Guilty or not, many voters have certainly experienced pleasure watching Trump torment the Washington establishment. In 2015, Christopher Orr argued in the Atlantic that the Republican primary race was the political equivalent of the movie Caddyshack, with Trump playing Rodney Dangerfield’s character Al Czervik and Jeb Bush taking over the role of Judge Elihu Smails from Ted Knight.
“Pretty much everyone in America would like to have more money, obviously,” wrote Orr. “What they don’t want is to think that wealth would fundamentally change who they are. This is a basic democratic credo. Most Americans don’t want to be rich so that they can develop a taste for fancy French cuisine to be enjoyed over polite repartee with their fellow snobs at the country club. They want to be rich so they can do whatever they want and never have to take crap from anyone.”
Orr added that Trump was “an aggressive anti-snob who says whatever the hell he pleases and misses no opportunity to stick it to the establishment. The GOP is Bushwood Country Club (Bushwood!) and Trump the obnoxious interloper who, owing to his wealth, can’t be tastefully ignored.”8
In 2016, Josh Barro of Business Insider called Trump “the guilty-pleasure candidate” and wrote about the future president’s brand identity: “Trump Steaks. Trump Vodka. Trump Wine. These are not luxury items so much as they are indulgence items. His is a brand that says, screw your cardiologist, have a steak. You earned it.”
Barro went on to observe: “There is a lot of money to be made selling virtue-signaling goods and services to affluent people, but Donald Trump is not Martha Stewart, and he is not Gwyneth Paltrow. The appeal of Trump is not just that he’s rich, but that because he’s rich he gets to do whatever he wants—and he does not want to drink kale juice.”9
In a similar vein, comedian Seth Meyers noted a suspicion among some political analysts that candidate Trump was more popular than reported because voters were reluctant to admit to pollsters that they backed his controversial ideas. Said Meyers: “Guys, that’s a red flag. Your president shouldn’t be a guilty pleasure.” Meyers then pretended to be a voter struggling to make the decision and said, “Uhhh—I know I should be getting a salad, but I’m just going to vote Trump. I am so bad right now!”10
Whether Trump’s unique style of commentary elicits laughter or outrage—or perhaps a little of both—there is now a presidential record to consider. In this era the stakes are high for America and the world, and who would say that a tasteless tweet should overrule a presidency that supports liberty and the rule of law?
Trump’s media detractors have known all along that they weren’t going to get anywhere blasting the president’s Caddyshack style if the substance of his agenda was yielding positive results for most voters. So reporters at major media outlets spent a few years promoting without evidence a theory that Trump had betrayed his country. Unhinged opinion writers like Paul Krugman at the New York Times suggested that tens of millions of American voters were willing to accept a Russian conspiracy to rig U.S. elections as long as they could gain partisan advantage or tax cuts.11
If the claims of collusion with Russia had been true, they surely would have proven that voters made a devil’s bargain in backing Trump. But the point was always to try to shame his supporters, not to conduct a thorough examination of the available evidence. In March 2018 the House Intelligence Committee released a report on Russian efforts to interfere in American elections, and like every other government report on the subject it found no evidence of Trump’s involvement in such efforts. Three days later, Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) told Maria, “What strikes me most is that we had seventy recommendations and findings, yet I think you might be the first person to actually cover” them.12
The collapse of the collusion case makes it hard to claim that Trump voters should feel guilty about anything. On the other side of the ledger, the tragic events of 2020 have only served to underline the moral imperative of electing a U.S. president who prioritizes American prosperity and liberty.
During the first three years of the Trump presidency, while American workers were often enjoying record-setting levels of job openings, perhaps it was easy for media pundits to take such conditions for granted. Wage gains were dismissed as insufficient compensation for Trump’s flaws. Such pundits will now have a hard time persuading the former owners and employees of shuttered businesses that, hey, it’s only money.
In the spring of 2020, state and local governments responded to the coronavirus by ordering the shutdown of much of American society. Mandated closures of businesses and other organizations inflicted a financial toll that would have been almost unimaginable just a few weeks earlier. Exactly how many trillions of dollars this will cost Americans is still to be determined.
Long lines suddenly appeared at food banks nationwide, even in some of the country’s most affluent communities. Aerial views of thousands of cars whose drivers were waiting for emergency food assistance circulated on the internet. Many people had never relied on charity before and were shocked to find themselves needing help. In San Antonio, National Public Radio interviewed a forty-two-year-old bank employee named Erica whose ex-husband had lost his job and could no longer make child support payments.
“I never, ever could have even imagined anything like this,” Erica told the public broadcaster. “I was almost ashamed, to be honest, to even pick up food from the food bank because somebody might look at my used Cadillac and be like, ‘What is she doing in the food bank line?’ But I had to get past those
