Is This The End For Donald Trump?

Trump

Donald Trump may have committed a fatal error in his campaign for the presidency.

Many consider Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump’s position on minimum wage his greatest mistake during this week’s debate. Not only that, he doubled down on those comments the following day, telling MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski that “Our taxes are too high, our wages are too high, everything is too high. […] What’s going to happen is now people are going to start firing people because it’s the same old story and it’s happened a hundred times and it’s always happened.”

Vox reports that “Donald Trump, a literal billionaire, just said on national TV that wages are too high,” adding that: “Within minutes of the Fox Business Republican presidential debate starting, frontrunner Donald Trump committed a classic Kinsley gaffe: accidentally saying what he actually meant.”

The Hill reports that: “the idea that America’s wages are too high likely won’t play well with the working-class, who make up a large coalition of Trump voters. While hourly wages have steadily increased over the past 50 years, the purchasing power that comes with it has stayed largely stagnant during that time period, gaining about $1.50 in adjusted 2014 dollars over that time period, according to Pew Research.”

As National Journal reports: “Trump’s polit­ic­al base is dom­in­ated by work­ing-class voters who have been dev­ast­ated by the re­ces­sion and sub­sequent slow re­cov­ery. Many of them are drawn to Trump be­cause they be­lieve his tough per­sona and ne­go­ti­at­ing prowess will re­verse Amer­ica’s eco­nom­ic de­cline—and with it, raise their own wages. Trump is run­ning against the Wall Street wing of the Re­pub­lic­an Party, but with his af­fin­ity for low cor­por­ate wages, he pit­ted him­self against many of the pop­u­lists he’s woo­ing.”

“If you find some­body who can move the Trump im­age, from bil­lion­aire mogul with swag­ger and morph him in­to a heart­less CEO jerk, this is a dif­fer­ent race,” said Re­pub­lic­an me­dia con­sult­ant Rick Wilson.

While it’s possible that this latest gaffe by Trump won’t hurt him any more than previous ones, as National Journal reports: “what makes this line dif­fer­ent is it goes against his own sup­port­ers’ in­terests. They may not care if Trump is rude to Me­gyn Kelly, or mocks John Mc­Cain’s mil­it­ary ser­vice, but when his com­ments dir­ectly im­pact their own bot­tom line, the re­ac­tion could be dif­fer­ent.”

One de­fin­ing fea­ture of the Re­pub­lic­an pres­id­en­tial primary so far is that many Re­pub­lic­ans have been hes­it­ant to go after Trump, fear­ing the back­lash they’ll in­ev­it­ably get by tak­ing on a can­did­ate who lashes out against any­one who goes after him. But he just gif­ted a sound bite for an en­ter­pris­ing Re­pub­lic­an chal­lenger to use against him—and cut in­to his over­whelm­ing sup­port among blue-col­lar voters.

Please leave us a comment and let us know your thoughts regarding Donald Trump and his damaging message to American workers.

Samuel Warde
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