Both men are known for their outsized personalities, unfiltered rhetoric, hatred for the media and utter assurance in their own righteousness. Both weaponized calculated bursts of invective: Rizzo promised to “make Attila the Hun look like a faggot,” while Trump assures his fans that he’ll “bomb the shit out of ISIS.”
Both placed themselves above other politicians as a breed apart, tougher and more genuine. “I have high principles — stand for good,” Rizzo told Newsweek in 1971. “If anybody gives me a bloody nose, I’ll wipe it off and just love to mix it up. My strategy is to be Frank Rizzo. No glib talk. No talking with forked tongue for Frank Rizzo.” Forty-five years later, Donald Trump is leading the Republican field. “I’m the only one that speaks my mind and tells the truth and everybody knows I’m right,” the magnate told a Fox News anchor last year, after his comments about temporarily banning Muslims from the United States. “You know what my campaign strategy is? Honesty. I say it like it is.”
Rizzo tucked a nightstick in his cummerbund, and working-class white Philadelphians swooned. Trump pounds out 140-character insults on Twitter — his enemies are “failing,” “grubby,” “low-energy” losers/phonies/dummies — for similar effect. “Both those guys are just saying what everyone else is thinking, what the average American is thinking,” says Diane Gochin, 58, who backed Rizzo when she lived in the city and supports Trump now. “With Trump, as with Rizzo, he is not bound by the bar association or the banks or anything else,” says Gochin, who now lives in Montgomery County but grew up in Northeast Philadelphia and worked in the vast bureaucracy of Thomas Jefferson hospital. “He’s the best bet we have for bringing the common people back into government.”
IN AN OCTOBER National Journal article, longtime political reporter John B. Judis dusted off some sociological research from the 1970s that had been published in the book The Radical Center: Middle Americans and the Politics of Alienation, by Donald Warren. Warren conducted surveys of large groups of white voters and identified within them a voting bloc he called Middle American Radicals (MARs). Their ideology, as Judis describes it, “revolved around an intense conviction that the middle class was under siege from above and below.”
MARs were distrustful of big business, and they favored some economic policies well loved by liberals, like a robust minimum wage and job guarantees. But they were also bitterly opposed to welfare and affirmative action and deeply suspicious of the federal government. Another hallmark: More than any other group Warren studied, MARs thought Washington, D.C., works best “when one person is in charge.”