A column in today’s New York Times speculates that Trump’s south-based insults of Jeff Sessions have begun to take a toll on his most-loyal supporters.
Working-class whites, particularly in the old Rust Belt, were the main beneficiaries of the expansion of health care under President Barack Obama. In Midwestern states that flipped from Obama to Trump, far more non-college-educated whites gained health coverage than did whites with degrees or members of ethnic minorities, according to an Urban Institute study. And if the president’s party succeeds in choking the last life out of Obamacare, these Trump voters stand to lose the most.
As noted, some of them are catching on. A Quinnipiac poll out this week showed that even among non-college-educated whites — the strongest demographic holdout for Trump — a plurality now say they’d like to see Congress be more of a check on the president. Since his election, he’s down 14 points among the “poorly educated” that Trump once professed to love, a CNN poll found.
Ironically, Trump’s disdain for the south is something I can get behind. Every social– and family-pathology that has a name is more acute in the south than anywhere else, and the reason is the strength of the churches, which relentlessly degrade people into submission; culturally, the south really is inferior.
But, now, at least some of the south has begun to understand that Trump was merely using them when he so artfully channeled their subterranean malice against anybody who isn’t as screwed-up and debased as themselves — that, in fact, The Donald is merely another gaudy carpetbagger. They deserve each other.