This may shock you, but politicians of both parties sometimes … well, they exaggerate. They make campaign promises that they suspect or even know that they won’t be able to keep. The more cynical of the breed have no intention of even trying.
But never in the course of American history have we seen something on this scale.
Donald Trump ran on a promise to protect the forgotten against the elites, to instill a sense of economic justice into a system that no longer seemed fair to many. He promised to protect people, to give them a sense of value and stability against the chaos that threatened them. He railed against “a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.” He promised “a new government controlled by you, the American people.”
"I was the first & only potential GOP candidate to state there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid," he tweeted in the campaign. "I am going to take care of everybody," he said. "I don't care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody's going to be taken care of much better than they're taken care of now."
I’m not exactly shocked that Trump has failed to keep those promises. But what makes Trump different, what has astonished even the most strident Trump critic, is how shamelessly he has done the exact opposite of what he promised, in the process betraying those people who had embraced him most wholeheartedly.
He has handed control of economic policy to the very Wall Street elites he once attacked. He bragged that he would take on the pharmaceutical companies that were overcharging for drugs, and would use Medicare to negotiate lower costs; after a secret meeting with Big Pharma executives, he attacked Medicare for trying to lower drug costs. He pledged repeatedly that he would replace Obamacare with a plan that covered everyone. Then he celebrated when the House pushed 23 million Americans and more than 700,000 Georgians out of the insurance pool while giving millionaires a huge tax cut.
Trump’s new budget proposal compounds that betrayal, slashing Medicaid by another $1 trillion and giving additional trillions in tax cuts to the wealthy. And again, the people hit hardest by such steps would be the very people who had adored him, who lavished him with so much praise and faith that cult leaders looked on in envy.
As Trump himself once bragged, he could shoot somebody dead in the middle of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and his supporters would still back him. White male voters without a college degree have been particularly fervent, backing him last fall by a margin of 71 percent to 23 percent for Hillary Clinton.
But take a look at what’s happening through the lens of a Fox News poll. In the last four months, the polls tells us, Trump’s overall job approval numbers have dropped by eight percentage points. But among white voters with no college degree, the decline has been far more rapid, dropping by 14 points. Those in that demographic who say they strongly approve of Trump — the people who in the past have attended his rallies and proudly donned MAGA hats — has dropped by 12 points.
I doubt that rapid decline can be attributed to the Russia scandal or the Comey firing. Instead, these voters are beginning to understand just how completely they’ve been scammed by a con artist who promised them one thing and is delivering the exact opposite.
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