Capitalism Hits Home: Why Some Americans Still Support Trump

Summary

Highlights

• Despite high unemployment and rising prices, 39% of Americans approved of Trump's performance in April 2025 🌟
• Tariffs and strained international relations have impacted the US economy, yet Trump retains significant support 🎯
• The Frankfurt School's analysis of authoritarian support in Germany during WWII sheds light on modern American politics 🔍
• Authoritarian family structures in America mirror those in pre-WWII Germany, impacting political allegiances 🇺🇸
• Trump’s messaging of restoring past prosperity appeals to those feeling economically marginalized 🎓

Key Takeaways

• Around 39% of Americans approved of Trump's performance in April 2025, despite economic struggles and strained international relations 🇺🇸
• The Frankfurt School's analysis of authoritarianism offers insights into why many support Trump, similar to support for Hitler in Germany 🇩🇪
• Authoritarian family dynamics and teachings in the US's Bible Belt contribute to this continued support 🤝
• Economic disparity and the promise to "Make America Great Again" lure citizens feeling left behind by rapid changes in the political and economic spheres 🌐
• Material conditions and reactionary political messaging are strong factors in Trump's continued support among many Americans ⚖️

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 03:00: Introduction and Trump's Approval Rating In this chapter, Dr. Harriet Fraud begins by introducing the podcast 'Capitalism Hits Home,' which is sponsored by Democracy at Work. She poses a question regarding the persistent approval of Donald Trump among many Americans. Citing various poll numbers, she offers to share her sources with listeners who are interested.
• 03:00 - 07:00: Impact of Tariffs and International Relations The chapter discusses the approval ratings of President Trump in April 2025 and highlights that 39% of Americans approve of his performance, despite this being the lowest in history for any president after the first 100 days. It raises questions about this approval in light of rising prices and unemployment affecting millions. The chapter delves into the impact of these economic factors against the backdrop of international relations and tariffs.
• 07:00 - 13:00: Comparison to Pre-WWII Germany The chapter discusses the current socio-economic and political situation in America by drawing parallels to pre-World War II Germany. It outlines the firing of workers from government jobs and cuts in benefits, which mirrors the dire economic conditions faced by Germany before the war. The narrative also delves into the alienation of America's closest allies, including Mexico, Canada, and Europe, due to the introduction of tariffs, creating a strained international relationship. These factors combined create a tense geopolitical climate akin to that of pre-war Germany.
• 13:00 - 15:30: Authoritarian Family Dynamics This chapter delves into the intricate relationships within authoritarian family dynamics, likening them to the international economic policies under the Trump administration. It highlights the impact of tariffs on trading partners, illustrating the complex web of alliances and economic relationships affected. The chapter emphasizes how major trading partners such as Mexico, Canada, and China have been crucially impacted, drawing a parallel to how individuals within authoritarian families navigate power and dependence. As a result, just like Americans dealing with economic repercussions, individuals in authoritarian family settings often find themselves suffering under strict, controlling dynamics.
• 15:30 - 20:00: Economic Disparities The chapter discusses the economic impact of geopolitical tensions between the United States and China, particularly focusing on the agricultural sector. It highlights the frustrations of Nebraskan farmers who are losing soybean sales to China due to the latter's strategic diversification of imports and response to perceived American hostility by shifting purchases to Brazil. This reflects broader economic disparities and the strategic maneuvering of China as a planned economy.
• 20:00 - 23:00: Authoritarian Influence on Obedience This chapter discusses the impact of authoritarian influence on obedience, using China's economic relationship with the United States as a case study. It highlights China's significant holdings of American Treasury notes, which are government bonds used by the U.S. to raise money. The chapter underscores the magnitude of the U.S. national debt, totaling 36 trillion dollars, thereby marking it as the largest debtor nation globally. The narrative raises concerns about the potential economic leverage China could exert as the second largest holder of U.S. debt instruments.
• 23:00 - 26:30: Material Reasons for Supporting Authoritarian Leaders The chapter explores the reasons why individuals or groups might support authoritarian leaders, focusing on material and economic incentives. In particular, it discusses the strategic decisions related to the holding and potential selling of U.S. Treasury notes by countries like China and Japan. The implications of these decisions highlight the intertwined economic relationships and power dynamics. The chapter also touches on Trump's renegotiation of tariffs, suggesting that economic leverage plays a significant role in international politics and can influence the support for certain leaders.
• 26:30 - 36:00: Mechanisms of Othering and Blame This chapter discusses the economic vulnerabilities of the United States, particularly in relation to debt, the value of the dollar, and international trade relations. The narrative begins with an examination of the potential consequences if foreign holders of U.S. debt, such as Treasury notes, start selling them off, leading to a depreciation of the dollar. The chapter highlights a scenario where the dollar's drastic drop could make America 'worthless and valueless,' underscoring the interconnected nature of the global economic system. This setting serves as a backdrop to President Trump's visit to Japan, which is portrayed as a negotiation effort amidst these economic tensions. The chapter implies a critique of a lack of awareness or consideration for the international system's complexities among American authorities or citizens. Overall, it presents a narrative about economic interdependence and the political challenges and perceptions that stem from them.
• 36:00 - 47:00: Lessons from History and Hope for Change The chapter 'Lessons from History and Hope for Change' discusses the potential negative impacts of current economic and foreign policies, such as alienation of allies and trading partners, devaluation of the dollar, and rising prices. It mentions that there has been much debate on these issues, but suggests that there is an unexplored perspective that merits consideration.

Capitalism Hits Home: Why Some Americans Still Support Trump Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 Hello, this is Dr. Harriet Fraud bringing you Capitalism Hits Home, a podcast sponsored by Democracy at Work. Today, I want to answer that question, or at least to contribute to the answer of the question, why do so many Americans still approve of Trump's performance? In the latest poll numbers that I've gotten from various sources, and if you want to know them, write in.
• 00:30 - 01:00 Um, April 2025, 39% of Americans approve of the job that Trump is doing as president. Now, of course, that is lower than any other president in history after the first 100 days, but nonetheless, over a third of Americans approve of the job that Trump is doing as president. Wow. How come? Prices are rising. Unemployment is rising. Millions
• 01:00 - 01:30 have been fired from decently paying government jobs. Benefits have been cut. America's staunchest allies. The most close Mexico. Second to most close is Canada. Third is Europe have all been alienated with tariffs. And our three biggest trading
• 01:30 - 02:00 partners have also been punished with tariffs. So between the alliances and the trading partners, they've been hit by Trump. Wow. The biggest trading partner we have is Mexico. Second is Canada and the third is China. Americans are already suffering
• 02:00 - 02:30 because of our treatment of China. For example, farmers in Nebraska are enraged because the billion pounds of soybeans that China buys from Nebraskan farmers are cancelled. They are getting their soybeans from Brazil. China is a planned economy and it's been diversifying its orders for a while, watching America's hostility.
• 02:30 - 03:00 Also, China is the second biggest holder of American Treasury notes. Treasury notes are bonds that the US government sells so that they can raise money. We have the biggest debt of any nation in the world. America owes 36 trillion. Biggest debtor nation. If China, the second biggest
• 03:00 - 03:30 holder of these Treasury notes, decided to dump them, on the one hand, China would be losing a lot of wealth because they'd be made pretty much valueless, but on the other hand, America would be reduced to utter shambles. I think that one of the reasons Trump renegotiated the tariffs is that Japan, which is the largest holder of American
• 03:30 - 04:00 debt in Treasury notes, started unloading them and the dollar went down. If the dollar goes too drastically down, America is worthless and valueless. And so Trump decided to visit Japan and negotiate. I guess he forgot we're in an international global system. Well, how can we understand this? Why aren't Americans all
• 04:00 - 04:30 overwhelmingly opposed that we're alienating our allies? We're alienating our trading partners. Our dollar is of less value. Our prices are rising. Why? Well, there have been a lot of discussion about that. But one view of what's happening hasn't been discussed and I think it should
• 04:30 - 05:00 be and that's the view of that comes from the school of marxian thought called the Frankfort school in Frankfurt Germany professors got together marxian professors before they all decided to leave for their own safety and they tried to figure out why are Germans supporting Hitler? My god. Well, and they also decided that
• 05:00 - 05:30 unlike many other Marxists, they're not just looking at the material conditions, which were terrible in Germany, but other things. What other things are happening besides the realm of economics? Because in Germany, the communist and the socialist parties were very powerful. It's one of the reasons that the industrialists, the top of the economics of Germany, subsidized Hitler so well. They
• 05:30 - 06:00 were afraid of a communist socialist takeover. But why did with so many socialists and communists, why did they fall for Hitler? And what the Frankfurt school found among other things because they explored a lot of stuff is that the structure of the authoritarian family really contributed. Now what does that mean? Well, Germany before World War II had an
• 06:00 - 06:30 extremely punitive, almost torturing way of bringing up children. Babies were swaddled so tightly they couldn't move. And then while their mothers were busy, they were hung on pegs, soiling themselves and staying in these bandages, accumulating soores, bleeding, accumulating lice. They were struck frequently and they learned that they
• 06:30 - 07:00 better obey the violent father for their own life preservation. Hitler represented that violent cruel father, the omnipotent father who has to be obeyed to the point of worship. And in 1933 when Hitler came in, Germany was in terrible shape. The inflation was historically
• 07:00 - 07:30 high. meat. The mark was the dollar of Germany at that time. Meat cost three billion marks a pound. Butter was 6 billion marks a pound. A pound of potatoes and a glass of beer, which were staples of the German diet, came at 50 million and 150 million
• 07:30 - 08:00 marks. People rushed. As soon as they got paid, they rushed to the store to buy things before the value went even further down and you needed even more. Their f Germans were frugal. Their life savings were wiped out and they were in terrible shape. A key component of what the Frankfurt school figured out is that German people had been reared with the idea that when hard
• 08:00 - 08:30 times came, when bad times came, when trouble came, shut up and obey the authority to stay safe. Many children in American authoritarian families carry the same message that when hard and threatening times seem to be coming, shut up and obey is the best way to avoid danger. Physically punishing American parents, like
• 08:30 - 09:00 preWorld War II parents, they couldn't really kill their kids and get away with it the way the German parents could. nor could they really get away of breaking their limbs because that is against the law. But they don't necessarily spare physical punishment. James Dobson who is the child rearing guru for the evangelical world and uh he also
• 09:00 - 09:30 wrote his advice for parents which is break the child's will. That was covered in a very good book by Philip Grean called Punishment and the Psychological Impact, religious punishment and the psychological impact of physical abuse. And Dobson picked right up on that. He advises breaking a child's will so that obedience is
• 09:30 - 10:00 unquestioned. Americans, particularly those in the Bible belt, which are the states of have well, I should say in the Bible belt is where Trump's support is strongest. The Bible belt in the United States is Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee,
• 10:00 - 10:30 Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, New Mexico, Ohio, Texas, West Virginia, and Virginia. They all voted strongly for Trump and remain most likely to support him. They like the World War II Germans may fear for what is going to that what is happening to them is frightening and they have to obey the authoritarian
• 10:30 - 11:00 father to get by cuz their reality really has changed because industry left the United States. so that capitalists could move their factories to low wage territories like China, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan where people have no ecological protections, no personal protections like pensions or health insurance and so
• 11:00 - 11:30 on and they could make even more money. Those near the top of the United States have really increased their wealth, which of course they brought back and bought the American political system. But between 1963 and 2020, the top 10% of America saw their wealth increase more than six
• 11:30 - 12:00 times. Those at the very top, the 1% saw their wealth increase seven times. Well, the ones in the middle and at the bottom saw their wealth not increase at all. They stayed at the bottom. They lost the security of decently paid white male jobs. Of course, that was only for white males.
• 12:00 - 12:30 that were unionized. And because more than a third of the country was unionized, they raised all wages and people got pensions and reasonable work hours and health insurance and money to spend. But they don't get that anymore. And when people are taught that when hard times come and trouble comes, you
• 12:30 - 13:00 just need to obey the omnipotent authority. The omnipotent authority or the one who claims to be is certainly Trump. That's why he retains 39% of American support. There's another marxian philosopher that helps shed light on that and that's Louie Altusair. really the foremost philosopher of France. He was the head of the aol normal superior which is a
• 13:00 - 13:30 graduate school and uh it's the equivalent of the super duper Harvard because they don't have legacy admissions. It doesn't cost anything. It's all the ability to do intellectual work pass tests to that gets you into the highest achar superior which altus was ahead of what he said is that there's three ideological state
• 13:30 - 14:00 apparatuses that embed the system of domination and subordination in our nations. They teach people, these three systems teach people to obey and submit inside. So they cringe and they are subordinate. So you don't need the police and the army to put people down. They do it for themselves. They shut up and obey. And they are the authoritarian
• 14:00 - 14:30 family, authoritarian religion and authoritarian education. Children brought up in these systems submit to authoritarians because they're afraid and they feel that their best bet is to obey, to silently obey. It's a
• 14:30 - 15:00 process for children who know they can't argue with orders being given. They can't question and I think they fear they won't survive because children instinctually know that they won't survive without parents. You know, human beings are the most dependent of all animal species. The second most dependent dependent are elephants who have to stay connected to
• 15:00 - 15:30 their mothers for 2 years. But that's 2 years. It's not 16 or 20. And in order to survive, children learn that obedience is paramount, that they better please their parents. What they do is they psych out what their parents want and they try to produce that. And if what their parents want is blind
• 15:30 - 16:00 obedience, they produce it. I have an example right now in my client load. I have a client who's a young teen. She's 13. Her parents, like most parents, are divorced and part of the time she lives with her father and part with her mother. Her mother is a very understanding person who tries to empower her. Her father exacts obedience. He acts like and says how tolerant he is. However, if she doesn't
• 16:00 - 16:30 do what he wants, he utterly ignores her. She has to eat alone rather than with him and his new wife, and she's shunned. So, she's learned that when her father tells her something, she had better just stand there and say yes and blindly agree, wipe herself out, and seem to be dumb because she can't afford to use her mind. That process of erasing your own ideas
• 16:30 - 17:00 and questions can continue. That numbness that leads to obedience can continue to the point where many people like the German people and like 39% of the American people support dictators who operate against their self-interest and they just decide not to know what's happening cuz it's too
• 17:00 - 17:30 scary to know. Of course, there's other reasons that are material reasons. The mass of Americans need change. Trump was obviously different from the usual politicians and he championed change. He also told people he could rescue America. He could make America great again. bring back the 1950s with all of its racism and sexism and higher
• 17:30 - 18:00 wages for white males. Although he didn't specify that, he just make America the greatest again. He also made sure and he has certainly acted on it to change any attempts at diversity, equity, and inclusion in our country to make it white again. white supremacist. So people who have been
• 18:00 - 18:30 brought up in authoritarian households who believe in the omnipotent father could support him as they supported their own irrational fathers who were who demanded ultimate obedience in the authoritarian family. And of there are many many authoritarian families which often take their
• 18:30 - 19:00 authority from religion. But authoritarian religion is often then reinforced by authoritarian families and authoritarian education. Teaching children to blindly obey and suspend their own doubts, their own questions and their own intelligence and quash the challenge and quash themselves
• 19:00 - 19:30 psychologically blank out and just go somewhere else. Like my client told me that she when her father gives her commands, she just blanks out and agrees with whatever he says. But of course, that numbs children's minds. And I have seen the transformation of this young girl as she chose to live with her mother, was horribly punished for it by her father
• 19:30 - 20:00 and now refuses cuz at 14 you can refuse to be with a parent. refuses to even see her father and her whole demeanor has changed. She questions. She has ideas. She interrupts. It's a whole she's not a submissive creature. She no longer numbs her mind. So that habit of erasing your own questions and attraction to someone who claims
• 20:00 - 20:30 omnipotence can really mitigate against realizing that what is happening is not in your self-interest at all. Now of course there are some other reasons. There are material reasons just like there were material reasons for the Germans to be upset. There are certainly material reasons for Americans to be upset. The mass of Americans really do need change. And Trump was the one who
• 20:30 - 21:00 trumpeted change. The Nazis labeled communists, Jews, gypsies, and gay people as bad people. vermin, bad people who invade us, who drain us, who have been destroying our nation. Trump does the same thing. He uses the word bad often. These are bad
• 21:00 - 21:30 migrants, bad Mexicans who are rapists and thieves, and people don't think, gee, he's been accused of rape, he steals. No, these are bad people. who are at fault for the problems that America is suffering. And I can res restore our greatness by punishing and expelling this bad element. Note that bad child is
• 21:30 - 22:00 something that authoritarian parents say to their children. It doesn't seem to matter when he uses that language. that 10 there are 10 million migrants in the United States out of 330 million people. No matter that migrants, whether legal or illegal, work at the hardest jobs, the most backbreaking labor for the lowest pay.
• 22:00 - 22:30 60% of the dishwashers in New York restaurants are migrants. Nobody else wants to take that job. But people have another psychological mechanism. They're taught that they're bad. Their wants are bad. Anything that contrasts with what's right for their parents to do makes them bad. And they turn that self-hatred against other groups because they don't want to feel
• 22:30 - 23:00 bad. They claim that the badness is in the other person, the brown person, the migrant, and therefore they can torture those people cuz they're bad. Germany could put them in ovens. They could shoot them, gas them, cuz after all, they could put them in labor camps as slave labor cuz they're bad. and they should pay back a little
• 23:00 - 23:30 of what they've stolen from us. Trump has that same message. We've been robbed. People from other countries have robbed us. They are bad people. Therefore, we are allowed to deport them to prisons from which no person survives. We allowed to imprison them without a
• 23:30 - 24:00 trial. We allowed to strip them of their rights. And that's how Americans allow people to be deported to El Salvador, separated from their homes and families, not being given anything like a fair trial. But after all, they're bad. They're poisoning us. those same words that are used against children's assertion of their own needs against
• 24:00 - 24:30 what their parents want. My little client's father asked her to go on a trip with him. She said yes when she was trained to say yes, but in therapy she realized she was afraid he'd kill her there. It was to a remote place camping. And when she realized that, she could say no. But her instinct was to blot out and say yes in spite of her fears. Well, the Germans kind of woke up
• 24:30 - 25:00 when their whole society was destroyed. Tens of thousands were killed. Their homes were destroyed. And after the war, they faced their own complicity in war, torture, murder, and genocide. The Germans did what no other group has done, which is they had something called Vagut Mahung, make it good again, where
• 25:00 - 25:30 they paid the salaries of people who were kicked, who were killed or thrown out of Germany. People who left Germany were paid the salary they would have been paid and gotten the pensions they would have been paid had they stayed in Germany. Also, they radically changed their child rearing practices, realizing that they were training people in unquestioning
• 25:30 - 26:00 obedience. Just as the Germans reconsidered when they were defeated, I I really hope that America doesn't have to be destroyed before over a third of our country realized that that was a mistake. I hope we can reconsider and on that basis there is some hope because Trump's support went down 12% in the last year. 12% from last year to
• 26:00 - 26:30 this year and it keeps on going down. It's down 21% in the case of Abrego Garcia, who was the innocent man deported and sent to El Salvador. And Trump doesn't want to bother getting him back. He says he can't, but of course he can. So that there is hope. Also, America, Americans are organizing. There
• 26:30 - 27:00 are Tesla takedowns every weekend. Tesla has lost 71% of its revenue and people are turning. They're going to anti-Trump demonstrations all over the world, but particularly in the United States. So, there is hope. There is hope that people will be so shocked by what they see that they'll be shocked into disobedience to an
• 27:00 - 27:30 omnipotent dictatorial authority. That's all for today. Thank you. Goodbye for now. [Music]