The continuing popularity of Donald Trump reminds me of the popularity enjoyed by Pretty Boy Floyd, John Dillinger, Bonny and Clyde, and other bandits during the “public enemy” era of the Great Depression. They out-played the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its modern, over-educated G-men. They cultivated a “Robin Hood” mystique — steal from the hated rich, give to the deserving poor — that had nothing to do with reality, but went over big down home. 

There was a popular enthusiasm for these criminals, and why not?. They were anti-government. They shared the universal hatred of the moneyed class. They defied the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, and by doing so reinforced the widely held conviction that otherwise honest people who were forced into a life of crime could rely on their good old common sense and the support of working people to get the better of elitist detectives and prosecutors. Sure, they robbed banks and committed a few homicides along the way, but their crimes are as nothing compared to their zeal for common people. And, then, at the end, their martyr’s deaths at the hands of an enraged establishment! so very poignant!! 

The current Trumpites are basically antinomian. They support not the under-dog, but the outlaw. They consider laws, government, taxes, political and social conventions, rules and regulations of any kind to be cruel repression of America Freedom. And who has been getting away with defying law, government, tax codes, political and social conventions, indeed, every kind of restraint that comes from a sense of decency and civic responsibility, and has been getting away with it all his life? Trump, that lover of the ignorant voter and model of the lawless life.