Trump's Victims
How one man turned the hardest working people in America into victims who saw solutions only through him.
He’s not a smart man. He can’t really read. And while it’s true that a friend once gave him My New Order—a collection of Hitler’s speeches—he denied reading it, saying, “If I had these speeches… I would never read them.”
But he didn’t need to. He had Roy Cohn.
Trump wasn’t shaped by ideology—he was shaped by cruelty. By a father who didn’t love him. By a mentor who taught him to lie, to bully, to deny, and above all, to never admit defeat. His entire public persona is a projection of that core insecurity. He doesn’t understand strength. He only understands dominance. There is no curiosity in him. No growth. No vision.
He’s deeply incurious about the world, and his playbook is two pages long—scribbled in the margins of torn-out Penthouse spreads from 1987. The master of image shaping that he is—Orwellian in his ability to change the perceptions of millions. Completely making up narratives out of whole cloth and selling them back to the people he just lied to.
This one man turned the entire Rust Belt—filled with proud, hard-working men and women—against their own best interests. He took people rooted in solidarity and labor, and twisted them into something else: isolated, angry, and convinced that their only power came through grievance. He didn’t give them something to believe in—he gave them something to blame. Turning hard working men and women in mewling childlike victims.
“The Democrats weren’t telling us what was wrong or who was to blame. Trump did that.” To paraphrase Michiganders on the NYT Daily podcast.
Trump, a man terminally fighting battles from the mid 80s and early 90s gets elected on the backs of union labor that he abhors, but he’s created voters by turning proud hard working Americans into victims that can’t save themselves without him because victims need rescuing. And he offered himself as the only solution to the problems he invented. Union workers want the same things they’ve always wanted: fair pay, a pension, and a job. And the truth is, there was actual progress happening without him.
Here’s what was really happening:
While Trump raged at windmills and trans athletes, the government was funding a generational shift in American industry. The CHIPS for America program, launched under the Biden-Harris administration, was restoring domestic manufacturing in a real and tangible way.
• $30+ billion in incentives
• $300+ billion in private investments
• 23 major chip projects across 15 states
• 115,000+ new jobs (35,000 in manufacturing, 78,000 in construction)
• Leading-edge chip clusters in AZ, OH, TX, and OR
• R&D and packaging centers across NM, IN, NY, and more
“All five major leading-edge logic and DRAM companies will produce chips in the U.S. No other economy in the world has more than two.”
This wasn’t theory. It wasn’t lip service. It was dirt-moving, job-creating, American industrial policy finally aimed at the future. Factories and work that was on shoring here in America.
And that’s when Trump told millions of people: none of this was real. There wasn’t progress. The factories? Lies. The jobs? A trick. The Democrats? Out to ruin you. He sold a story that everything that was helping them was actually hurting them. Real 1984, "there are four lights" type stuff.
People who didn’t have time to follow policy or parse infrastructure bills knew one thing: eggs were expensive. Maybe it was bird flu. Maybe it was corporate greed. But Trump gave them a simpler answer: Blame the Democrats and blame the immigrants.
That’s how you turn progress into fear. That’s how you turn well-meaning, working-class Democrats into frightened victims—begging for a strongman.
And that’s how you steal them—not just from the other party—but from the democratic process itself.
The current narrative is that the Democrats have "lost" a majority of the blue collar workers, and I would argue that they’ve been stolen and taken out of the process of democracy. Sold lies, and sold down the road into economic hardship and despair that only doubles down on the feelings of victimhood. The American worker has to be given hope. Hope to overcome. It’s easy to be a victim, it’s easy to feel weak and like no one is there to help, but the progress of the last 4 years proved one thing, and that’s is the fact that centrism and a single leader can work both sides of the isle to help secure a positive future. Middle America has to wake up and stop being afraid. Orange man bad, and he’s lying to you and stealing your retirement while he points at the trans athletes.
Stop being fooled. Come back to the light. Make America, American again.
p.s. I've been on a bit of a kick of late using ChatGPT to help do python and html coding for some business tools. I've also run my last two completed articles through it to get feedback. It's not prompted writing, it's me writing a whole thing and looking for some feedback. She has some pretty amusing changes, just things said a way that I wouldn't say it. Pulling back things that I think are biting and hard hitting, or difficult to take, she wants to pull back on. referring to blue collar voters being turned into "mewling children" was a bridge too far for her. Also, she wanted me to get reference for claims like "He kept Hitler speeches by his bed" Also she asked me to say what was so great that the Democrats had done. Something tangible. So, I grabbed this graph off of the government's website that showed all these accomplishments, but because it's an image... no one has bothered deleting it yet. Also, the bot brought up Roy Cohn, which really makes me think that this LLM is well trained on anti trump writing out there, because this shit is in the water on my side of the isle. There's probably 20% of this that has been altered or fleshed out... like here at the end... haha.. I just went and compared my ending paragraph to hers (that was in here when I started writing this.) I just swapped my writing in, because I'm a better writer. 😄
Anyway, I'm trying to stay away from image generation and other things that are resource hogs for AI... just to hold on to our climate for a few more minutes, but I don't think there's a world where we can ignore it, and we can still be as creative as we want to be.... If anyone would like to edit for free (or $20/month) I'd be happy to collaborate once in a while when I get a bug up my butt and have to write something.
Peace.