Trump’s ‘El Camino’ campaign rides to victory

In 1958, Chevrolet introduced the El Camino. Built on the body of an Impala, Chevy advertised its sedan/pickup truck hybrid as “the most beautiful thing that ever shouldered a load! It rides and handles like a convertible, yet hauls and hustles like the workingest thing on wheels.”

The El Camino story began in 1932, when the Australian division of Ford Motor Company received a letter from a farmer’s wife in Victoria asking for “a vehicle to go to church in on Sunday, which can carry our pigs to market on Mondays.”

That letter sparked the design creativity of Ford engineer Lew Bandt, resulting in the 1934 introduction of a combination ritzy sedan in the front/rough and tumble pickup in the back. Ford’s hybrid idea was picked up by Chevy decades later.

While Chevrolet discontinued the El Camino in 1987, Americans no longer desiring a vehicle combining churchgoing stylishness with farm-working toughness, the 2024 presidential election shows that voters were wishing for an “El Camino” president, a candidate sporting the elegance of a sleek convertible, yet whose driving work ethic “hauls and hustles like the workingest thing on wheels.”

When President-elect Trump’s version of Santa arrived early, on Nov. 5, he gifted America with a shiny new “El Camino” victory. Trump’s boundless energy on the campaign trail over the past two years after announcing his candidacy on Nov. 15, 2022, reveals him to be, to paraphrase Chevy’s initial El Camino ad, “the workingest campaigner ever.”

I find the El Camino a superb metaphor for Trump’s campaign, combining 5th Avenue style with a genuine understanding of the most important issues facing America’s working-class families: inflation impacting the cost of groceries, the obscene influx of illegals through an open border, woke prosecutorial policies creating a crime epidemic in liberal cities and woke absurdities in the realms of gender issues inviting men into women’s spaces and, particularly, women’s sports.

The El Camino analogy works, not merely because of Trump’s work ethic placing value on the ruggedness of the vehicle, but also because of the hybrid nature of voter support he amassed. Many Americans in once solidly Democratic voter blocs, seeing the pickup portion of Trump’s El Camino, hopped on board.

Why would working-class families hitch themselves to a billionaire leader rightfully belonging to the most elite class in America? The answer to that question is simply that voters recognized in Donald Trump one essential quality – authenticity.

Donald Trump’s El Camino campaign was no mere strategy. It was genuinely authentic. Those decrying as inauthentic Trump’s appeal – increasing support among working-class families, blacks, Hispanics and young voters only by successfully fooling them – reveal themselves to be the hypocrites (as is thoroughly consistent with the now-axiomatic truth that liberals are always guilty of the very charges they most hotly level against conservative opponents).

Donald Trump, inauthentic? The voters knew better, able instinctively to recognize in Trump something entirely different from the plastic fakery of the attempts to relate to the working class by liberal elites, such as “I’m gonna get me a beer” Elizabeth Warren, Nancy Pelosi showing off her ice cream stocked frig, or the non-answer “I come from a middle-class family” campaign line Kamala Harris uttered whenever asked how she would solve the inflation dilemma caused by Biden/Harris policies.

Americans know injustice when they see it, and when they saw Biden’s DOJ shoveling a load of manure into the back of Trump’s El Camino campaign, they respected him all the more for his toughness. The Mar-a-Lago raid, the mug shot, the patently ridiculous Bragg, Leticia and Fani show trials – all meant to weigh down Trump’s El Camino until its axles snapped, either bankrupting or incarcerating him – failed, proving his “El Camino” campaign’s strength and durability.

While from the beginning conservative Americans were loving what they saw, many who had never imagined themselves becoming Trump supporters couldn’t help but respect what they were seeing. The images of Trump’s “El Camino” campaign garnered admiration from a wide swath of Americans normally disinterested in politics, whether rising bloodied after being shot to cry “Fight, fight, fight!” or serving fries out of a McDonald’s window, or wearing a sanitation worker’s orange vest in a garbage truck.

Had Kamala tried similar photo-ops hoping to connect with middle America, serving fries at McDonald’s where she pretended she once worked, it would have been her Dukakis-in-a-tank moment, laughed off as inauthentic and hypocritical.

Trump’s “El Camino” campaign successfully expanded his MAGA base. As Victor Davis Hanson wrote, “Trump’s veritable campaign menagerie of RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Dana White and Kid Rock made it impossible for the Left to demonize MAGA Republicans as right-wing aristocrats or laissez-faire capitalists.”

I see Hanson’s words as describing the El Camino quality of the Trump campaign.

By contrast, VDH writes of the other side, “The endorsements of the Biden-Harris legacy media, calcified Hollywood endorsers, blowhard university faculties, and tech barons proved vastly overrated.”

Why overrated? Because this year for Christmas, Americans craved a president with El Camino style/toughness. Trump offered those qualities, while the Harris campaign offered only celebrity glitz, big on style but void of an attempt honestly, and with toughness, to address the most crucial issues facing Americans.

Americans got what they wanted for Christmas this year and are now excited to see how their new El Camino handles as it drives down the road over the next four years.