OPINION: By Walter Curt
People don’t understand why Trump’s base is so fiercely loyal, or why the rhetoric about treason and accountability resonates so deeply. It’s not because his supporters are extreme or unhinged, it’s because they’re the only group in America that spent thirty years watching their towns collapse while every politician in both parties looked the other way. The Midwest lost more than a million manufacturing jobs since 1990, and when those factories died, everything around them died too: the satellite shops, the diners, the repair businesses, the tax base, the schools. Entire towns like Flint, Youngstown, and Springfield went from thriving to devastated while Washington pretended nothing was happening.
And as the jobs vanished, the social collapse followed. Opioid deaths in the rural Midwest became 1,600% higher by 2016 than they were in 1999. Poverty soared. Crime spiked. Families broke apart. And not a single politician, corporate executive, or policymaker who offshored those jobs or signed those trade deals was ever held accountable. The people who got wiped out were told to “learn to code” or accept that this was “the new economy.” Their pain was invisible, until Trump showed up in 2016 and said out loud that they’d been betrayed.
That’s why the loyalty is unshakable. Trump didn’t create their anger—their anger created Trump. When he says the political class is corrupt, they know it because they lived the consequences. When he talks about accountability, they hear the first serious attempt in their lifetime to hold the people who destroyed their communities responsible. That’s the part the media and Democrats still don’t grasp: Trump’s base doesn’t want violence, they want justice. And he is the first man in decades who even acknowledged what happened to them.
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