One of the more irritating things about the current election is the obtuseness of the media, particularly the so-called conservative media. They insist on assigning motives to Trump voters that are at odds with observable reality. For months now the official narrative has been that Trump is powered by toothless hillbillies, high on meth and anger at the dusky fellows. Voting Trump is how these losers are lashing out in anger, always in anger. Never mind that the data says the opposite.

The narrative, coincidentally, always speaks to the wonderfulness of conservative media. Similarly, they tar Trump with every offense to decency, even though he is often saying the things these same conservatives used to say a decade or two ago. According to the modern conservative, anyone holding the opinions common a few decades ago is a monster. Hilariously, Trump’s lack of a political ambition is held against him by conservatives. Again, the critique is always about the critic in these cases.

That’s the cynical interpretation. These people know better, but choose to lie in order to flatter themselves and their owners. Another way to look at it though, and part of why Trump exists, is that these people and the entirely of the ruling class are divorced from reality. They live in their bunkered communities, work with other managerial types and spend their days agreeing with one another about their wonderfulness. To them, the status quo is fabulous. Why would anyone want to change it?

This story from the Imperial Capital is a good example of the blinkered nature of our elites.

Lawmakers on both sides of the Capitol are quietly launching a new effort to expand visas for low-skilled foreign workers in government funding bills — a push that could drive a deep ideological rift through both parties later this year.

Republicans and Democrats whose home states rely on immigrant labor are lobbying top appropriators to include language in this year’s funding bills to renew controversial provisions from last year’s omnibus spending measure that effectively quadrupled the number of low-skilled worker visas.

Nine House lawmakers, led by Rep. Billy Long (R-Mo.), sent a letter last week urging the Appropriations Committee to keep those higher numbers intact. And key senators have already begun to discuss the issue.

“Many businesses will be severely impacted, and some may be unable to operate, without this cap relief,” said the House letter, obtained by POLITICO and addressed to Reps. John Carter (R-Texas) and Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Calif.), who head the panel that oversees funding for the Department of Homeland Security. “Failure to enact this exemption will hurt seasonal businesses across the country.”

The program in question is the H-2B visa, which covers immigrants who work as landscapers, housekeepers and seafood processors. Those visas are legally capped at 66,000 per year, which pro-business advocates say is an artificially low number that could harm key U.S. industries.

We have two primaries going on in which immigration is the defining issues. On the one side, the guy promising to build a wall and bar Muslims from entry crushed the field, despite being outspent a million-to-one. On the other side, the old-time socialist, who preaches worker’s rights and obliquely opposes the immigration lobbies, is making life hell for the party candidate. If Sanders went back to his old anti-immigration ways, he would run the table on Crooked Hillary.

Despite this year long news story, the politicians and their backers in both parties want to increase immigration! Obama is violating Federal law so he can import hundreds of thousands of Islamic terrorists. You could be forgiven if you started to wonder if these people actually hate you. How is it possible to be this blind to daily reality in America? It’s as if these people live on another planet and pop in every once in a while to stage a political show.

I’m fond of pointing out that all you have to do is spend a little time with grad students at an elite university to understand why Mao sent these people off the rice paddies. They manage to combine wrongheadedness with smug condescension to the point where you want to smash them in the face. I suspect a corollary here is that you can understand the French Revolution by spending a few minutes following American politics. A normal man wants “to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”

This is why Trump exists. It’s never been about Trump, what he says or what he promises to do. That’s just the glitter on the stripper. The Trumpening is about the people in charge and their callous disregard for their duties and the country they allegedly serve. It’s as if the voting public went out and found the one guy who most offends the ruling class. Trump is a more polished version of Chuck Tingle and the voters are the Rabid Puppies. It’s not about voting for something as much as it is voting against something.

Trump is the warning shot. He’s the food riots before the revolution. He’s the stack of letters to the editor in protest over some issue. People do not go from happy to bloody revolt overnight. It’s a process and the early stages are warnings, at least they should be viewed as warnings. If the people in Washington insist on flooding the country with helot labor, despite what’s happening in the election, the people are going to insist on building scaffolds in Washington. The Trump phenomenon is the warning.