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Trump is no working-class hero

My sister works long hours as a waitress and my brother works even longer hours at a plant that mines and processes limestone. Another brother toiled for decades in the housekeeping department at our hometown hospital; it closed two years ago. A nephew has a job at Walmart.

My sister works long hours as a waitress and my brother works even longer hours at a plant that mines and processes limestone. Another brother toiled for decades in the housekeeping department at our hometown hospital; it closed two years ago. A nephew has a job at Walmart.

So I know a bit about the "working-class whites" who are being credited with/blamed for electing the detestable Donald Trump. And while no Trump ballots were cast among my five siblings and me, some extended family members may have voted for him.

I'd like to think they were no more motivated by racism, xenophobia, or ignorance than were my middle-class gay white Republican friends - good people who see their guy's triumph ushering in "a whole new world," as one of them Facebook-messaged me Wednesday morning.

As for what such a world might look like, Trump's campaign trail is littered with ugly hints and uglier threats. His belligerence is troubling, and so are his promises about jobs for working-class people, because they're as empty as the husks of casinos he used to own in Atlantic City.

Garish and enormous, those vacant structures, and the thousands of lost jobs they represent, remind me of the blank faces of the factories in the New England town where I was born.

When I was growing up in North Adams, Mass., in the 1950s and '60s, the paper, textile, and footwear mills that had sustained generations of mostly white ethnic families were fading fast.

Almost every one of those jobs has since disappeared. And no matter what size a rhetorical sledgehammer the new president uses on the trade agreements he blames for robbing Americans of employment opportunities, they're not coming back - any more than they're coming back to Camden.

It was there, about 15 years ago, that I attended a news conference in the shuttered headquarters of what was once a major local bank. For some reason the event was staged in the former company cafeteria, where the sight of vintage commercial kitchen equipment gathering dust startled me into realizing just how many sorts of jobs had vanished when the bank was acquired, merged, moved, or closed.

Such decisions weren't made by the employees, any more than the mill workers in my hometown decided to shift their plant's operations to nonunion states.

Owners and top management - people like Trump, in other words - made those decisions, driven by concerns far more compelling to them than the fate of some anonymous burger-flipper or machine operator.

As for the fate of the families whose heads of household became jobless due to front office politics and boardroom machinations? Sorry. Those are the breaks.

Along with magical vows to create jobs, Trump's campaign served up plenty of red dog-whistle meat to mollify not just members of a formerly more prosperous working class, but all sorts of people hungry to have their real and (more often) imaginary resentments acknowledged. If not inflamed.

But the boilerplate on our president-elect's campaign website, with its bullet points and polished aura of seriousness, is nearly fatuous. His denunciations of the (fill in the blank) people supposedly filching jobs that rightfully belong to the (presumably white) American working class are misleading and repellent.

The hope I hear people express on social media about what Trump's victory will mean for America makes me deeply sad.

The notion of a leader shaking up or even laying waste to "the system" from which the little people understandably feel disenfranchised - including a mass media that ignores or treats them as an anthropological curiosity - has an appeal I can appreciate.

But in the towns where Walmart is the biggest employer and folks are barely getting by, in the impressive array of Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania and Ohio that helped put him over the top, the impact of Trump's job creation fantasies will be less than zero.

In voting for this singularly unqualified real estate developer/reality TV host, who has gut-level disdain for the institutions and mechanisms of governance, working class white people - my people - and many other good and not-so-good people have been fooled. Again.

kriordan@phillynews.com

856-779-3845 @inqkriordan

www.philly.com/blinq