What chances does Trump have to win the 2020 election?

It seems absurd to believe that America could make the same mistake again, to elect an ignorant and vulgar narcissist to the most powerful position in the world. But we can’t underestimate the ability of the self-serving super-rich to convince millions of Americans that a surging stock market and a powerful military are essential to their livelihoods. All at the expense of jobs and health care and education.

There are at least three good reasons, strangely and sadly enough, why Trump could win again.

Delusion: A booming economy for all of is

The stock market has more than tripled in value since the recession. America’s richest 10% own 84 percent of the stocks.

Real wages have decreased since just before the recession.

Despite these stunning facts about income disparities, people at the rich end share the Wall Street Journal’s delusion about the economy: “Americans traditionally left behind…are reaping the benefits..” But that’s far, far from the truth. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Real average hourly earnings increased 1.3 percent, seasonally adjusted, from March 2018 to March 2019.” But the cost of living went up 2.8%! Even Forbes admits that “real wage growth is actually falling.”

Trump brags about the low unemployment rate. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics bases the official unemployment rate on employees “who did any work for pay or profit” during the week being surveyed. That includespart-timeworkers who are employed for just ONE HOUR A WEEK. Tens of millions of Americans are limping along with part-time or ‘gig’ jobs that don’t pay a living wage and usually lack retirement and health benefits. According to a New York Times report, almost a third of America’s work force earn less than $12 an hour, nearly all of them without health insurance. An NPR/Marist poll found that 20 percent of American jobs are contract positions, and that within ten years contractors and freelancers could make up half of the U.S. workforce.

The bottom 60% of earners are leading in one category: they’re dying at increasing rates from drugs and suicides.

Fear: The socialists are coming

Of course, this concern of the super-rich is minimized if Joe Biden wins the nomination, but then we’re left with an advocate for whiteness, war, and Wall Street.

No matter who leads the Democrats against Trump, there’s growing support for Medicare-for-All and the Green New Deal and taxes on the rich. Conservatives use scare tactics to vilify social-minded programs because they fear the prospect of sharing the wealth. Forty years of a winner-take-all mentality has nurtured the greedy belief that ‘social’ is a dirty word.

But ‘social’ serves everyone, ‘individual’ serves only one. And true socialism is far removed from any government control. As activist Gar Alperovitz describes socialism: “It’s about decentralizing power, changing the flow of power to localities rather than to the center.” It means firefighters and police and roads and public transportation and parks and libraries. And it means respect for the “social composition” of schools, especially in the early years of our children’s lives, when successful patterns for adulthood are found in their kindergarten social skills.

Why is the word ‘social’ feared in America? One well-studied explanation is that rampant inequality has reduced the level of TRUST in our society. Coinciding with the expanding wealth gap has been a remarkable downturn in public opinion about the belief that “most people can be trusted.” As a result, the two unequal extremes lose contact with each other. People at the wealthy end tend to become antisocial, less willing to support the needs of society, opposed to sharing their wealth, and determined to convince the rest of us that socialism in any form will threaten the cherished American qualities of individual initiative and entrepreneurship.

It’s revealing, then, that the socialist nations Denmark and Finland and Norway and Sweden have been ranked higher than the U.S. in business freedom by the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Nationalism: Keeping the “wretched refuse” off our shores

Extreme nationalism is usually associated with white supremacy, and with the goal of minimizing the inflow of darker-skinned individuals. But it goes beyond that, to a long-held sense of American exceptionalism. A 20-something African-American man summed up the pro-Trump sentiment when asked his opinion of the president’s behavior: “I love that. He’s for America 100%. It’s America or no way. I love that.”

How to account for American exceptionalism? A theory called “voluntary settlement hypothesis” posits that “self-selection tends to produce groups of immigrants who are more autonomous, independent, and goal-oriented than their neighbors who stayed behind.” The hypothesis describes the pattern of migration from Scandinavia to the U.S. in the late 19th century. Perhaps that helps to explain the resulting social-mindedness in Scandinavia and independent-mindedness in America.

Nationalism and exceptionalism have been accentuated by inequality. The U.S. has the lowest median wealth (as a percentage of average wealth) in the developed world. Studies show that people at the extreme high end of inequality tend to feel entitled, and superior to others. Ironically, poorer whites also feel superior, in the sense that they’re reluctant to give up their long-time self-assigned position at the top of the racial hierarchy.

So maybe there’s nothing we can do about American attitudes. But we can continue to state the facts, to try to keep Americans from voting against themselves.

Which of the 22 candidates have not treated middle Americans with respect?

Sent an abortion something big shot millionaires urge their mistresses to get when they impregnate them? No hypocracy among republicans here. Do as i say, not as I do.

I hate what it says about the American people.

President Trump’s outrages, absurdities and indelicacies arrive with such frequency that they numbingly blur together, and to focus and comment on each is to give him too much of what he thrives on — attention — and be debilitated by his dominance of your thoughts and passions.

That’s why many of you rightly cry foul about the media’s obsession with him, and it’s why I’m judicious, or try to be, about how much real estate he gets in my columns.

But there are utterances and actions of his that can’t go unexamined, breaches of decorum, diplomacy or normalcy that stand out from the rest or precisely distill his character. And the recent revelation that he would like to put himself at the center of the nation’s most prominent Independence Day celebration — moving the fireworks to a new spot in Washington and making a speech as part of the occasion — falls into that category.

Most of his predecessors did nothing of the kind. They understood that the day belonged to the country, not its leader, and they didn’t conflate the two.

Trump does, all the time, and it’s alternately annoying, confounding and galling. If you’re not thrilling to his vision and submitting to him, you’re possibly guilty of treason — remember that rant? If you’re asking legitimate questions about unholy alliances that he may have forged or conflicts of interest he may possess, you’re orchestrating a coup.

Trumpian logic, more narcissistic than syllogistic, holds that if it’s the president’s job to lift up the country, then it’s the country’s job to lift up the president — spiritually, financially, with appointments for his cronies and sycophants, with jobs for his kin, with applause and of course with parades.

A parade: That’s how this whole impulse to convert the Fourth of July into the Fourth of Trump started, according to reporting by The Washington Post. In Paris, beside President Emmanuel Macron, Trump beheld a Bastille Day procession with all its military hardware, and he wanted the same in Washington, the same for him, tanks in the streets, fighter jets in the air. But that was too financially costly and politically risky, so now this: a tentative plan for a starring role amid the starbursts that less needy and more dignified presidents were content to marvel at, not exploit. For Trump, everything — a national holiday, America itself — is an opportunity for brand enhancement, another tall building on which to slap the letters of his name in gold.

And his response to effacement is hyperbole and swagger: He’s like one of those animals that puffs itself up when predators come around, using illusory might to conceal intrinsic weakness. Is it any accident that in the middle of an escalating feud with congressional Democrats, as the more damning aspects of Robert Mueller’s report sank in and his namesake was served a subpoena by a Republican-led Senate committee, he played host to and praised a loathsome autocrat, Viktor Orban of Hungary; again flaunted his friendship with Vladimir Putin; toughened his talk about Iran; and ratcheted up his trade war with China? For Trump, vulnerability begets a pantomime of super-potency.

He envies Orban, Putin and their ilk. They don’t have to deal with so much disrespect and dissent. They just crush it. His designs on Independence Day call to mind those sorts of leaders: their vanities, shamelessness and equation of national interest with self-interest.

Presidents before Trump were plenty vain — it’s close to a job requirement — and presidents before Trump presented themselves as vessels of the American story and symbols of American values. Barack Obama certainly did, speaking of Kenya and Kansas and the way this country brought such strands together in a singular context of diversity and opportunity. He was right.

And Trump is right to regard himself as an essentially American character who parlayed confidence, showmanship and a daredevil’s approach to ethics into boundless fame and considerable riches.

But he’s neither synonymous with the country nor indispensable to it, obvious distinctions that routinely elude him. “I alone can fix it,” he said during his speech at the Republican National Convention in 2016, and that was no aberration. More like a motto, perhaps stitched onto a throw pillow that he uses for lumbar support while slumping at the Resolute Desk.

Independence Day commemorates the breaking free from insufficiently humble rule. It pays tribute to a country being born, not a leader being crowned. And Trump would surely fashion remarks like those during his belated visit to American troops abroad, when he performed an aria of self-congratulation — the only song he knows.

It’s music so familiar at this point that it barely registers. But sometimes you need to pause and listen. And sometimes you need to say how ugly it is.

I hate what it says about the American people.

I hate what it says about the American people.

In short I believe Trumps chances are looking very good