Trump’s Rise Enabled by Decades-Long Slide for the Middle Class
Sitting with his new wife in their new home, Ish Yniesta spoke of the life they rebuilt together after individual struggles with divorce, bankruptcy and loss. To them, Donald Trump represents the best chance for an unmoored country to achieve similar security.
Yniesta, 47, American-born son of a Filipino immigrant, works in a plastics plant and had to live with his mother for three years between marriages. Rita Smith-Yniesta, the 61-year-old daughter of a cotton-mill worker, is a homemaker who lost her former husband to cancer in 2012 and had to live off savings. They married in October and moved into their Summerville, South Carolina, house in November. Last week, they attended their first political rally when Trump, the real-estate heir, television fixture and Republican presidential frontrunner, spoke near Charleston.
“We’re happy,” Yniesta said between sips of sweet tea two days later as the couple’s shih tzu, Abby, napped nearby. “We’re all about being proactive and doing something—creating our own reality show, so to speak.”
Trump has tapped into a cohort of Americans who have experienced the uglier side of a grinding, decades-long economic transformation. Middle-class households are the minority for the first time since at least 1971. Inequality has soared to a 45-year peak.
Trump leads in polls thanks to proposals such as barring Muslims from the U.S., sealing the Mexican border and deporting the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants. A CNN survey Dec. 4 showed Trump with 36 percent support among registered Republicans, with the highest support among whites and those with no college degree. Fifty-five percent of Republicans polled said Trump could best handle the economy.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-12-14/trump-s-rise-enabled-by-decades-long-slide-for-the-middle-class
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