While this is undoubtedly true, I don’t think it is just the sense of entitlement that is driving this anger. It isn’t as if entitled ‘Karens’ are just a phenomena that spontaneously popped up in the last couple of years, or that a bunch of middle-class white guys playing golf explaining to each other why they are so uniquely special and anyone who hasn’t accomplished their achievements is just lazy or stupid hasn’t been a perennial past-time since the first Scot decided to make use of all of this rocky, unfarmable land by getting someone to pay him for the privilege of chasing a small ball around it.
I think the anger is more a consequence of the fact that things like the economy, politics, employment, et cetera, seem more increasingly out of control, and unlike minorities who can legitimately point out that they have been excluded and denied fair participation, middle class white people don’t really have anyone to blame. So instead, they get angry at the social changes that are occurring, even if legalizing gay marriage or recognizing institutionalized racism aren’t the cause of them, and then blame the people who are agitating for such changes for being somehow ‘at fault’ for everything, because if the world had just stayed frozen circa 1955 they’d still be living on the fat of the land with big-finned cars and an endless supply of Olympia beer in the garage refrigerator.
That this utopian dream was never a reality even for middle class white folks isn’t the point; this is the marketing campaign that has been sold to them since the days of Reagan, and codified in Newt Gingrich’s and Dick Armey’s “Contract With America”. Reinforcing these ideas, and blaming everybody else who wasn’t on board for obstructing it has been the implicit mission statement of Fox News and other conservative propaganda outlets, who have managed to stir up anger and resentment over something so trivial as the president’s fashion sense or that someone wrote a childrens book about a a little girl with two mommies, and of course, the endless War On Christmas.
In this environment, with a large group primed to resent anybody who even speaks softly about a need for social change or equality, comes a candidate who looks like a parody of a wealthy magnate but talks in their language of resentment about how all of the “elites” don’t like him either because he speaks truth to power and will “drain the swamp”. The propagandists love him because he is the caricature they really want but no working politician will lower themselves to being (even Reagan, who reluctantly acquiesced to Trent Lott in dog whistling about “states’ rights”), and he’s suitably compliant and fungible to appeal to any of a wide array of “fellow travelers” from conservative Evangelicals looking for a literal anti-Christ to white nationalists and fascists seeking a figure to rally around.
Even though these different groups don’t really share a consistent set of political beliefs or ethics, they’re all in agreement that they are somehow being screwed over by progressive change, and Donald Trump, as ridiculous and inept as he is at, well, everything but especially politics and governance, is their cause célèbre that allows them to emerge and voice their resentments even if he and they can’t clearly articulate them. When the camera is turned to what is clear instances of brutality, unaccountability, and flat out murder by police of ordinary citizens of all racial backgrounds but especially blacks, the response is that it was somehow instigated by some combination of Antifa and Black Lives Matter. And this is the common thread; it is always some minority group that is the culpable actor instead of deeply entrenched institutional abuse and lack of accountability.
As for Donald Trump himself, I think his anger comes from a very different and personal place. The neglect of his father, social rejection from people he views as business peers, his manifest and successive failures as a businessman and investor, and just the general lack of actually being good at anything have made him a bitter, entitled narcissist who deep in his core probably realizes that he hasn’t actually earned anything he’s gotten in life and hears even the faintest criticism as an echo of his own lack of self-respect. His insistence on complete loyalty from subordinates, his fawning over autocrats in the hopes that they will treat him with the respect he cannot get from actual leaders, his obsessive need to put his name in gold letters on every flat surface he can find, and that clownish comb-over all speak to a endless well of insecurity that no amount of trophy wives, beauty pageants, and other superficial prizes that end up being giant money pits can fill. Trump is fundamentally angry because he’s a complete clown, and the people who show up to his rallies to fête him are the exact opposite of who he really wants to love and adore him.
Stranger