Trump backed by same forces that helped Hitler, says Clinton aide

Alec Ross points to his home state of West Virginia as a symptom of the ­economic forces propelling Donald Trump.

Hillary Clinton adviser Alec Ross at the UBS event in Sydney yesterday.

Hillary Clinton adviser Alec Ross points to his home state of West Virginia as a symptom of the ­economic forces behind the rise of Donald Trump.

The coalmining state was once dyed in the wool Democrat. But the decline of that industry and lack of new ones to replace it have seen a rise in the power of the ­Republican Party.

“People from places like West Virginia have embraced a form of political extremism because of the stagnation that they have had,” Mr Ross said yesterday in an interview in Sydney, where he was a keynote speaker at the Australasia conference hosted by UBS. “Once the mines were closed, the unions couldn’t look after them. It made the people especially vulnerable to nationalist voices.”

Mr Ross, a technology expert, worked on the successful 2008 Obama campaign and was hired as an adviser to Mrs Clinton when she became secretary of state.

He has been a technology adviser to Mrs Clinton in the 2016 presidential campaign and has just released a book, The Industries of the Future, which argues that linking big data with industries such as agriculture and biotechnology will create new jobs.

He compared the forces behind the rising popularity of Mr Trump to the economic forces behind the rise of Adolf Hitler in 1930s ­Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy.

“There are similarities between the rise of Trump and the rise of Mussolini and Hitler,” he said. “It’s nothing new.”

He said the Trump campaign theme, “Make America Great Again”, appealed to many working-class Americans as it harked back to a time when the US was economically stronger — a ploy also used by Hitler and Mussolini to appeal to the public at a time when their economies were weak.

“Mussolini would make speeches evoking old Rome,” he said. “It’s the evocation of a uto­pian past, which may or may not have ever existed, that Trump is doing when he says Make America Great Again.

“It is a specific appeal to a certain kind of middle American white person who has felt emasculated over the past decade-plus.”

Mr Ross said it was the feeling of rising economic inequality, ­particularly among people without a university degree who did not live in the big cities, that was fuelling support for Mr Trump.

He said there was no easy political solution for Mrs Clinton, if she were elected president, to deal with the political and social frustration of Trump supporters such as the former coalminers of West Virginia and their families.

“It’s going to be difficult,” he said. “The only way she can counter it is through good governance — the roll up your sleeves, good technocratic governance.

“There is no magic wand, but there has to be a set of policies in place that facilitate inclusive growth. There are no short-term fixes. Humans are not as easy to update as software.”

Mr Ross said improved education was one policy option to ­address rising US inequality, as was a “fairer” tax policy.

He said the present US tax policy, where some of the wealthiest Americans pay less tax than their staff, needed to be reformed to reduce perceptions of inequality.

There did not need to be a rise in the overall level of taxation, but there needed to be “fairer taxes”.

Mr Ross said if Mrs Clinton was elected president, she would take a “more workmanlike attitude in her approach to governance” as opposed to the more visionary approach of Barack Obama.

“I don’t think we should expect grand articulations about the ­rebalancing of capital, labour and state,” he said.