Republicans get a bad rap as the party of the wealthy. It’s true that they used to enjoy the support of most of the rich—though today the bicoastal upper class in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Manhattan vote Democratic.
In 1896, Republican William McKinley beat agrarian insurgent William Jennings Bryan, thanks partly to the genius of his campaign manager, “Dollar Mark” Hanna, the Ohio businessman-politician who invented raising corporate campaign contributions.
Even so, the GOP base always had a bias in favor—not of rags to riches—but of rags to respectability. Of course, the GOP had its wealthy politicians. Theodore Roosevelt’s family—like that of his Democratic cousin, Franklin—were well-fixed. Nelson Rockefeller was a Republican, though never truly loved by the party base—partly because of his divorce, partly because of his inherited wealth. Ross Perot was a Republican before he ran for president as an independent in 1992, helping sink George H. W. Bush’s second term.
On the other hand, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and even engineer Herbert Hoover—GOP presidents in the 1920s—were not particularly rich. Dwight Eisenhower was a career soldier who didn’t make money until he wrote a best-selling book. In 1952, when Ike’s young California running mate, Senator Richard Nixon, got into trouble because of a campaign slush fund, he got out of it by delivering his “Checkers Speech” (Checkers was the family dog) pleading that his wife, Pat, could only afford a good Republican cloth coat. Ronald Reagan had wealthy friends who funded his life style. The Bush dynasty—now defunct and derided as “out of touch”—was an exception with deep pockets in both Connecticut and Texas. Donald Trump claims to be a multi-billionaire, though his dirty secret is that he may not be worth even one billion. He is twice divorced, reveling in the scandalous headlines about his infidelities. God only knows what the only once-divorced Nelson Rockefeller would think.
Trump is a vulgarian, crass, and the antithesis of “classy,” old school wealth. Rags to respectability seems no longer to be the aspiration of GOP base voters—many of them declining white lower middle class—for whom success through education and hard work is increasingly elusive.
In steps Trump who offers his supporters vicarious empowerment through ersatz riches and celebrity—and the promise of restored national greatness. The scam artists who ran Trump University provided an expensive education of sorts in being ripped off—not in the traditional values of the American Jewish middle class.
