slate - "America Furst"
Note that in the subtitle, Jamelle Bouie uses the term "American", not "America"...an important distinction. Well worth reading.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/01/donald_trump_promised_a_return_to_dominance_for_a_certain_kind_of_american.html
In his inaugural address, new ruler Donald Trump promised a return to dominance for a certain kind of American.
By Jamelle Bouie
“The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening to you now,” said the newly minted American president in his inaugural address. “You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen before.” This is not true. Donald Trump is a minority president who takes office despite having lost the national popular vote by substantial margins. Even at this stage, he remains a deeply unpopular figure, with the lowest favorability ratings of any new chief executive since we started counting. But it does reflect something that is true of the Republican Party.
There has been, for the past 30 years, a tension at the heart of the GOP. Its leaders have been conservatives, heirs to the anti-government traditions of Goldwater and Reagan, skeptical of (if not opposed to) the legacy of the New Deal.
Some of the people who vote for Republicans, especially the affluent and the educated, are cut from the same cloth. But many aren’t. And in the past decade, the ones who aren’t have grown as a share of the Republican electorate. They are white. Many do traditional blue-collar work. They live in older, largely segregated suburbs. Some are working class; others have a hold on middle-class life. But they all feel insecure, both in the face of rising costs—of health care, of housing, of education—and a rapidly changing, increasingly multicultural world. They vote for Republicans, but they don't hate government—they back programs such as Social Security and Medicare. They just want government to work for the so-called deserving. They’re hostile to mass immigration and deeply respectful of law enforcement and other authority.
Trump is the first Republican president to speak directly for those voters. He is their avatar, the man who embodies their anxieties and resentments. He spoke for them as a candidate; he spoke for them as a nominee; and he speaks for them now, as president of the United States. And in his inaugural address—which adopted the rhythms and rhetoric of his campaign for a national audience—he exalted them as “the people,” the rightful “rulers of this nation.”
First, however, Trump painted a picture of the United States as a kind of hellscape, marred by constant violence and deprivation. “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted-out factories, scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation, an education system flush with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge,” said Trump, channeling a vision ripped from the United States of his youth, when cities were in deep industrial decline and crime actually ravaged the nation. “This American carnage,” he said, “stops right here and stops right now.”
snip. worth reading it all.
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