There is a movement in America that is seeing lifelong democrats supporting Donald Trump and who express their disgust at having Hillary Clinton as their presidential nominee. They have even started their own Super PAC named, Trumpocrats PAC. The movement is picking up steam and seems to revolve mostly around trade policies. That’s because blue collar democrats, rightly, believe they have been abandoned by their party. They believe the current democrat party is the party of big business and that the interests of the middle class workers have been cast aside in favor of large donations from businesses wanting cheap labor in the form of illegal and legal immigration.
The executive director of Trumpocrats PAC is Christian Rickers. He talked to Breitbart News about what inspired him to cross party lines to support Donald Trump.
Rickers’ argument centers on trade policy, and Trump’s ardent opposition to the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) that Clinton supported publicly more than 40 times but now claims she opposes. He points back to Bill Clinton’s backing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) from his time as president, and Rickers says Democrats everywhere should be terrified of how much further Hillary Clinton would go if she’s elected president.
This is a statement from a telephone interview with Breibart News:
I’m a lifelong Democrat, really since I was a little kid, and I still am a Democrat. But the Clintons—for instance, where I am from, my hometown, when I was a kid we had 15 manufacturing plants and we now have one. Nobody does anything there anymore, and that’s the same thing happening in a lot of small towns across the country really. The Clintons are really the cause of this, the cause of manufacturing going overseas with NAFTA and the trade deals and all of that. Donald Trump, he says a lot of crazy sh*t, but the one thing that he does say, that he really does want to do something about that and that he wants to protect our people with better trade policies and new trade policies.
David “Mudcat” Saunders, who spoke to Fox News:
“I’m a Democrat,” Saunders, who worked for many prominent national Democrats over his career, says in the interview video. “I believe in the two founding principles of Jacksonian Democracy, social justice and economic fairness. Right now, I think that the Democratic Party—my great party—has got away from some of this.”
Rickers also went on to talk about the growing gap between the rich and the poor that democrats love to run on as long as they can work to widen it after being elected:
History teaches us that the gap between the rich and the poor grows when democrats are power and shrinks when republicans are. The measurement tool used to track the gap is known as the GINI Coefficient. Bill Clinton set the record for the largest growth in the gap at about 6 1/2 %. Barack Obama has shattered that record, yet under Reagan and Bush the gap narrowed by about 6% each.
Rickers also commented on the income gap:
Otherwise, the gap is going to continue to increase between the rich and the poor because a lot of people don’t have the ability now to rise up whether they’re underemployed or facing hard times. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is talking about Planned Parenthood or whatever—which is all great, but that’s not what we need. We need people to be self-sufficient and feed their families. Trump speaks to that, and there are people all across this country who are fed up with it—obviously, that’s what this election is kind of all about. You have party registrations switching by the tens of thousands in Ohio and Pennsylvania and elsewhere, and there’s a lot of people—they don’t want to be Republicans, but they don’t like either party anymore. We’re going to give them a place or organize out of, you know? A home, if you will.
Rickers also goes on to say that even democrat politicians are moving towards Trump:
They don’t want to give money to the RNC, but they might be interested in making some phone calls or putting up signs or going through the Rust Belt on a bus tour to drum up support among blue collar folks and organize some like-minded people for Trump. Well I think you have a—there’s a lot of that going in the I’d say Wisconsin to more Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania and Virginia, that have actually come out publicly. We’ve actually been in contact with a lot of, several elected officials—mayors and around the Cleveland area where there have a lot of Democrats crossing over, and up in the mining valley where they’re just flat out switching. There have been op-eds about it, you know.
Billy Bova, a lifelong democrat from Mississippi said:
If you have historically been a working class, middle class person in areas of America that produced good paying, blue collar factory jobs, white collar factory related jobs, small business jobs in your towns around the plants and factories, it would be hard not to support a Trumpocrats effort in electing Donald Trump! Historically, many regular-working Democratic voters have always been most interested in a candidate that supports economic issues, not so much social issues, but bottom-line pocketbook, kitchen table money issues that can pay their bills and help their children. Trump shoots directly at their pocketbooks, gives them hope for a better future.
These same folks, I believe, have been assured that Trump will also protect and seek to strengthen their Social Security and Medicare benefits, and finally, after 20 to 30 years, put their lives back on a level playing field by undoing the very so called free-trade, world-trade, global-trade agreements that that hollowed-out their jobs, their families, their communities, their businesses. That is a powerful reason, a survival reason, for them to want to vote to elect Trump President.