Louis Capozzi | Another brick in the wall

Citizen Capozzi | How the Penn Bubble insulates students from Trump supporters

By Louis Capozzi 05/25/16 11:34pm

There’s a wall at the center of the 2016 presidential election, but Mexico has nothing to do with it. Instead, the wall separates “us” from Donald Trump’s supporters.

Trump supporters are popularly imagined, at least at Penn, to be a bunch of racist, sexist, xenophobic, and ignorant hicks. In the minds of Penn students, they’re probably waving a Confederate flag, wearing an offensive t-shirt, or beating up a black protester.

Whether in Washington D.C. or at an elite school, it’s easy to understand how this perception arises. At Penn, there are few Trump supporters, and even most Republicans are wary of embracing the eccentric billionaire. On social media, endorsing Trump is the worst kind of heresy and risks backlash from our aggressive consensus culture. In short, a wall exists and Mexico didn’t pay for it.

Yet things are about to change.

Unless you’re staying at Penn, you will almost certainly live somewhere with a much higher percentage of Trump supporters than your current community.

How do I know this? Several recent national polls have Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton statistically tied in a head-to-head matchup. If you’re going home to Ohio, polling suggests you’ll find more supporters of Trump than Clinton. If you’re traveling in Pennsylvania or Florida, expect an equal breakdown between the two candidates.

If you feel inclined to interact with Trump supporters in their native habitats, there are two options.

First, you can pretend they don’t exist and trust the many pundits and celebrities that insist Trump cannot win. After all, even some Republicans are adopting this stance, hopeful that they can embarrass the Trump insurgency and take back their GOP.

I do not recommend this strategy.

I don’t accept that almost half of the American people are mere bigots without reason. Many highly educated people support Trump, including Penn alumnus Jon Huntsman Jr. Even some minority citizens support Trump, as he earned 20 percent of the non-white vote in the most recent Florida poll. It’s comically arrogant to summarily dismiss so many people as ignorant bigots.

But if humility isn’t compelling, consider the risks of dismissing his supporters. Last September, I identified a similar refusal to acknowledge Trump as a legitimate candidate. Pundits scoffed, citing his historically bad favorability ratings and lack of policy knowledge. I predicted he could win the Republican Primary, and now he has.

While some pundits have already learned their lesson, I highly recommend caution to the others who are doubling down on their earlier mistake.

The other option is to tear down the wall and engage with Trump’s supporters, to consider their perspectives and present your own.

While the wall is complex, language comprises most of the bricks. As educated Penn students, we’re used to a certain way of speaking. This is perhaps the most off-putting thing about Trump to us. Yet I would argue this is the key element of Trump’s success. Why? Most people don’t talk like we do.

Trump routinely makes wild claims with tenuous links to evidence and reason. As college students, we likely sympathize with Trump’s exasperated fact checkers. However, not all people have the educational privilege to read newspapers, journal articles, or statistical reports. Only 40 percent of Americans have a college degree, and even those who do might be more concerned with making a living or raising a family; why should they care if the numbers in Trump’s tax plan don’t add up?

Further, Trump has targeted Muslims, demonized illegal immigrants, and made sexist comments. To well-educated students, his comments are not only ignorant, but offensive to people we know in our increasingly diverse communities. But in a state like Iowa, which is about 90 percent white, Trump’s comments may be less troubling because diversity is less relevant there. Polling suggests that voters think Trump will manage the economy better than Clinton. If voters think Trump will improve their livelihoods, perhaps you can begin to understand why they won’t rule out Trump because he disparages Muslim immigrants, a group they rarely interact with.

I’m not arguing that we should embrace ignoring facts or targeting marginalized communities. But Trump, the extravagant billionaire, has clearly connected with millions of Americans in a way most educated elites haven’t. Perhaps he realized that over 70 percent of Americans dislike political correctness. Perhaps we can learn something from Trump’s success.

If you want to persuade, it’s probably not effective to dismiss prima facie almost half of the country as racist, sexist, xenophobic, or ignorant. Not only are you wrong – many well-educated people like Jon Huntsman have rational reasons for preferring Trump over Clinton – you are unlikely to change minds.

And if you don’t change minds, the wall will get higher in 2016.

And Trump’s critics will pay for it.

LOUIS CAPOZZI is a rising first year law student from Mechanicsburg, Pa. His email address is capozzil@sas.upenn.edu. “Citizen Capozzi” appears every other Thursday.

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