As Deep as He Gets: Decoding Why “Loser” so Menaces Donald Trump

I never understood how Trump’s contemptuous remarks in regard to John McCain’s military record (“I like the ones who weren’t captured”) didn’t immediately end his campaign for President. The fact that they didn’t revealed the emerging pathology of a growing base for whom this would have previously constituted the crossing of an inviolate line. It also marked the moment the vague nausea in my gut about this appalling human being began its transformation into the lacerating ulcer it is now.

Trump’s base has only one historical analog: The non-slave owning antebellum southern men willing to sacrifice their lives to defend an institution from which they didn’t even benefit. (In fact, the lot of the rural farmer was made worse by slavery, as he was never able to be paid a fair wage for his labor, nor possess the kind of buying power that might have produced a Southern middle class like the one burgeoning in the north.)

But slaves represented a crucial source of self-esteem to the “cracker” class even as they could afford none. Enslaved people were a huge swath of the southern population that every white person, no matter how poor, could feel superior to. Hundreds of thousands of Confederate soldiers lost their lives in devotion to this very sentiment. They may have died, but their malignant insecurity survived…