Steve Sailer writes: What’s behind Trump’s sudden rise to Public Enemy No. 1 of the Establishment? They tried bankrupting him over his immigration skepticism in June (even the golf tour cut business ties with Trump), and tried blacklisting him in July for not being reverent toward John McCain. But now, in August, Trump is doubling down on the issue he seemingly stumbled upon: immigration.
What’s been going on?
First, Trump is always looking for an underserved market, especially one that aligns with his innate personality. Of course, he’s hardly infallible at judging which way the winds are blowing. In this century, he’s poured a lot of money into golf courses in the teeth of the worst golf recession since the 1930s (although golf seems to be finally growing in popularity in 2015).
But Trump made at least one historic call: When he started his lavish Trump Tower in the 1970s, the Dow Jones hadn’t hit four digits in a decade. It seemed then like a ruinous bet. When he finished it in booming 1983, however, it was exactly what the newly rich suddenly realized they wanted.
My hunch is that Trump read Ann Coulter’s ¡Adios, America! a few weeks before his campaign announcement and recognized that immigration skepticism had matured as a philosophy, but nobody running for president was selling it. (The central joke of Coulter’s book, one that Trump’s candidacy now makes even funnier, is that white liberals don’t realize that by amping up immigration, they are making their purported worst nightmares come true. And not just economically, but also culturally: the ostentatious Trump brand of luxury high-rises promoted by his reality TV show appearances, for example, is not one that would appeal as much in a more rooted society with more discriminating tastes. But in multicultural, globalist New York, Trump’s self-promotion over the decades has successfully made his name synonymous with that most broadly appealing value of the age, money.)
Why weren’t they?
Candidates who aren’t entertaining enough to get themselves free airtime are beholden to wealthy donors. And one of the strongest forces in the world in recent decades has also been one of the least discussed: class solidarity among billionaires.
Now, you might think that having a billion dollars would free you to indulge in a Trump-like blast of a good time telling unwelcome truths. But in reality, we largely have a highly disciplined class of the extremely rich, who gather frequently in Davos and Aspen to be informed of the latest talking points about why any resistance to them is racist.
While the rich and powerful used to gloomily plot together in secret Bilderberg confabs, the current generation finds it more effective to invite the media to their conferences on how to fight nativist bigotry (and, by the way, high wages) by flooding working-class neighborhoods with Third Worlders. Thus, billionaires and journalists have become coconspirators against the public weal. That’s a tough tag team to beat.
