Trump and the Significance of the Wildwood Rally

If ever there were a snapshot of serious political message being sent, it would be that coming from the estimated 100,000 Americans who gathered this past Saturday in Wildwood, New Jersey, to hear and cheer on former President Donald Trump....

The post Trump and the Significance of the Wildwood Rally appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

If ever there were a snapshot of serious political message being sent, it would be that coming from the estimated 100,000 Americans who gathered this past Saturday in Wildwood, New Jersey, to hear and cheer on former President Donald Trump.

Trump’s detractors called the attendees a cult, which is not only designed to insult but also wrong. What was in evidence in vivid fashion in Wildwood — in decidedly blue-state New Jersey — can only be described as a movement.

American history has seen movements before. Most prominently there was the “civil rights movement” of the 1960s. It existed because millions of Americans came to see that black Americans were being deliberately discriminated against. They were not allowed to vote, to prosper economically, or to share in what was known as “the American Dream.” The civil rights movement demanded change — and, in time, it got it.

So, too, were the anti-Vietnam War protests a movement, one that wound up having a serious impact on the 1968 election and ending the presidency of the once popular Democrat President Lyndon Johnson.

The base of the Trump movement is, unsurprisingly, motivated in part by economics. For example, contrary to the blatant lie Joe Biden likes to tell, inflation was not 9 percent when he took over from Trump. It was 1.4 percent.

As FactCheck.org notes, under Biden:

Inflation surged to its highest level in over 40 years. Despite recent moderation, consumer prices are up nearly 19% overall. Gasoline is up 54%.

Yet even those dismal economic numbers are not enough to inspire the passion seen on vivid display in Wildwood.

There is something else at work — a big something else.

It is, safe to say, cultural. It’s symbolized by a decided contempt for average Americans and the values they hold dear. This would include patriotism.

Liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. writes:

In affluent neighborhoods around Washington, New York and Los Angeles — and, for that matter, Paris, London and Berlin — it’s common to denounce nationalism, to disdain supposedly mindless, angry populists, and to praise those with an open-minded, cosmopolitan outlook. Note that those involved are praising themselves….

Across the democratic world, an enormous divide has opened between affluent metropolitan areas and the smaller cities, towns and rural regions far removed from tech booms and knowledge industries.

Globalization married to rapid technological change has been very good to the well-educated folks in metro areas and a disaster for many citizens outside of them. This is now a truism, but it took far too long for economic and policy elites to recognize what was happening. It should not have taken the Brexit referendum victory, the election of Donald Trump and the nationalist surges in Hungary, Poland, France, Germany and Scandinavia to bring home the cost of these regional inequalities.

Bingo.

It is exactly that “enormous divide” that “has opened between affluent metropolitan areas and the smaller cities, towns and rural regions far removed from tech booms and knowledge industries” that drove 100,000 Americans to show up en masse to cheer on Donald Trump in, of all places, blue-state New Jersey.

And it’s safe to say that these Americans are decidedly angry at seeing the former president repeatedly targeted by the lawfare establishment of the nation’s elites and forced to sit for endless hours in a courtroom while trumped up (so to speak) charges are hurled against him.

It may amaze some that a New York Republican billionaire would receive such passionate support from working-class and blue-collar Americans. They forget that Trump’s parents raised him in an environment that had him spending lots of time at his father’s construction sites teeming with hard hats, a sea of blue-collar construction workers. He knows then — and he knows them well. And, in his heart of heart, he considers himself to be one of them.

America has seen this before — in 1980 with another Republican with a working-class background, who grew up to be not simply a movie and TV star but the seven-times head of the union for working actors — the Screen Actors Guild. Like Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan got working Americans — and they got him.

As former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said Monday on Sean Hannity’s radio show, there has been a shift of the political tectonic plates, with a slow, steady move away from the political left.

And the results of that shift were on vivid display 100,000 Americans strong at this past Saturday’s Trump rally in Wildwood, New Jersey.

As the November elections grow closer.

The post Trump and the Significance of the Wildwood Rally appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.