The mantra this season is that people who are feeling overwhelmed, alienated, forgotten and angry in America are backing Donald Trump.
This has struck me as odd and incongruous from the very beginning -- it would be like people who are starving and scrounging for their next meal backing Chris Christie, or Marlon Brando (in his later years).
Donald Trump has nothing in common with the overwhelmed, alienated, angry and forgotten. He may have the skill to speak to them as though he is sympatico, but he isn't.
He has his every need -- and whim -- attended to immediately. He is the antithesis of alienated -- he is connected to power in every aspect of his life. Forgotten? He gets attention that makes Beyonce and Caitlyn Jenner positively scream with envy. And angry? That's pure performance art. Donald Trump isn't angry. He just knows how to play into that vein of real anger many people have.
So I have been baffled from Day One why Trump has the loyalty of so many people with whom he shares nothing more than (possibly) human DNA. They love a guy who has looked down on their ilk his entire life, and will continue to once this street fair ends in either his demise or his election.
The raving, unfiltered yet practiced, almost joy-filled hatred of Donald Trump is regarded as political genius and evidently in 2016, as a requirement for national leadership.
The pundits who laughed him off in June and took him seriously in September and now speak of the very possible reality of nominee Trump or president Trump, keep going back to the "touch the chord" chorus.
Well, punditry, I am white. I am older. I am overwhelmed. I feel forgotten often, and alienated even more often. And there are times I allow myself to be overcome by anger at the injustice and unfairness and despair I see in the world, and sometimes in my life.
I see the millions of unemployed and underemployed older people struggling to be heard and to feel relevant. Their government may have abandoned them, but more so, the corporate world, the tech world that gives new meaning to the old 1960s phrase "Don't trust anyone over 30" has abandoned them, made them feel that their voices, energy, talents and wisdom don't matter.
But I have never fallen prey to Trumpism. I can't understand why a multibillionaire with a 1980s backroom Wall Street vocabulary and attitude towards women and minorities is the savior of the angry and the alienated.
No one can explain to me how this guy will rid his hapless and deluded followers from their alienation and anger. By marginalizing those already on the margins? That won't create jobs for the 55-year-old who had been unemployed for three years. That won't make Google or Yahoo or Amazon want to retrain tens of thousands of older people they "sort of" want to help but regard as something out of a museum.
Vilifying the weak and hopeless has never made society better, and has at best, only momentarily made the disaffected and alienated feel better. So what's the end game?
When I am feeling overwhelmed, alienated, forgotten and angry -- and I do as an older white man who doesn't feel I am listened to or valued for the considerable talents I have -- I don't turn to an arrogant, obscene rich guy for solace.
I try to improve my situation as best I can by using what skills I have, and take my solace in knowing that blaming everyone darker, less fluent in English and more estrogen-endowed than I is a pathetic way to live.
Earlier on Huff/Post50: