Here's why Bruce Springsteen's blue-collar heroes have made Donald Trump their rock star

[TomSea]

Here's why Bruce Springsteen's blue-collar heroes have made Donald Trump their rock star

"These mills they built the tanks and bombs that won this country’s wars” — Bruce Springsteen, “Youngstown” 

Bob Wilson was coming of age when sulfur stung the night sky and the valley glowed with molten steel. Scarfers hissed, slag cooled, unions marched like armies and train tracks knew no rust. Weeks were flush with paychecks and promises in a potent vision of America that would vanish before Wilson stepped too far into manhood.

“You could watch it all from a bridge,” said Wilson, an auto mechanic with the deep gaze of a marksman. “Hot ladles and steel and men working. Then it was gone.”

Bruce Springsteen immortalized the nobility of men who once stood before the furnaces and the betrayals of a collapsing steel industry. His 1995 song “Youngstown,” a poetic elegy in a vast working-class canon, is still revered by the city that inspired it.

But many of the machinists,  miners and laborers who embody Springsteen’s lyrics from the Rust Belt to the Appalachian coal fields have turned to the swagger of Donald Trump in a long-denied bid for redemption. Springsteen’s politics may have stayed liberal since he played Stambaugh Auditorium here two decades ago, but economic decline, foreign competition, crime and abandoned mills have turned many in Youngstown — notably blue-collar white men  — toward the right-wing, isolationist politics of a billionaire reality-TV show star.

“I call it the pissed-off steel workers party. A lot of people like someone who causes trouble. That’s why Trump is so popular,” said Wilson, sitting in the dim of his hillside shop in the slipping away hours of a warm afternoon.  “Why am I voting for him? He’s not Hillary Clinton.” He smiled, turned the radio low. “You know, my entire adult life I’ve been voting for the lesser of two evils.”

Read More At: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-ca-springsteen-trump-20161019-snap-story.html     

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A lot of pissed-off people are going to be even more pissed-off on November 9.

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Rank-and-file democrats who in normal years would be extremely "discomforted" at the thought of voting (R) have been watching how many in the Republican Party reject Mr. Trump's candidacy. This has given many democrats the courage to consider Trump. If establishment republicans are horrified by Trump, how bad could he be? the thinking goes. I firmly believe the crossovers will be huge for Mr. Trump.

Bottom line, Trump will win without NeverTrump republican votes.