What unites Trump voters?

[Admin]

The following is an original take. One doesn't have to invoke Habermas and the expansion of economic logic to other sphere's of life, but the author of the following piece suggests Trump is the invasion of unscrupulous business logic and morale into politics:

The world that Mr. Trump inhabits is today’s Other America, the seamy, blustering, hustling and huckstering underside of our fabled brightness and optimism. For those who can afford to idealize politics, it may seem alien. But for many people, it is everyday life. The political and business worlds have always overlapped. But we used to — and the establishment still does — expect politicians to adhere to a minimal level of honesty and consistency. We judge business tycoons differently; within the confines of the law, more or less, we expect them to lie and cheat their way to the top, and we assess them solely on how quickly and efficiently they get there.

The reputation of Ulysses S. Grant was tarnished by the mere association with the unseemly practices that earned his Gilded Age counterparts in the business world everlasting glory. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before someone with the plutocrat’s professional ethics made that leap into presidential politics. But the rest of the country had to catch up.

Yet Mr. Trump seems to suffer from a manufacturing defect. Republican leaders seem to want to recall him as though he were a faulty airbag. And it’s unlikely that enough Americans will buy his marketing pitch for him to win in November. Imagine, though, a different figure, someone with Mr. Trump’s callousness but without the thin skin, lack of self-control and fragile, oversize ego. Imagine, in other words, a demagogue who embodies the dynamics of America’s pervasive commercial atmosphere, but who is smart, cunning, self-aware and self-disciplined — so cunning that he would, say, embrace the parents of Capt. Humayun Khan with the slightest trace of a wink to his or her followers, and then, once elected, close the door to any Muslim who wished to immigrate to America.

Imagine this same figure prefacing an insinuation that Mrs. Clinton be assassinated with a heartfelt declaration of her decency and good faith. We had better prepare for such a person. In business, Mr. Trump might be called a beta test, or a “proof of concept.” To that end, he has already succeeded. Trumpism — not the political ideology rooted in xenophobia and nationalism, but the cynical worldview that sees politics, like everything, as a market to be conquered — is not going anywhere.

The Selling of Donald J. Trump - The New York Times