the opportunity to either put up or shut up!  (Oh, I forgot……Trump never shuts up.)

 

If we look way back, this change in the country all began when the American middle class started shrinking in the 1980’s.  As automation occurred and jobs left the rust belt of the country and as the United States lost almost 50,000 factories, the blue collar workers of the country then started looking for the next PT Barnum to believe in.   They found that man in Donald J. Trump…him, his billions, his fashion model wife and his Twitter account, and all the false promises that come with it.

 

Let’s hope that the young man from Illinois had a very good time while visiting Washington DC and that Donald J. Trump is able to fulfill all the promises that this and many other American men and women are counting on.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017