An Unlikely Melting Pot at a Trump Office in Florida

By DAVID BARSTOW

For a campaign depicted as offering a rallying point for the white working class, volunteers for Donald J. Trump in Tampa are noteworthy for their ethnic diversity and for the variety of their political opinions.

… For a campaign frequently depicted as offering a rallying point for the white working class, the people volunteering to help Mr. Trump here are noteworthy for their ethnic diversity. They include a young woman who recently arrived from Peru; an immigrant from the Philippines; a 70-year-old Lakota Indian; a teenage son of Russian immigrants; a Mexican-American.

They range the political spectrum, too, from lifelong Democrat to independent to libertarian to conservative Republican. To a person, they condemned and sometimes ridiculed David Duke and other white supremacists who have noisily backed Mr. Trump. “I totally do not agree with them,” said one volunteer, Andrew Cherry.

Yet like Mrs. Linsky, many spoke openly about how fears centered on race and ethnicity were at the heart of their support for Mr. Trump. To a large extent, they traced those fears to the scars they still bear from the Great Recession — lost jobs, drained 401(k)’s, home foreclosures, rising debt, the feeling that the country is broken.

More than anything, several Trump volunteers here said, the Great Recession exposed a corrupt, out-of-touch ruling class in Washington that allows big corporations to outsource jobs at will while doing nothing to address millions of illegal immigrants who compete for jobs and drain government coffers.

• First, the working class isn’t all that white anymore.
• Second, the thing that most drives the American upper middle class around the bend about the New Yorker — his gaudy, unrefined taste — is exactly what appeals to The Diverse. (In contrast, golf architecture aficionados, for example, are apoplectic about Trump’s increased profile in the world of golf course design. Do you realize that vulgarian dared to criticize the USGA’s cutting edge stylistic setup of Pinehurst for the 2014 US Open in which they ripped out half the sprinklers and let the course turn brown? Trump dared to tweet that golf courses look better green. Why, I never …)
• Third, Trump’s tastes tend to appeal to immigrants.