Comment by jmathai

Quality of life has been going down for most Americans over the past few decades. It's harder to buy a house, raise a family, etc. on a modest income. Increasing cost of goods has outpaced wage increases but there are probably other factors at play too.

Americans lived in a world where all you needed was a decent job and you could have a good life - defined by what I said above. That's not the case anymore and they're upset about it - they're looking for someone or something to blame.

The republican party chose to blame immigrants and the democrats chose to blame lack of DEI. This fractured the citizens into two camps who can seemingly find no middle ground anymore.

Meanwhile, the wealth gap continues to increase and the middle class is shrinking. But neither political party can run on a platform of reducing spending AND higher taxes on wealth. They'd lose their funding sources - so they're stuck with immigrants and DEI.

Meanwhile, Trump sees an opportunity to extract wealth from the working class by reducing government spending and diverting those savings to corporations and the wealthy. Moderate Americans feel a bit powerless given how quickly our long standing legal and government structures seem to be deteriorating.