As I said in the GOP thread, it won't, because while the broad characteristics of the Thing are the same, they're in reality two ontologically distinct entities. That is to say, Trump wraps himself in the guise of an outsider, not someone who has been cultivated and groomed within the Hill for decades. He may present himself as a billionaire, but ultimately in the eyes of a voter, he's "just a working stiff like me." There's something to be said to that line that every American thinks of themselves as a "temporarily displaced millionaire," and so there is in some sense an identification with Trump in that respect, as a "temporarily displaced millionaire" that's finally made good. Nevermind the fact that he inherited his wealth - that's immaterial here, because: the fact that he rambles incoherently and that he doesn't come with the fancy high-intellectual credentials serves to emphasize this alignment; he didn't go to Harvard or Yale or Georgetown to study law/political science, he didn't intern for a senator or clerk for a judge out of college, and he didn't work in some shady think tank for 5-8 years before starting down that
cursus honorum that the vast majority of our politicians follow. The broad-strokes narrative is eminently recognizable as the paradigmatic American dream: go to college, get some money from your parents, "start a business", find success, and then enjoy the fruits of your labor. The narrative works despite the actual facts (he got his degree from an Ivy League, his wealth is inherited, he long-term almost certainly lost money through his business decisions over doing nothing with it and sticking it in indexed funds) because it rings a lot more clearly to people; it reifies the American dream (with just a bit of startup capital anybody can "become a billionaire") as opposed to the
cursus honorum of The Hill which paints a picture of a political élite of powerful people using their power and social connections to put their children in lanes that raise them into that same élite class in an ourobouros of political hobnobbing.
The political response, from the élite both in the Republican and Democratic parties serves only to play into this. Their reaction is to attack his credentials (i.e. that he doesn't come from this political élite ourobouros pipeline) and to attack his manner of speech (i.e. that he "sounds dumb" or "incoherent," or else that he says distasteful things). This serves only to focus that social/class dichotomy. It's not a matter of rich versus poor, but a matter of socially élite versus not. It's a classic divide that has long colored American history and culture. On the one hand you have the blue blood élite that go to high-falutin East Coast Universities, attend symphonies, and talks about the latest
Economist or
New Yorker articleand only really interact with each other. And on the other hand you have everybody else that maybe go to a State school, listen to popular music, and reference Mad Magazine or Looney Tunes or whatever. A member of the everybody else may make a fortune - they may even command more wealth in reality than any of those blue bloods, but they will never
be a blue blood because they don't have that pedigree, they don't have those credentials, and they don't have "that taste". All of the democratic criticisms of Trump play into this. The criticisms of his ill-fitting suits, of his garishly decorated apartments, his tacky bombast, his predilections for fast food, his rambling inarticulate diction, this all plays into this dichotomy - it's an ordinary person made good being derided by an élite class for not being one of them - and it serves only to emphasize to ordinary voters that there is a class divide in this country, and that political élite class ("the swamp") will do whatever they can to hammer home this divide and prevent ordinary people from holding any power whatsoever.
This is why the improprieties of Trump and the improprieties of Biden are totally different. Biden is a Washington élite. A senator of 30 years. As such, he presents himself/is presented by association with his party as someone who is of a more refined or distinguished character. He is an élite and is deserving of the esteem that entails. When it comes to light that Biden has used his influence to get his burnout son a cushy job on a corporate board, that emphasizes this class divide again. That ourobouros rears its ugly head (or...tail?
). It makes it clear that the meritocracy is a lie, and that there's rules for the powerful (political/cultural - not economic - élite) and there's rules for everybody else. When Trump does bad, it looks different because a) Trump doesn't present himself as someone who ought to be held to a higher standard as a Biden or Hillary does, and b) because when Washington points that bad out, it simply comes across as that political élite circling the wagons, as looking down their nose at the boorish normal people, and as conspiring to prevent ordinary people from acquiring any sort of power or say whatsoever. That's the difference.
A big refrain during the 2016 election was that to understand Donald Trump you needed to take him "Seriously" and not "Literally." Which is to say, you had to think about him and his rhetoric more in terms of what he represents at a broader, structural or cultural level. Much was made of this distinction because to Coastal Liberal voters and media, what he said was literally incoherent and nobody could really make sense of why he had and continues to have so much staying power. The answer that the Coastal Liberal voters and media have seemed to settle on with this form of analysis is, essentially, that Trump speaks to racism and "economic anxiety" which resonates with poor voters. But this is still not getting it. This is still trying to take Trump "literally" and not "seriously" by paternalistically looking down one's nose at the boorish poor white who irrationally "fears what he does not understand," and the assumption is that, on the one hand, we need to rehabilitate these people by patronizingly showing them the error of their ways, or else rest smug in the knowledge that Trump will reveal himself as a fraud and his base will turn on him. That's not going to happen, and as long as you (royal You) insist on such a monolectic, superficial (literal) analysis, you will never actually understand Trump, nor his base of support. They aren't dumb. They aren't deluded. And they aren't propped up by some absurd shadowy cabal of Russian GRU operatives. And you (royal you) are never going to truly understand them until you make a genuine dialectic analysis of the structure of American culture and politics. To understand Trump's support you have to not only take Trump "seriously, not literally," but you have to apply the same dialectic analysis to the Democratic (in particular) and Washingtonian (more broadly) establishment as well.
tl;dr: read
The Rise of Silas Lapham
