Every presidential campaign has its quintessential supporters, whether it’s Ted Cruz’s hardcore evangelicals or Bernie Sanders’s college students. In Donald Trump’s case, it’s the fratty-looking young white men with their “Make America Great Again” ball caps and their lusty cheers for any mishaps occurring to protestors.
Finally, in the interests of both political science and sociology, someone — to be precise CBS News’s Jacqueline Alemany — has taken a closer look at these Trump bros, and it turns out that they are passionate young men with some very serious concerns:
Their reason for backing Trump was simple, and echoed the sentiments of his other fans: He isn’t politically correct, and he doesn’t back down in the face of criticism.
In other words, he’s crude, and he’s rude about it. Maybe some of these bros have faced aggressive campus speech codes that have made them proud to be offensive. But you get the sense that they just don’t want to control their behavior at all. Alemany’s prize interview is with David Portnoy, “founder of Barstool Sports, the frat-focused sports website.” Here’s Portnoy’s complaint:
“There is a sentiment among frat guys, lacrosse players and middle class affluent white kids that they are kind of getting persecuted lately,” Portnoy told CBS News.
“You tell a joke it gets blown out of proportion. You gotta walk on eggshells. There’s kind of that feeling, and Trump, he tells a joke and doesn’t back down. He says things that would normally been frowned upon. At a school, a kid would get expelled. Not that it’s right or wrong, but he’s sort of defending a lot of the things they’ve been attacked for in the last five years or so.”
“It’s an F-U to society, who is telling us we are a bad guy because we like hooking up with girls on spring break,” he added. “And they see Trump sticking up for that.”
Without question, the right to hook up with girls on spring break ranks up there with the glass-ceiling-shattering aspirations of Clinton fans, the anti-economic-inequality battles of the Bern, and the cultural counter-revolution plotted by those who TrusTed. It’s nearly as glorious a dream as the Kasich campaign’s vision of remaking America to more closely resemble Ohio. So remember that the next time you wonder why these dudes stand in such long lines to cheer for their candidate.
