Ryan Cooper, Self Employed Sales (2008-present)
My dad is a huge Trump supporter. He’s also 80 years old. He watches VHS taped movies because he can’t get a digital tv signal where he lives. He has never used a computer and didn’t own a telephone until the early 1990s.
It’s easy to look back in time and reflect on a simpler era. Back in the 1980s, OJ Simpson was a football player, Bill Cosby was America’s favorite dad, gay people didn’t exist, Muslims were the freedom fighters whooping the Soviets in Afghanistan, and Hulk Hogan got big muscles by drinking milk.
None of that was true. Add another 30 years to that.
Life in the 1950s seems so quaint. Everyone seems so happy on the Andy Griffith Show or Leave it to Beaver. Sure, minorities didn’t have rights, women were treated like property by their husbands, and gay people were considered criminals.
America was great in the 1950s due to the simple fact that none of our factories or homes had been destroyed during World War II. Everything from washing machines to tv screens, toasters and ovens, trains, planes and automobiles were all made in America. No other country had the ability to make consumer products like America in the 1950s.
Having no competition also made American businesses complacent. Ford, Chevy and Chrysler began investing in non-automotive industries that often didn’t make money. Unions demanded and received lavish contracts because people had to buy an American car. Zenith made television sets that doubled as furniture.
It was only a matter of time before someone else would make a car that wasn’t the size of a whale, a TV set that wasn’t as big as the kitchen table, and a refrigerator that wasn’t olive green or harvest gold.
For many older white male voters like my father, Trump is the only politician who “gets it.†They truly believe that Trump is the man who will return America to 1950s greatness.
Unless Trump starts a nuclear world war that demolishes every other country except America, there will never be another time in world history where America manufacturers everything.
