Дональд Трамп - Triggered

The logic in this may have been devious, but it certainly wasn’t stupid. Like the Democrats of today, those liberals realized that when people are dependent on you, they’re much more likely to go to the polls and cast a vote for you. It’s just basic psychology. It is not in the best interest of the Democrat Party to give workers money and let them make their own decisions. If they do that, the Washington establishment that creates wasteful spending programs and doles out food stamps to out-of-work coal miners would become obsolete, and there would be no reason for those coal miners to get out to the polls and vote for a Democrat next November. The Democrats also managed to create a split between the leaders of labor unions and the actual members. A big part of the reason for that divide is the rampant corruption in union leadership. More than ever, union leaders have become part of the Washington establishment—veritable swamp creatures in their own right—while the actual workers continue to suffer through flat wages, high taxes, and glacial economic growth. Along the way, union bosses realized that they could “represent” the membership by doing nothing: not working and being completely subsidized by the workers of their own unions! Meanwhile, they threw their support behind a party that did nothing for them but ship union jobs overseas. They were literally helping to export the American dream that they were initially created to protect.

For example, take John “Johnny Doc” Dougherty. As of this writing, the boss of the Philadelphia Building & Construction Trades Council and Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers is awaiting trial on a 116-count federal indictment that includes the embezzlement of more than $600,000 in union funds. According to the Wall Street Journal , Dougherty had union workers power wash the sidewalk in front of his house, water his tomato garden, and make sports bets for him. For the past fifteen years, he practically ran the Democrat Party in Philly and its suburbs. So deep into the Democrats’ pocket was he that he made sure his union local did the wiring for the 2016 Democrat National Convention at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia. He met with Hillary Clinton during the campaign. Dougherty might be a throwback to the days of the movie On the Waterfront , but he isn’t an anomaly. Union leadership across the country is rife with corruption. According to data released by the US Department of Labor, since 2001, the Office of Labor-Management Standards has investigated and prosecuted union leaders for embezzling more than $100 million in union dues. Union leadership also spent something like $100 million in collected dues on Hillary Clinton’s campaign while supporting an agenda (immigration reform, climate change, and other Democrat favorites) that sounds like talking points for a Bernie Sanders speech.

To be honest, Rusty probably knew all that better than I did. He just needed someone to tell him what he already knew. By the time I went inside the venue for my speech, he was looking a little more secure about the vote he would cast in a few days.

When I asked Rusty what modern Democrat policies his grandfather might have supported, from socialized medicine to giving amnesty to millions of illegals, he couldn’t name a one. “How about keeping more of the money you earn from working?” I asked. “How much more of your paycheck do you want the government taking away?” Rusty shook his head and said, “None.” I smiled. “Look, Rusty,” I said, “I understand the tradition. I understand that being a Democrat is all your family has ever known. But, man, today’s party is not your grandfather’s Democrat Party.” You could almost see the light go on behind his eyes. I put my hand out and he grabbed it. “Welcome to the GOP,” I said. “We’re glad to have you.”

I’ve had this talk many times since then, and I’m sure I’ll keep having it.

BLUE-COLLAR BILLIONAIRE

In the aftermath of the election, the so-called experts and geniuses on TV were shocked to find that my father had gotten unheard-of levels of support from voters who belonged to labor unions. In fact, the only Republican presidential candidate to get a larger percentage of the union vote had been Ronald Reagan in the 1984 election. For weeks, op-ed writers and data journalists seemed baffled that in all the years that Republicans had been running for president, the candidate who had finally broken through and gained the support of rural union workers was a billionaire who lived on the top floor of a Fifth Avenue high-rise. They pored over my father’s life story, trying to find some way to explain it all away, even saying that the voters must not have had all the information, that they had gone with Trump only because they were “non-college-educated,” or that they just hated Washington and wanted to burn it down.

What all those morons with Ivy League journalism degrees failed to see was right there in plain sight. As I’ve often said, if you want to wear yourself out, follow Donald J. Trump around a job site someday. My father doesn’t just visit a construction project; he stays the whole day and then comes back the next day. By the time he’s through, he knows most of the workers’ names, every problem they’ve encountered, and just about exactly how much he’s spent. At The Trump Organization, we’ve hired thousands and thousands of union workers over the years, including Teamsters, union carpenters, and union electricians. Thanks partly to my father, many of them kept working for years, bought homes, and sent their kids to college. Democrats can pretend to be the party of the American working class, but those men and women aren’t easily fooled. To voters like Rusty, the billionaire from Fifth Avenue is just as blue collar as they are. To the idiots on television who ended up with egg on their faces: shame on you. The same goes for the executives who kept these idiots employed. Only in the world of fake news can someone get something so wrong, such as the 2016 election, come back the next day, and pretend nothing ever happened! Where the hell is the accountability, people? Heads should have rolled! Do you remember the meltdown on CNN? What a glorious early morning as those who had predicted for weeks that Hillary would win by double digits had to eat their words. Still, they got away with all their lies. Trump exposed the supposed experts for what they are: full of shit.

It all reminds me of another trip I took early on in the campaign, this one to Trump Turnberry, my father’s golf course and country club a few miles from Glasgow, Scotland. We were about to reopen there after a year of extensive renovations. As it happened, the trip took place just as British citizens were getting ready to vote on whether or not their country would leave the European Union. As we were getting ready to cut the ribbon at one of the famed golf holes, I was hanging around with some of the guys who look after the course—people from the local towns who drank in the pubs and worked all day out in the sun (and the rain… it is Scotland, after all). As usual, they were the people I spent most of my time with. In my years of going to Turnberry for Trump Org, I’d gotten to know most of them well.

A few yards away, a group of reporters was gathering around the stage. Most of them had come to ask my father questions about his presidential campaign and his views on Brexit, which was the big story of the day. None of them cared very much about the golf course. From where I was standing with the maintenance guys, we could hear the television news anchors giving some early poll results on the referendum that was going to happen later that week. According to those news anchors—a small subset of the British population, say 1 percent, who lived almost exclusively in London and other metro areas—there was no way their countrymen would vote to leave. That, they seemed to suggest, would be ridiculous and stupid—not unlike the election of a certain brash billionaire from Manhattan that was happening across the Atlantic Ocean.