Working class hero

Why a minority of Americans who work with their hands love Trump

"Anthony 'The Mooch' Scaramucci tells the inside story of how Donald J. Trump, a billionaire living on 5th Avenue, identified the struggle of blue-collar Americans, won the Presidency, and put the country on a path to long-term prosperity." -- promo for Scaramucci's Trump: The Blue-Collar President, out October 24 on Center Street/Hachette

Roy Edroso Breaks It Down has found this fragment from an early, rejected draft of Scaramucci's book on a few balled-up sheets of Eaton's Corrassable Bond in a trash can outside his publisher's office:

Look, I'm not going to sit here and tell you Donald Trump is a blue-collar guy in the usual sense of the word. He doesn't know what a quart of milk costs — though he does know that whatever it costs, it's too much for the working people of America.

Donald Trump has never in his life, to my knowledge, put on a pair of underwear that cost less than fifty collars and wasn't freshly ironed. Also, after he wears them once, he throws them away, or rather Consuela does. She's his personal maid, and let me tell you, she has taught the President a lot about how working class people live, because she watches old TV shows about white people with jobs on Antenna TV and relates the plots to him. (She tried once to tell him about how her own family life -- I think it was after her daughter's Quinceañera -- but the President looked away, made a cutting gesture with his hand, and said "not interested." She hasn't tried since. I know because, if he'd fired her, she would have told me, as I still hold her non-disclosure agreement. They're very sloppy in this White House! )

Nor, in all frankness, does Donald Trump know how working people worry when the basic necessities of life become more expensive, or when they lose their jobs. I was in the room once when Steve Mnuchin tried to explain it to him. (Steve wanted me to leave, but I knew the President gets a little shaky on names and faces sometimes so told him I was a caterer who was there to measure for tablecloths, which I pretended to do by using a pair of earbuds like a tape measure. He told me that was alright, and during the meeting addressed me as “Luigi.”)

The President respects Mnuchin because he is wealthy and because he finds his wife, well, interesting; many times he told me, irrespective of context, "that chick Steve's banging, she has a coat made out of Dalmatians. And when she smokes a cigarette, she uses one of those long holders like in the old movies." Once I saw him order the Secret Service to bring him a prostitute with Mrs. Mnuchin's specific measurements, and he wasn't reading them from a piece of paper. The President can be very attentive and detail-oriented when he wants to be! Another time he handed me a piece of The Apprentice stationery on which he had written "get me a coat made of firedogs that wuld fit M."

To get back to my story: Mnuchin tried to explain the household economy of non-rich people to Donald Trump the same way he tried to tell him about the national economy -- with short words, colorful slides, and broad gestures. After each fact of working-class life he related to the President, such as their trips to Costco and lack of yachts, Steve would excitedly add, "I know, right?" to show himself in sympathy with Trump's skeptical expression.

When the presentation was over, Trump got up, shook the sweaty Treasury Secretary's hand, and said, "Those poor bastards have it rough, huh? Send them all a turkey for Thanksgiving. See you later. My regards to your wife. How much to bang her, by the way?"

So, to repeat, Donald Trump is not working-class in the old-fashioned sense. Or in any sense. Look, to be perfectly honest, I don't think the guy wipes his own ass.

But Donald Trump knows what working class people hate, and for that he doesn't need to know the price of tomatoes or anything else. He knows working class people hate people who don't look like them -- except if they're Donald Trump, or other people they see on TV, or police officers or Kevin James or, really, any other white people so long as they're not hippies, or hipsters, or social justice warriors, or anyone with a top-knot or a tattoo (unless they were in the Navy).

He also knows they hate certain sports, like soccer. Oh, sure, the kids all play it in school so they have to go and watch, but they don't like it -- not like they like football, or like they used to like football before Trump told them it was unpatriotic. They just pretend they like it for the sake of the kids -- and let me tell you, when those kids get old enough to mouth off to them, which these days is like age 11, the first thing these working-class Americans do is take the kid's soccer trophies straight to the dump.

Yes, I said to the dump, because working-class Americans live in a world where if you want to get rid of something, you go to the dump, and if you want a treat you go to the soda fountain, and if you want to make a bet you go see the numbers-runner at the soda fountain, who writes your name in a tiny black book and only accepts cash. Then you go to the corner bar, put a quarter in the jukebox, get a beer with a head on it, and talk about the old ball-and-chain, your crazy brother-in-law, women drivers, girls you made in high school, how baseball isn’t the same since they put in the designated hitter, and what Washington needs is a tough businessman who’ll crack heads and make deals and make America great again.

You may say to me, Mooch, that world doesn't exist anymore. And you're right -- for you and me it doesn't, and more's the pity. But for the people who made Trump president -- I mean, the American people who did it -- it's more real than anything else. In fact, it’s so real that they still think what Washington needs is a tough businessman, and if they don’t have one in the White House now maybe it’s because the first time they voted it didn’t work and they have to do it over, like when your car won’t start right away. And in 2020, when their caregivers bring them to the local high school to vote, whenever they pass a poster about "diversity," or a boy with dyed hair or a girl holding another girl's hand, that'll just make them more determined to vote again for Donald Trump. And if we can just keep enough of them alive that long, those smart-ass liberals will see the real power of blue-collar America.