The New Yorker has just published a 7,500-word article about Donald Trump, except it’s not really about Donald Trump. Two thirds of it is about Mr. Trump’s supporters—including me—and that’s what explains the title: “The Fearful and the Frustrated” [August 31, 015].New Yorker readers can feel smug without even reading the article; Mr. Trump appeals to losers, just as they have always thought.
The author Evan Osnos, [Email him] is a veteran journalist and has been with the New Yorker for seven years. After weeks of following Mr. Trump around and talking to his fans, he announces that Mr. Trump is “expanding the discourse of hate,” that his core supporters are “the portion of the electorate that is drifting deeper into unreality,” that he could unleash “anti-democratic politics,” and that he appeals directly to “the crude tribalism that Richard Hofstadter named ‘the paranoid style’.”
What a monster! New Yorker readers can feel delightfully superior not only to Mr. Trump but to the unhinged primitives who might actually vote for him—that is to say, the 55 percent of white men who say that would back him over Hillary Clinton. ...