Donald Trump’s Tampa Office Is an Unlikely Melting Pot – NYT
But here in Tampa, in the week before the pivotal Florida primary, conversations with more than 20 volunteers showing up to make campaign calls or otherwise help out at a small Trump campaign office in an old cigar factory yielded some surprises on the subjects of race, ethnicity and bigotry.
For a campaign frequently depicted as offering a rallying point for the white working class, the people volunteering to help Mr. Trump here are noteworthy for their ethnic diversity. They include a young woman who recently arrived from Peru; an immigrant from the Philippines; a 70-year-old Lakota Indian; a teenage son of Russian immigrants; a Mexican-American.
They range the political spectrum, too, from lifelong Democrat to independent to libertarian to conservative Republican. To a person, they condemned and sometimes ridiculed David Duke and other white supremacists who have noisily backed Mr. Trump. “I totally do not agree with them,” said one volunteer, Andrew Cherry.
Yet like Mrs. Linsky, many spoke openly about how fears centered on race and ethnicity were at the heart of their support for Mr. Trump. To a large extent, they traced those fears to the scars they still bear from the Great Recession — lost jobs, drained 401(k)’s, home foreclosures, rising debt, the feeling that the country is broken.
From: Donald Trump’s Tampa Office Is an Unlikely Melting Pot – The New York Times
A media that was more interested in being self-reflective in a meaningful way (ie one that wanted to learn from its mistakes) instead of being self-reflective in a solipsistic way (one that is obsessed with psuedo-sophistication) might be self-aware to point out that the depictions of Trump as “a rallying point for the white working class” largely come from the media itself.
Members of the media are forever being surprised when the facts of the real world conflict with some media narrative. What does that tell you about members of the media?Report
The “white working class voter” does hold with the exit polls, to an extent. It does falsely suggest his support is narrow and deep when it fact it’s more broad and shallow, though.
I was thinking about this earlier and I have four open Trump fans on Twitter that I regularly engage with (that I can name off the top of my head): One black, one Asian-American, one Jewish, and one WWCV. (My Twitter feed is not exactly representative, to be sure, but I found that interesting when I thought about it.)Report
That is exactly my point. Trump is a populist, that much is obvious. And he’s a populist with a record of scapegoating certain ethnic minority groups, so it’s perfectly reasonable to think about him as a rallying point for white working class voters… if you’re righting something from six months ago.
So, that’s the question: why does the media have such a hard time reconciling old narratives with present facts? Perhaps because the contemporary media is much more interested in narratives than it is in facts.Report
Why is the media comfortable sticking with old, familiar ways of thinking rather than constantly checking them against new facts?
Probably because they’re human.Report