Trump Story: Take Deux

Over the past year, the candidacy of the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party, Donald Trump, has created a lot of controversy over many statements he has made as well as for other decisions made and actions taken since last June. Many of his campaign events and rallies have been catalysts for anti-Trump protests and are frequently the places where much of the political strife this country is undergoing come to the forefront. Here in Austin, and especially here at McCallum, the political views of the majority of the student body are to the left of center, it may be difficult for some of us to comprehend the meteoric rise of someone whom it would be easy to dismiss as a race-baiting populist or as a nativist anti-intellectual. To try and further understand the point of view of people who support the Donald, I sought out a few of McCallum students who were Trump supporters to ask them a few questions.

If any of you have read the article that was published in a pervious issue of The Shield, Putting a little swing in your state, you may have noted that Trump supporters accounted for just 3 of 195 seniors planning on voting in the 2016 election. That was back in December, and while that number may have changed, it was very difficult to tell. For all of the hours I spent trying to find these Trump supporters, I was only able to find one person who was willing to be interviewed for this article. They declined to be named out of concern that their car might be keyed or that someone having read the paper might decide to do something silly or make a point about it.

This person, who I will refer to as Ron first became interested in Donald Trump because of "the situation in Europe with all the migrants". Perhaps fearing that something similar might befall our great nation, Ron became interested in protecting our own borders, and "his policies reflect…you know, the whole wall thing." Ron is assuming already that he and I have the same views about the real-life implications of current events and their consequences, something which he will repeat throughout the interview process.

The most major issue to Ron was immigration, something that according to Trump "nobody was talking about until I brought it up". Ron's belief that our current immigration system "clearly isn't working" and that "everyone's seen the reports" as well as "videos of people walking across the border...sometimes carrying weapons" and noting that "there is no response". Ron believes that "if we put up an impassable wall, we will largely stop land immigration". Ron is quite clear about the cause for his concern, saying that this "largely has to do with the security of our nation", and is not a racially motivated grievance. "Having a large amount of illegals come in, commit crimes - not all of them" causes people to be "afraid of their own safety."

By this point, Ron's presuppositions that we've all seen the reports or the videos of people walking across the border with guns that he was quick to mention may have confused many readers. I was for the entirety of the interview holding my tongue, mostly out of a desire to not have this not turn into a line-by-line debunk of the Trump platform, any number of which I'm sure you can find in the media somewhere. That being said, many of the things that Ron likes to assume we all know about or that some of us choose to willfully ignore are exaggerations of the truth or utter falsehoods.

"As we've seen, there are those that come in, commit crimes" Ron again mentions, which while true is a not entirely fair to illegal immigrants, who commit fewer crimes per capita than the population at large. Ron pivots to an appeal to an economic appeal, saying that "it's costing the US large amounts of money to enforce it's current policy" and that because "we can't collect taxes on them" and "they're here making money", essentially saying that immigrants do not pay taxes. I decided to attempt to explain the many ways in which immigrants do pay state income taxes and sales taxes, all of which, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy amounts to about $11.84 Billion per annum, an effective tax rate of 8%.

Ron is't completely supportive of the entire immigration plan, and believes that deporting the 11 million illegal immigrants here is " not really something that you can do". Ron believes that there should be some sort of system in place instead where "non-violent immigrants should be able to become second class citizens". What Ron supposes the status of non-violent immigrants are in today's society is unclear.

I wanted to ask a couple of questions about Donald Trump's tax policy, mostly because I thought that if I could get Ron to think long and hard about fiscal responsibility he might have second
thoughts about his support for the man, and I could avoid yelling about how Trump was an adulterer or a schmooze or a bad businessman. At any rate, my question was as follows: Trump's tax plan would create a deficit of about $1 trillion a year, what government programs would we have to cut in order to account for this massive loss in revenue? Ron was not interested in this potential possibility, and touted the Trump campaign line that most of this was focused on our corporate tax, saying that "we have the highest tax rate for corporations in the industrialized world" which although way may have the largest top marginal tax rate is effectively untrue. Large companies like General Electric have for years payed nothing in taxes, and many industries are large recipients of government subsidies, all of this aside, setting the corporation tax too far below someone's marginal tax bracket would most likely lead to self incorporation, a process in which individuals become companies in order to avoid paying higher taxes. When I asked what Ron thought government's role is, he just said that "government is too large it needs to be less" and that we should cut "most regulatory agencies, the military, and social programs". This is a very common opinion of  many conservatives, that the size of government should be cut, in Ron's opinion, "the role of government is to keep our borders secure and to say out of people's personal lives as much as possible".

My final question for Ron had to do with the likely Democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton ."First off she's a liar, second she should be in prison for getting four Americans killed by leaking data through her emails" Ron wasted no time in bringing up the two most prominent talking points about Hillary Clinton, only he had seemingly combined in his head the attacks on the Amerixan Embassy in Benghazi and the private e-mail server debacle. I decided to ask why he thought leaking those emails got those four Americans killed. Ron says it was because "it compromised their identity", 
however the embassy was attacked not because it was low profile, but because it represented a very high-profile US presence in the country, and at least one of the four Americans killed was an important diplomatic figure, Ambassador Stevens. Ron says he "can't say if the attacks wouldn't have happened if Clinton was not Secretary of State" and that he had in the years since 2012"kinda forgot" what actually happened at Benghazi. At any rate, Ron believes that Clinton "should be held to a higher standard". What higher standard someone who might be one of the most scrutinized former government officials in the country could be held to I will leave to interpretation.