Interesting New Yorker Story on Donald Trump-Incorrect Attribution!
Summary of eRumor:
An article written by Roy Kaplan that supposedly appeared in the New Yorker says that Donald Trump is a “giant middle finger from average Americans to the political and media establishment.”
The Truth:
This commentary wasn’t published by the New Yorker.
Forwarded emails of the story that began making the rounds in early 2016 claimed that it was penned by an unnamed “political correspondent for Bloomberg” and was published in the New Yorker on February 1, 2016. But the article was actually written by Don Fredrick, a vocal critic of President Obama who publishes his commentaries at his fringe website, The Complete Obama Timeline.
The general gist of the article, which was published in December 2015, is that Trump is a symbol of working class Americans rejecting political and media elites, as explained in its opening sentence:
The better question may be, “What is Donald Trump?” The answer: A giant middle finger from average Americans to the political and media establishment.
Even though this particular article was not published in the New Yorker, however, an article with a similar theme — voters giving the finger to the political establishment by supporting Trump — was published in the magazine in November 2015. The commentary, which was written by James Surowiecki and appeared on the magazine’s “Financial Page,” begins:
Donald Trump’s campaign slogan is “Make America Great Again!” A better one might be “Only in America.” You could not ask for a better illustration of the complexity of ordinary Americans’ attitudes toward class, wealth, and social identity than the fact that a billionaire’s popularity among working-class voters has given him the lead in the race for the Republican Presidential nomination. In a recent Washington Post/ABC poll, Trump was the candidate of choice of a full third of white Republicans with no college education. Working-class voters face stagnant wages and diminished job prospects, and a 2014 poll found that seventy-four per cent of them think “the U.S. economic system generally favors the wealthy.” Why on earth would they support a billionaire?
In the end, both stories summarize support for Trump as a stand against the political establishment and elitism — but the stories are very different, and Fredrick’s commentary has been incorrectly attributed to the New Yorker.