Bikers for Trump

There is a significant irony in having a bunch of bikers wanting to support you politically, and you telling them, "Sure, come hang out at one of my golf clubs."

On the other hand, it's working for him.

For a week every summer, tiny Sturgis, South Dakota mushrooms from a town of 7,000 to a metropolis of 500,000. Welcome to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, where hundreds of thousands of largely working class and middle-aged Americans make a pilgrimage during the first week of August to celebrate a particular subset of American culture.

Here, they can enjoy the Sturgis Motorcycle Museum and Hall of Fame, and the sprawling majestic sights of nearby Black Hills National Forest. Harley Davidsons are the bikes of choice, classic rock and country music blare, the beer flows, and the politics runs surprisingly conservative. The mainstream media has picked up on the story, highlighting the degree to which this particular demographic has tilted, almost entirely, to Donald Trump....

Working class heartlanders are not voting on transgender bathrooms, or safe spaces, or gay adoption, or historical preservation, or protection of endangered species, or gender-neutral pronouns, or university “speech codes”, or any of the other things that blue state elitists tend to find their way to.

They are looking for a candidate who wants them to have more money in their pocket, who says what he actually believes, and who is not going to let the Stalinist mentality of political correctness pervade his candidacy.

Bikers don't like Stalinists. Remember that the Hells Angels volunteered to deploy to Vietnam to fight Communists if they could go as a unit. For some reason, the government didn't take them up on the offer, but I don't doubt they meant it sincerely.

I've said here before that Trump's communication style is something he picked up in his World Wrestling days. He's been talking for a long time, but he used to go on Oprah. Since WWE, he's learned to talk like Hulk Hogan or Macho Man Randy Savage. Bikers love that. A lot of people do, really. That's why WWE is a big money entertainment industry.

But there's more beyond that. There's something about being the new Hulk Hogan; about wearing the confidence of 1980s America. It's almost magic.



Just compare the rhetoric. "The greatest world champion of all times." "I don't think I've ever seen...." And then Trump: "These are the most beautiful bikes that anybody has ever seen." (They aren't. There is a better collection of bikes over in Maggie Valley; but nobody thinks Trump is supposed to know anything about this. Nobody even pretends that he ought to know.)

People respond to that confidence in authority. Maybe they shouldn't. Maybe we should all be much more suspicious of such claims. But they do, and they especially do when it seems to be working out. Hogan kept winning his matches; Trump keeps boiling the economy.