“I was reminded that Trump was still fundamentally a real estate developer with exactly zero previous campaign experience, who had gotten this far by spending only a fraction of what his opponents had and against the wishes of his party — who was as new to the idea of a Trump candidacy as the rest of us were.Although his political maturation over the past year had not been altogether linear, it seemed clear that an understanding of what his candidacy meant to his supporters was taking root. Trump seemed aware, despite his insistence that voters of all stripes were drawn to him, that his constituency came chiefly from white working-class Americans who felt left out of the Obama recovery and cheated by what they saw as a rigged economic system. Playing to this sentiment, he had begun to include in his speeches a litany of dire economic statistics pertaining to whichever state he happened to be visiting at the time. The data, compiled by Sam Clovis and Stephen Miller, senior policy advisers, invariably cited the collapse of that local manufacturing sector over the past two decades. It had become axiomatic in Trump World that wherever jobs had been lost was also where Trump’s voters could be found. 'They’re great people,' he murmured back on the plane after the event in Buffalo. 'And they want help.' His face crinkled in disgust. 'They don’t want hope. They want help.'”
Annotation
Draper on the evolution of Donald Trump's campaign.
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