The great shift.

Speaking broadly, the American workforce is roughly divided into two cohorts – those who shower before they go to work and those who shower after work.

Again speaking broadly, those who shower before work, work in offices. They are the doctors, salesmen, office managers, bookkeepers, bankers, small business owners and other white-collar workers whose daily efforts add value to society.

But the shower-before-work crowd also includes DEI-obsessed HR managers, untethered-from-reality college professors, unaccountable government bureaucrats, bottom-feeding lawyers, “journalists,” and rent seeking climate change activists who deplete societal marrow.

This latter group, along with the approximately 42 million Americans who receive welfare benefits, constitute the core of the 21^stcentury Democratic Party.

That’s a dramatic shift.

At one time – not that long ago – the Democratic Party was seen, with some justification, as the party of the shower after work crowd. Those who shower after work do so because they get hot and dirty doing the sweaty work that must be done if the country is to function. These workers are busy all day building houses, working on cars, repairing downed power lines, answering calls to put out fires, and climbing into sweltering hot attics to fix air conditioners.

And for decades they voted for Democrats.

But against the background of a Democratic Party that was already morphing into a coalition of celebrities, the ultra-rich, über-educated white coastal liberals and those who depend on government benefits for daily living, Donald Trump came down the escalator.

Donald Trump is a multibillionaire who built his fortune on the labor of those who shower after work. The respect that Trump has for that worker is authentic to the point that it need not be spoken. Trump never has to put on a hard hat and go to a jobsite for a photo op. He has been to plenty of jobsites when no one in the media was looking. The workers on that jobsite get Trump because he exudes the fact that he gets them.

Trump’s empathy for the common man arrived concurrently with a gnawing fear in the pits of the stomachs of working and middle-class Americans that the country is about to pay a terrible price for having exported its muscular work to third world countries. It’s not hard to imagine how China having more shipbuilding yards than the United States could one day come back to bite in a most unpleasant way.

As to the timing of shower-taking, Democrats like Kamala Harris look condescendingly upon the late shower-takers. They have disdain for people who get dirty at work and who don’t know Pinot Noir from Pinot Grigio. In the past 30-odd years, and with the acquiescence of squishy Republicans, they have allowed the United States to devolve from the Arsenal of Democracy to the Nation of Zoom Meetings.

The Democratic Party of Kamala Harris is by no stretch any longer the party of the working man.

The irony of ironies is that the Republican Party, led by a New York born & bred billionaire, now is.