The FRONTLINE Interviews
Victor Davis Hanson
Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institution
Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is a regular contributor to Fox News and the author of The Case for Trump.
Following is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE’s Jim Gilmore conducted on July 18, 2019. It has been edited for clarity and length.
This interview appears in:
TOP
Victor Davis Hanson
Chapters
Text Interview:
Highlight text to share it
Contrasting Obama and Trump
Let’s start with the inauguration of both President Obama and Trump.How do they represent themselves?What are their aspirations at that point?And how do they differ?
Well, in 2008, Barack Obama, remember, just, I think it was 10 days to a week before the election, had said that he was going to fundamentally transform the country.That was surprising because his campaign had been based or predicated on physical discipline, opposition to gay marriage, opposition to open borders.So I think that after the primary with Hillary Clinton, people thought… that he was going to reach in the middle.And indeed, when he was inaugurated, there was great hope that after the acrimony of the Iraq War and the September 2008 meltdown that he would bring us together.
And that was quickly dispelled with the Tea Party opposition to so-called Obamacare, which didn’t get a single vote from the Republicans.And after the 2010 midterms, which—in which he lost 63 House seats and he lost six Senate seats—excuse me—eight Senate seats, I think, and he lost more than both Bill Clinton had in ’94 and Donald Trump did in 2018, I think that kind of marked a watershed.
On the other hand, when Trump had his inauguration, almost from the beginning there was a sense that he was going to—he called it “drain the swamp,” but whatever it was going to be, it was going to be a chemotherapeutic experience.In other words, he had campaigned on there was a bipartisan cancer in Washington, and whatever it took would deal with that cancer before it hurt the host: us.
So he was unabashedly candid that things were going to be different.And from the very beginning, the pushback—as you remember, the day of the inauguration, Madonna suggested out loud that she’d like to blow up the White House, and then a series of events ensued where there was lawsuits in three states about voting machines; there was a celebrity appeal on television that the electors should not follow their Electoral College mandates.Then we went all the way into the Logan Act, the Emoluments [Clause], the 25th Amendment, and they were all efforts to suggest that the election had not been genuine or authentic or valid.And we’re still in that cycle after nearly two and a half years.
The Promise of Obama
Obama believes coming in, he sells his biography.He sells himself as someone who can bridge the divide.How did conservatives see Obama coming in?You write that in some ways, Obama inherited a divided America, but he made it much worse. …
Well, he professed that he was going to bring us together, but he ran as the progressive alternative to Hillary Clinton.Hillary Clinton, remember, at that period was drinking boilermakers, and she was trying to appeal to swing voters in the Midwest.Even though Barack Obama didn’t explicitly say things, there were things during the campaign, things, statements, assertions that worried conservatives.He said at one point, I think it was in Philadelphia, that you have to get in people’s faces.He said, take a gun to a knife fight; when he referred to his grandmother as a typical—not a white person, but a “typical white person.”And there were things within his autobiography that would lend credence to the fact that he was in certain areas and certain times provocative on issues of race.
Then when he was elected, there was a point where he suggested that Latino voters need to—I think I’m quoting directly—“punish our enemies” at the polls; they need to have solidarity by their ethnic fides.So there were elements within there.And then when the Tea Party started, he used an obscenity.He called—he referred to them [sic] “Tea Baggers.”In some ways, he was very Trumpian.The difference between Obama and later Trump, the candor and even indeed the callousness, was that he sounded mellifluous, and he did it in sober and judicious tones, and maybe the frequency was not quite like Trump, but if you would actually go and read the text of things Obama said about the opposition, it was not—it was not designed for conciliatory progress between the two factions.
And the result of that was what? …
Well, the result of what he was doing, within just two years, he had the greatest midterm losses since the Great Depression, I think since FDR’s ’38 disaster.And that—and he galvanized an entire group of people who he had referred earlier to, loosely, as the clingers.I don’t know if he used the word “clingers,” but he said, “They cling to their guns.”Hillary would later call them the “deplorables” or the “irredeemables.”Joe Biden would call them the “dregs of society.”But we know who they were.They were the old Reagan Democrats, the [Ross] Perot voter.Maybe even we could use the term “silent majority.”And then they were rebranded the Tea Party people.And these were people who were angry about losing—that they had not been told that they would lose their health plan, they would lose their doctor.There was the psychodrama about Jonathan Gruber where he sort of laughed—a consultant to the Obama health care plan—where he laughed about deceiving these people.
And there was a sense that there were not Republicans in the House or the Senate or indeed at the national scene that were sticking up for them.Now, there were a lot of other reasons that had nothing to do with Barack Obama, and that would entail social media, the use of the internet, where people’s frustrations in a nanosecond could reverberate to tens of millions.
And then globalization had been widely praised as a way of bringing Western capitalism to the Amazon Basin and giving people penicillin in Kazakhstan.But the fact of the matter was, any areas that relied on muscular labor that could be Xeroxed abroad at cheaper rates, in addition to outsourcing and offshoring, we sort of hollowed out the interior of, say, the Ohio River Valley or the San Joaquin Valley of California, and there were people who didn’t—they weren’t on the globalization train.And we had mixed—we, meaning both parties—had confused cause and effect.The cause of their malaise, the higher suicide rates, the turn to drugs like Oxycontin with the loss of a job, but we had almost suggested they were unemployable or they were not willing to go follow the fracking trail.
And so there was a lot of contributions to this backlash or this uprising of what would become the Trump base in eight years.
Sarah Palin and the “Forgotten”
… What did Sarah Palin see?What did she tie into?Why?And how successful that was.It does lead, in a lot of ways, to Trump and the same people.He understood the same thing Sarah Palin understood.What’s Sarah Palin understand?
Well, Sarah Palin was the avatar of Donald Trump.She made her appeal to the working class—and often, indeed, the white working class—was three things.One, she was a mayor from Wasilla, [Alaska]; she had sort of a rural accent; she didn’t put on pretensions, and her husband was a working-class person.So there was not going to be a scene of a candidate putting on camouflage like John Kerry, or like Hillary Clinton, who would later quaff boilermakers, or [in] her later incarnations against Trump, she said, “No way, I’m so tired,” when she went south of the Mason-Dixon.This woman was authentic, whatever you thought of her.That was number one.
Number two, she said that Washington and the East Coast were sophisticates, and they had a particular agenda that was masked by rhetoric and by bureaucratese, and that you had to cut to the quick.So they would talk about peak oil and the transition to a non-fossil fuel economy; almost like with a sword through a Gordian knot, she said, “Drill, baby, drill.”And everybody thought that was a Neanderthal reaction, but in fact she would be proven correct, because today, the United States is the largest producer of natural gas and oil in the world.Indeed, it’s going to be the largest exporter next year.
And she applied that directness or that simplicity to the health care, because she said there was going to be death panels, and that caused an enormous anger, because the more that she went out and addressed crowds—these were the first indication of what would later become the Trump crowd—she had enormous response.In fact, to this day, there’s controversy within Republican circles where the elites still point to John McCain’s loss and say, “You picked Sarah Palin.”When you actually look at the polls, the polls after her selection started to close the gap, and what really lost, I think, McCain the 2008 election, were a, the September [2007] meltdown and his rather herky-jerky reaction to it where he wanted to cancel or postpone the debates.
Sarah Palin understood this discontent among this group of people.Certainly Trump tied into it.Obama, the candidate and then the president, did he understand who these people were?Did he understand the discontent and the anger?
I think he did.I think at least you can make the argument in 2008 because he carried Pennsylvania; he carried Michigan; he carried Wisconsin.And he, if you remember his commercials, he did attack China.He said that George Bush had taken out a credit card from the Bank of China and was running up a debt with China.That was the first time we had really heard in the national discourse somebody attack the idea of asymmetrical surpluses vis-à-vis China.And then, in addition, he went after McCain for his wealth.He said McCain had so many houses he’d forgotten where they are.
So he ran for a moment as a populist, and he—the effect was of one of two kinds.Yes, he got some of the white working-class out, but most importantly, his appeal to them meant if they weren’t going to vote for Barack Obama, they were not going to vote for John McCain, and indeed, they were not going to vote for Mitt Romney.So he set up the calculus in 2008 that there’s going to be 5 to 8 million people out there, and they’re not going to go to Mitt Romney, and they’re not going to go to John McCain.We may not win them because of the social issues—abortion, what would later become support for gay marriage, transgender, that whole nine yards—but economically and culturally and on class considerations, they will not vote for a series of Republican millionaires.
And remember, for all of the Republican success during the Obama era, where they picked up between 1,000 and 1,100 offices, they had not won the popular vote since 1988, when George H. W. Bush brought in that populist, Lee Atwater, who took a fine, upstanding guy like Mike Dukakis, and when he got done with Willie Horton, the tank and Boston Harbor, he turned him into an East Coast boob. And that was the last time they won 51%; indeed, the last five—of the last six elections, the Democrats have won the popular vote five times, so the war Obama saw was in these swing states.
The tragedy for the Democrats was that Hillary Clinton thought she could inherit the Obama formula, and she would call this the “blue wall.”And she didn’t go back and work at it.She took them for granted, and they, after eight years of cultural and economic depravation, they were ready to be had.And that 5 to 7 million that would not vote for John McCain and they would not vote for Mitt Romney, and they probably wouldn’t vote for 14 or 15 of Trump’s primary rivals, came out for Donald Trump, largely because of a series of issues that he tacked onto the traditional Republican agenda.
Obama, the Bank Bailout, and the “Forgotten”
Did Obama, though, understand the consequences of the 2008 recession, the way that hit and the effects of it?And when he’s working with the banks to save the banks and he’s saying, “I’m the only one between you and the pitchforks here,” how did that play with this population, and what was the blowback from it?
I think for the first two years, Barack Obama was able to make a persuasive message to these so-called deplorables or irredeemables and say to them: “George Bush and Wall Street and the wealthy Republican silk-stocking cadre didn’t care about you, and I stepped in, and I inherited a mess.And now the recession’s over in June of 2009, officially over, and now we’re going to”—but then what did he do?He started to veer off into, “We’re going to give you millions of green jobs.”Or [commentator] Van Jones was going to recalibrate the economy and people were saying: “Wait a minute.I have a job in coal in Pennsylvania or in West Virginia or Northern Ohio,” or, “I’m a natural gas producer.What’s all of this green stuff?”
This was the beginning not just of “There is climate altercation, and we have to be very careful and study it,” to “There is something not called global warming; it’s climate change; it’s dramatic; we’re going to have to fundamentally change everything.”And these people: “I thought he was a populist, was worried about our jobs.Now he’s got the Silicon Valley–Hollywood message, and where does that leave me?”
And then, as he started to regulate with government intrusion into health care, people all of a sudden saw their $300 and $400 premiums for a partial plan go up to $1,000 or more.And they were—said [sic], “Well, it’s comprehensive now.”And these workers would say, “Well, I don’t want birth control in my package or drug rehab for a 78-year-old woman.”So there was—there were elements of Obamacare that fed into this growing idea that he was no longer the anecdote [sic] to George W. Bush.
Let me back up for a second.You write that there have been two Americas since 2008.Talk to me about the divide that comes about because of the economics, the reality of the economics after 2008.
Well, after 2008, there had been this financial collapse, and people felt that the government, whether it was a permanent—defined as a permanent bureaucracy or the left or the right, was most important in saving the financial system, the banks, Wall Street, but not the industry and the small employers that were laying people off.So we had unemployment go up to 9% to 10%.And usually the more severe a recession, then the quicker the recovery.The recession ended in June of 2009, but we did not get 3% GDP growth for an annualized 12-month period ever.We haven’t had it until last year for 10 years.
And that frustration and that high unemployment of those post-2008 years, people started to say, I’m taking a second look at globalization; I understand what globalization is.It’s two Americas.The people who are involved in insurance, finance, media, entertainment, they have a cachet because their labor can’t be Xeroxed.I’m a columnist and a so-called pundit.As one worker said to me in Bakersfield, [California], when I spoke, “Well, why doesn’t somebody from South Korea write your column for $200 like they do to us?”And I said, “Well, I don’t think they could do it.”“Well, why can’t they do it?They can do lathe work or they can build tractor rims like we do.”So there was a sense that the government said all of those people who have physical, muscular labor will be replaced, and they’re going to be replaced by cheaper labor in South America, in Asia, in China.
But all the anointed people—and they just happened to be from Washington to La Jolla, [California], and from Boston to Washington, D.C.—they’re special.And they’re not only special, but their markets have expanded to 7 billion people.And then we saw these staggering—the Fortune 500 in—after 2008.To get on it, you didn’t just have a half a billion; you needed $3 and $4 billion to be one of the 500…
That was very dangerous in American history, because whenever you have ideological divides, force multipliers that fuel that division are geography.And we saw it in the Civil War, where it wasn’t just slavery or non-slavery; it was a geographical unit.And what’s scary about today’s time is we have geographical units where people—where we’re speaking today in Menlo Park, [California], for example.They’ve been to London or Tokyo, but they’ve never been to Bakersfield, and don’t want to go to Bakersfield.And in their way of thinking, that’s six hours by car or five hours, but London’s only eight or nine hours, so what’s the difference?They don’t have anything in common with the people in the interior.
And the idea that it used to be noble to make granite—to refine granite for counters or aluminum for refrigerators or wood floors or oil or natural gas, that didn’t change.This elite on the coast still used it; in fact, they were more materialistic than ever.But they just forgot to give tribute or recognition or even thought to the people who produce these goods and services, which their new incomes so readily gobbled up.
The Rise of the Tea Party
So the Tea Party.Describe who the Tea Party is.What is it all about, in a clear way, and how it affects the GOP?
There were people between 2010 and the present who were angry.It started—the Tea Party started with frustration over Obamacare because of high premiums and coverage they didn’t want to pay for, and the fact that it was not a bipartisan effort, that it had been rammed down the throats of the Republicans.And then it was enhanced by anger over suddenly over a trillion-dollar deficit.So it was physical sobriety.And then when people complained to their representatives, there was—they were angry at [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell; they were angry at [Speaker of the House] John Boehner.And the idea was, you people have not been successful at the national level, and you play by Marquess of Queensberry rules.McCain should have talked about Rev. [Jeremiah] Wright, and Mitt Romney should have grabbed that microphone when [sic] Candy Crowley in that second debate.And why should we go out on a limb and fight for you guys when you’re going to saw it off and say these people are Tea Party or they’re deplorable?
So there was a psychological reason for the Tea Party, that they felt their own party looked down at them.They felt that columnists and pundits and politicians in Washington didn’t really experience the economic downside of globalization.They didn’t like their crudity, their uncouthness.They didn’t like their fire.And whether it was accurate or not, the perception among the Tea Party people was, our party would rather lose nobly than win ugly.And they wanted to win ugly, and they got their chance in 2016.
And the results for the GOP leadership that when the Tea Party starts up, are all gone a couple years later.What were the results of what was happening?Originally, the leadership of the GOP was enlisting Tea Party folks because they could win, but then it seems that they didn’t quite understand what the gamble was.
Yeah, I think what happened was they felt that the Tea Party had been successful in giving them a huge midterm victory in 2010, and then after Barack Obama was reelected, they said: “See what happened?You got arrogant.You started primarying particular moderates that could have won in 2012.Obama still got reelected.And so we’re not going to listen to you to the same extent.”
And the establishment—and I think you could see that represented in the 2016 group of candidates on the Republican side.They said, you know what?If you’re Marco Rubio, or you’re Ted Cruz or Scott Walker or Carly Fiorina, any of the candidates in 2016, they—if you asked them, they would say the Tea Party was valuable; it came and went.
Donald Trump had a problem.He said: “I can’t win without the Republican establishment, so I’m going to still get the 90% Republican”—indeed he did—“and I’ll have a traditional Republican agenda.I’ll have low taxes, more energy development, more deregulation, conservative justices.However, I’ll tweak that message in a way none of my candidates will do.I will create issues and fissures that are designed to appeal to these swing states.”And boy, did he.
Suddenly China was on the—we’d all agreed that if you give China copyright or patent infringement exemption, or you don’t care where they dump, or their surplus doesn’t matter, or they infringe on technology to do business, doesn’t matter.The wealthier they get, they’re going to be like Carmel, [California], or the Upper West Side by 2040.He said, “No, they took that job from you, and they cheat, and they’re dishonest.”And then he said—and this was a very powerful message—“Open borders bring in people who don’t have to play by the rules that you do.They have sanctuary cities.Try having a sanctuary city when you want to buy a federal gun and say: ‘You know what?Federal law doesn’t apply here; I’m going to buy a gun today and take it home.’ You can’t do that.They can do that”—“they” meaning the progressive project.
And he said, they—“Bringing in cheap labor lowers your wages.”And that was a second issue that nobody in the Republican Party saw.A third issue, of course, as we—was globalization, that globalization had not been symmetrical.And the fourth was: “I may be an SOB, and I may be chemotherapy that will make you sick, but you need somebody like me to attack this problem, this bureaucratic stasis on the Republican side that nobody wants to fight the Democrats the way that they fight now.And I’m going to do it.It’s not going to be pretty.I’m your pit bull.You cut the leash, point me in the right direction.There might be some collateral damage.”That was the message.
Nobody saw that.Every time Trump did something very politically stupid, like attack a war hero like John McCain, the pundits said he was finished; he’s done; nobody can do that.And yet his base stayed with him the entire way.
And why did they?They said, “Well, John McCain started it.He called us, quote/unquote, ‘crazies’”—he did—“and he didn’t fight in 2009, and he always says one thing in the primary.”And so Trump was able to get away, which by traditional standards was pretty uncouth, to say that an American hero had been less than honorable by being captured.Last time we’d heard that was George Patton said that.
The Partisan Passage of the Affordable Care Act
…When Obama assumed—again, he was the bipartisan president—when he assumed that he was going to pass health care in a bipartisan manner, but ends up with no Republican votes, what are the consequences?What’s the effect of that?How does it lead to 22 repeal-and-replace attempts afterwards?
Well, after Obama’s health care victory, remember he had said to, I think it was Lindsey Graham or other Republican senators, “I won; elections matter.”And when people had said, “Don’t you want to have our input about health care?,” and there were people that came in, came to the table and said, “The individual mandate worries us,” or “There were elements of the comprehensive package that we don’t really need, and we want more competition,” and they were shut out, and the answer was, “Well, we have supermajorities, and we can get this thing through the House and the Senate without your votes.And you had a referendum, and you lost.And so this is the way we’re going to do it.”
That idea was predicated on the idea that you wouldn’t lose your doctor or you wouldn’t lose your insurance plan and it would be popular.And so they took sole possession of it.It was very stupid politically.
And so right after that happened, the Democrats said, “We got it.”And then everybody said, “But I lost my doctor and the premiums.”And the Republicans said, “They did it, not us.”
At that point, when they lost the House, and they lost their comfortable margin in the Senate, then Obama said, famously, after he was reelected, “I have a pen, and I have a phone.”And although he had said during the 2008 primary, “I’m not going to open the border; I can’t do that; I’m not a king”—I think on 20 occasions he said, “You can’t do by individual”—suddenly, by individual fiat, he was doing all sorts of things with the EPA; he was doing it with the border; he was doing it with partial amnesties.And unknowingly, what he was saying to the country is, when a chief executive doesn’t have a majority support in the Congress to get through a legislative agenda, then he has a duty to use an executive fiat.And you can see how that metamorphosized to Trump’s advantage, that precedent.
Democrats will argue that the reason that the health care had to go through without any Republican votes was because of a political decision by the Republicans that they would not cooperate.If this guy says he’s the bipartisan president, all we have to do is prevent him from accomplishing things, and that will weaken him, and that will allow us to get rid of him.And when McConnell says, “Our chief goal here is that Obama will never be reelected,” that feeds in to it.Did the GOP play a game of politics here to some extent, as far as you see it?And what was the effect of that?
Well, I think that all parties play politics, and the degree that they have rhetoric about getting along is when they’re evenly matched, and neither can gain a legislative advantage, and they have no recourse.But when Obama was elected in 2008, as you remember, he had a supermajority in the House and Senate, and he had about a 60% approval rating.And at that brief moment—and a lot of presidents who find themselves in that position, had he reached across and said, “I think we’ve got to make health care more equitable, and my Republican colleagues are going to have a substantial role in this,” and he had said on the same thing on the border: “There’s an ‘a’ word that Republicans don’t use; it’s called amnesty.And there’s a ‘d’ word that we don’t use called ‘deportation.’ And we’re going to bridge that gap.We’re going to secure the borders.We made a mistake in the past, but the people who are already here that haven’t committed a crime or they’re not on public assistance and they’re green card residents, we’re going to legalize their green card,” that would have worked.But what happened was, for him to succeed, he would have had to be an FDR-like character or a Reagan character that continued that popularity, and he went down to Trump levels, about 43% to 44% approval, and then all of a sudden everybody started talking about bipartisan.Why are the Republicans doing this?Well, the Republicans were doing it because they’d won.They’d created a huge midterm victory, and they felt that he was wounded, and they had it in their mind—I don’t think they were realistic, but they thought they could defeat him in 2012.
After 2012, there was so much acrimony that Obama, when he lost the Senate in 2014, the attitude was, I’m going to just use the powers of the presidency and go hard left and get a progressive legacy agenda.And then we, the Republicans, couldn’t stop it, but they became embittered.And you had all the ingredients for a really wild, nasty 2016 election.
The Failed Grand Bargain
Another event that took place that we’re looking at is the 2011—the failure of the Boehner-Obama grand bargain.What were the aspirations there, and what were the results?
… The problem with a grand bargain was that the Republican leadership, Boehner especially, was meeting with Obama, and he thought that he could emulate the 1993-94 era of [Newt] Gingrich and Clinton, where the Republicans would give maybe 2%, 3% on higher taxes and then Obama would maybe not increase federal spending as much.And we would then get closer to a—not a balanced budget, but we’d be going in the way that Obama’s commission, the Simpson-Bowles Commission, had recommended.
The problem with that is that Obama had raised taxes.He’d taken the rates up, and yet we still had deficits.And so people in the base, the conservative base, were saying: “There goes our Republican establishment again that Reagan had to fight.They always want to concede, and they want to raise taxes.And once they raise taxes, federal spending never drops.So we get these huge deficits that continue, but incrementally and insidiously we always pay higher taxes.So we’re going to go back to starve the beast.We just want to hold the line at taxes, and if the deficits get too big, then you’re going to have to cut spending.”
And Boehner wasn’t the right person to represent his position, because he had no grassroots support, and that was evidenced in the 2010 Tea Party.In fact, shortly after, he imploded as a speaker, as a Republican majority leader.
Failed Immigration Reform
The 2013-2014 immigration reform attempts: The Senate passes it, and then it kind of blows up in the GOP leadership’s face, in the Democrats’ face.What was it that created this backlash within the GOP base about immigration?Why did it fail?
The immigration compromise efforts of 2013 and 2014 failed because the base did not trust their own leadership, and by that I meant they were perfectly willing, if they had been told there will be no more illegal immigration, the pool of 11 to 15 or 20 million we know from the MIT-Yale study who are here illegally can be calibrated now, and people who have committed a serious crime or felony will be deported.People who have no work record and they’re on public assistance will be deported, and people who came on the scent of amnesty in the last year or two will be deported.And what’s left?People who are hardworking, they’ve been here for three or four years, they’ve never committed a crime, not that they will be given amnesty; they will be given a green card.
And in the Simpson-Mazzoli 1986 amnesties, only about a third became citizens.But that was an individual choice on the part of a legal—they were perfectly willing to do that if it was guaranteed to them that would have been a one-time operation.They distrusted that their leadership would build a wall across the border.They’d had a Secure Fence Act, but it was never the entire border.They were not convinced that there would be actual deportations, and they were not convinced that employers would be fined for hiring illegal aliens, so to speak.
So they were angry at their own party because of the—what I guess they would call the Chamber of Commerce/Wall Street Journal wing and corporate wing that wanted cheap labor, and they didn’t think that they would stand up to Democrats and build a wall, and they didn’t think that the Democrats would deport the people that they said or hinted or nodded that they would deport.Those were people who had committed crimes, or they were not working, or they just got here.
And the irony, the tragedy of it is, if the Republicans had got what they wanted, you would probably have a secure border now; you would probably only have deported maybe 5 [million] out of 20 million people—the newcomers, the people not working, the people who had committed crimes—and we would have now 15 million people that had a green card; they were working, had never committed a crime, had been here a long period of residency, and they would be a pool.And they would not be replenished by illegals.It would be a measured, legal, mericratic [sic] and diverse type of immigration all over the world.We don’t privilege people that happen to live next to the border.And I think the Republicans would have gone for that.
But the Democrats, I don’t think they would have gone for it.I don’t think they wanted to deport anybody.And the reason I don’t think they wanted to deport anybody was they felt that immigration, which—illegal immigration, which they had opposed in the 2008 campaign, there were people now who were in the United States so long—20, 30 years—they had a second generation of a constituency, and they felt that there were people getting amnesties, and states were starting to flip.California would never again see a Reagan, a Pete Wilson, a George Deukmejian.Nevada was flipping from red to blue.New Mexico was flipping.Colorado was flipping.They had dreams of—and that was based on a new type of open borders/identity politics/very sharp vocabulary.
And so the Republican base said: “You know what this is about?This is not about immigration; this is not about dealing with the people here.This is about a”—and I’m quoting them almost literally—“a globalist project to get away with—do away with borders, nationalism, and create an identity politics–Electoral College strategy to keep Democrats in power.”The Republican establishment never addressed those concerns.
This the Gang of Eight in ’13-14.That was the deal that was going through.But then [House Majority Leader Eric] Cantor loses in Virginia, and that seems to have changed everything.What was the message that was being sent there?And how did it resonate?
To the conservative base, the message from the Gang of Eight was that their representatives were going in a room with the left, and when they got out of the room, there was probably going to be large numbers of people still coming across the border.There was probably still going to be people who were doing it illegally.There was still probably not going to be a diverse pool, but mostly people from south of the border who by—given proximity or family ties.And it was going to be a control.It would be a reduction, and that was never going to fly.
And why did the Gang of Eight on the Republican side agree to that?Because they really didn’t want to reduce the number coming across because they had enormous pressure from landscaping, agriculture, meatpacking; that people who were young and male from, say, Oaxaca state in Mexico were very hard workers, and they would do things at wages that Americans, they felt, wouldn’t do—whether that was accurate or not—and they were not going to give that up.And they were not going to secure the border because—and they had themselves had, to be honest, contempt for the American unemployed or underemployed worker.They thought he wants too much money; he doesn’t work like people from Oaxaca, and we’re going to let them in.
And so out of that whole failure of the Gang of Eight really amplified these new cracks in the American fabric, or tears, and we started to hear about nationalism, and we started to hear about “America first,” and we started—even before Trump came on the scene.He didn’t create the MAGA agenda; he exploited it.He saw that there were people who felt they had been—we heard this term not since the Depression—the forgotten man, the forgotten people.And that became, along with globalization and China and manufacturing jobs, immigration, illegal immigration became the basis for the Tea Party 2.0.
Obama’s America and Trump’s America
So how is Trump’s America different than Obama’s America?
Obama’s America differs from Trump’s America in a variety of ways.First of all, it’s geographically different.If we had on the screen blue and red counties, it’s a sea of red geographically, and it looks like Obama’s America is very small because it’s two strands on the coast and a little bit around the Great Lakes and maybe a smidgen here in Illinois or something.But if you recalibrate that map for population, then the blue becomes a balloon.And so it’s 50/50.Population is split, but geography is not.
And that creates all sorts of problems.So people say, I’m in California, and a senator represents 20 million people, and a senator in Wyoming—well, that was the design of the Founders.But that divergence was the first thing.And why is it that way?It’s that way because largely people on the coast are closer to Europe, and they’re closer to Asia.And we’re in a globalized, interconnected world.And if you’re in Apple or Google or Citibank or Stanford University or Harvard, whatever that type of activity is, it’s a coastal commonality with people of like kind in Europe, in Asia, that have matched our standard of living and education and values, and they have the same agendas.
The people in the Midwest then were more—not all—but more into the elemental aspects of life: farming, mining, timber, manufacturing, assembly, gas, oil.And people—it almost felt in the Obama world that these were either polluting industries or they were 19th-century industries or they were reaction industries, or they were people who didn’t get the proper education and had no choice.And they forgot the nobility of labor that a person who’s able to use their arms for eight hours and put up with something to produce a good product, there’s a pride in ownership, and that’s a valuable thing for the country.
And then when you add the foreign policy to it, there was the argument against both the Republican coastal and the—but especially the Obama elite, that our foreign policy in matters of trade or national security or alliances is crafted in Washington or it’s crafted here at Hoover or at AEI [American Enterprise Institute] or Brookings, but the people who actually implement it are somebody from the interior.And in the case of the Republican Party, Trump would later find that very effective to say, “Your children are going over to Afghanistan for somebody’s idea of nation building that’s never been over there.”It was a way of crystallizing that issue.
So these issues that Trump embraced were all predicated on the divergences in these two Americas as exemplified by the Electoral College, where it all mattered.And it only mattered in about nine states.That’s where the war was going to be, and that’s where—that was the front lines of two Americas, the fight between them.
Do you see the legacy of Obama leading directly to Trump?What were the things from Obama that led to Trump’s ability to get elected?
One of the legacies of Obama was an improper reading of demography.All of a sudden when Obama became president, the old binary of affirmative action that we all had followed—in other words, it was 90% of the population owed to 10% or 12% who had suffered under slavery, their ancestors, and then by extension that grew to the Hispanic population.So maybe it was 25% or 20% of the country would be the beneficiaries of affirmative action.People were willing—that had been an old argument, since the ’60s.
Obama recalibrated this as diversity.And by diversity, it meant if you came from the Punjab or you came from Argentina or you came from anywhere and you were not, quote/unquote, “white,” then you were part of a new mosaic; you were part of a new country.And that population suddenly expands, regardless of class, up to 30%.And suddenly people were saying, well, not just your corporate board is not diverse, but your fire crew is not diverse; your taxi fleet drivers are not diverse.And they said, well, what does that mean?There’s people who have no white privilege.They’re working people, and these guys that code from, you know, from Mumbai are much wealthier.It didn’t matter.
So Obama created this idea that diversity was the new gospel and that we really weren’t going to look at historical precedents for oppression or victimization.We were not going to really look at class so Eric Holder’s son could be part of diversity in a way that a coal miner’s son in Appalachia wouldn’t.So they just discarded past historical circumstance.They discarded class considerations.And they said if you’re not white, you’re part of the new diversity. …So what Obama—I don’t know if he did it inadvertently or by accident or naively, but he was saying to the country, “Your superficial diverse appearance is essential to who you are, not incidental.”And people in the Midwest said, “Well, I’m not doing very well on globalization, and if somebody’s very wealthy or better off than I, and they have different-colored skin, and suddenly they’re diverse, and they get—I don’t like that.”And the problem with the Obama logic is they were still 70% of the population, and they began to vote, not as white supremacists, but by people who said, “I’m not diverse,” and suddenly the Democratic Party, that its bread and butter had been the white working autoworker, the white working lathe operator or Caterpillar driver, they were losing that rubric in droves.
And then when Hillary Clinton ran against Trump, she made the miscalculation that, “I’m going to inherit the Philadelphia turn-out-and-vote; I’m going to inherit the Pittsburgh, the Flint, Michigan; the Detroit, the minority vote to make up for the rural that Obama lost.”But she inherited the downside from Obama.She lost that rubric, but she didn’t inherit the upside.She didn’t—she couldn’t appeal to minorities to come out in the number and with the solidarity necessary to counteract that vote.
Why Trump
Trump was able to use this.Talk about how he used it, but also why him?Why this specific guy?You call him an outsider from many different areas of America.Very different tactics, very different sort of way of presenting himself.Why him? ...
In 2016, remember that when Trump suggested that he might run, everybody laughed at it, not just because he was an entertainer, but because they had felt they had finally got a Republican field with signature senators—Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz; governors who had been successful—Scott Walker, Chris Christie; outsiders like Ben Carson, Carly.They had the whole thing.They didn’t have that in 2012.So they laughed at him.
What they didn’t realize was that, whether you liked him or not, it takes a skill set to run The Apprentice reality show for over 11 years at top ratings.And he had name recognition, number one, and number two, he had developed a set of skills in the repartee/ad hominem/ad hoc world of real [sic] TV that was immediately transferable to a debate.
So in the first debate, when Rand Paul gave a very persuasive argument about the dangers of money and politics, every other candidate said, “That doesn’t apply to me,” Trump said: “It does apply to me.And you came up and asked for $10,000, and I wrote you a check, and I’ve been very happy with the service you’ve rendered.”Nobody would ever have thought of that except a real TV star.
And then he was a billionaire, so he got not only free publicity, and he had the right skill sets, but he was able to finance himself over rough spots in the primary.And then, what I never understood, and I do not understand to this day, these were very bright men and women, and I don’t understand why they didn’t calibrate that they had lost five out of the six popular votes because they could not appeal to the white working class or the irredeemables in the numbers they needed to counteract their hemorrhaging in the suburban women voters or minority voters.They never caught on because their agenda was still about capital gains tax cuts, that we have to worry about the top rate reducing.And Trump would do that, but he didn’t talk about it.He talked about, as I said earlier, globalization, China cheating, bring back manufacturing jobs, more gas and oil, conservative cultural values in our judiciary.And they didn’t quite catch on.
He also—and I think this is the most controversial to say about Trump, but I made the argument—I think it’s valid—that he was empathetic.In other words, I had never heard a Republican candidate go into Ohio or Indiana or Michigan and use the first-person plural possessive: “our.”It was always “our vets.”I never heard Mitt Romney go to a crowd and say: “I want to help our autoworkers.How are our farmers doing?We love our vets.”That came across.
The second thing is that he didn’t change his accent or appearance.When every candidate of both parties went into a particular region, they changed their, not only their accent but their appearance.I know when Trump came to a fundraiser in California, to Tulare, I talked to people.I said, “Did he have the straw in the mouth?”“No.”“Did he have the Caterpillar hat?”“No.”“Did he have the jeans?”“No.”I said, “Did he change his accent?”“No.”I said, “What did he do?”He said: “Well, he wore this ridiculous suit.He had polished shoes.He had a tie that went down almost to his knees.He had the comb-over.And he had this grating Queens accent.”And I said, “Did it go over well?”And they said, “It went over wonderfully,” because he was the same wherever he was.And people at least said, “This is a guy that doesn’t change his accent.”And so he came across as authentic.
And finally—and this is even more controversial—he—his sins were negated by Hillary Clinton.If Joe Biden or any of the other people had stayed in that race, who were in it 2008 and had reemerged, they could have made real inroads on the womanizing question, the financial fast-and-loose activities or problems with the government or the people around him.But every time they did Access Hollywood against Trump, then Trump said, “Look at Bill Clinton and his liaisons.”Every time they said, “Well, Trump Steaks or Trump Water or Trump University or Trump Foundation are iffy,” they said, “Look at the Clinton Foundation, the emails, Uranium One.”
And so it was almost as if Hillary Clinton was a candidate that was designed to nullify the advantage they might have had by suggesting that Trump was not presidential.
Trump and Birtherism
…The birther issue about Obama not being born in America: What was that all about?Was that a political tactic?Was it something else?How did that go over?And why, a very smart guy, does he tie into an issue like that?
Remember when Donald Trump got on the birther issue, he hadn’t been a declared candidate, but I think he thought that he was going to uncover something, and it would be so spectacular and sensational that it would propel him into the national discourse.Why did he pick on that issue?There were a couple of things.I think he was a creature of the internet.There were conspiracies all over the internet.Some of them were fed by laxity of Obama himself.I’ll give you one example.I think when Obama wrote Dreams From My Father, he was pretty much a political unknown, and he really wanted to accentuate that he had come from Kenya, that he was a different type of American and he had done very well.So in that publicity blurb—as an author you all get it—one of his editors said, and you can still see it, “Barack Obama was born in Kenya.”Obama said later that he didn’t see it.Trump said, well, his own publisher said he was born in Kenya.
And so there were little elements that were ripe to be exploited.And when he got under the—I think Obama could have very easily just—he thought it was absurd; nobody would believe it.The very first day he could have just said, “Here’s my birth certificate; go talk.”
I don’t know whether Obama waited to do that to draw Trump in, to make his gaffe seem more ridiculous, or that he just didn’t take it seriously.But it hurt Donald Trump because I think when he announced his candidacy, everybody thought—remember, they’d laughed him off.At least in the short term it hurt him.It might have helped him in the long term only in the sense that they didn’t take him seriously because he’d been a birther.So they said: “How can a birther run?I’m not going to take him seriously.”And they didn’t realize that he had certain skill sets other than birtherism.
Was it also to some extent sort of an understanding of the fact that there is a white voter out there that you sort of had defined who felt forgotten, who felt misused, abused, and so therefore he was playing to some extent to the attitudes of a public that he absolutely needed to win?Was it a political decision to some extent?
Yeah, I think Donald Trump understood that there were certain ducks lining up in a row; that the election, given the last two elections, that it was going to be decided in the Midwest, in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina maybe, and of course Florida, and the rest didn’t matter; that he would do well where he did well, and his opponent would do well—Hillary would do well where she did well, and that those states were overwhelmingly not just white, but they were white working class, and they were deeply suspicious not just of what they called “diversity,” people who they felt were of the same economic or even better off than they were but had advantages because they were non-white, and they were tired of the new internet chorus of “white supremacy, white supremacy, white privilege, white—
” that you hear in the universities, but they were also suspicious of the wealthy globalized class.
Now, how did Donald Trump pull that off?Because he is a wealthy, globalized billionaire, and he was very brilliant politically in what he did.He said: “I know them better than you do.I know these bankers; I’ve dealt with them.I know these real estate guys.I know these big corporate people, and they’re a tough bunch.And I was just like them.And they don’t care about you.And I didn’t care about you for a time”—he even said that—“and they’re not nationalists; they’re globalists.”
And all of a sudden people said, “You know, we have one of our guys that knows those guys, and we’re going to take our billionaire, and he’s going to fight because he cares about us even though he’s got a billion.”So he nullified the class argument almost automatically that he might be a Republican limousine liberal or something.
But it was “I am a billionaire, and I know what billionaires do, and it’s not right.”And they believed him.
Trump’s Inaugural Address
… The stakes of what he was laying out in the inauguration …What was the promise that he’s making, and what were the stakes starting his administration off in that way?
Well, the subtext of the Trump inaugural address—I think George W. Bush said, “There’s some weird S-H in it”—was, the subtext was: “I’m going to be refuting everything that was in the Obama inauguration.”And what was the Obama message?That we were now a post-modern United States.We were going to transition to wind and solar renewable energy.Our values, whether they were abortion or gay marriage or green power, would be synonymous with those in Europe.Europe has shown us the way that national borders cause war.We’re now citizens of the world.We’re only exceptional to the degree that everybody, whether they’re in Greece or Britain, thinks they’re exceptional.And so we’re citizens of the world.We’re going to have more or less porous borders, etc.
And Trump came in and said: “I looked at the world.It’s not a very nice place outside the United States.And don’t let us fool you that the world wants to take us down to their level, not us take them up to our level.And we are exceptional.We’re the largest democracy in the world.We’re the biggest oil and gas producer.We’re the most efficient farmer.We’ve got the best—”He just essentially said we have the best of everything—best universities, best medicine, best.And why don’t we just say that we are, and that we are exceptional?
The other message was a very powerful one.He said that the postwar order was over with; that for 75 years the United States after World War II had been in a singular position, had enormous power.Its rivals, whether it was South Korea, Japan, Russia, Europe, were devastated, and we supplied the world.In that role we were willing to carry NATO along.We were willing to stand up to—all over the world to stop Soviet communism.We were willing to run up huge trade deficits with our former enemies that were now our allies—Japan or Germany.We were willing to have laxities to help China and South Korea.
But we’re not that country anymore.And so everybody—and he used it—is cheating.And it’s time for the United States to say: “You know what?You’ve had 75 years, and now you’re going to be symmetrical.”And boy, that was a return to normality, but it was such a jarring message.We never had quite heard that.
I guess he would say, Trump would say: “You all have been living an abnormal life.Nations don’t run up huge trade deficits with their allies.NATO alliances don’t work when only six of 23 nations meet their promises of 2% investment in GDP.You can’t have a relation with China when they take your technology as a cost of doing business.We love the Germans, but the asymmetrical tariffs have led to a $70 billion trade deficit with Germany…And so this can’t go on.”
And I think people were just hysterical in Europe, Japan, Latin America, that the United States would no longer feel that it had to listen to the E.U. or the International Criminal Court or protocols in the Middle East.Everybody’s sort of said, for all practical purposes, “The Golan Heights is not going to go back to the Assad Syria.”He said it.People said, “You know, Tel Aviv is not the capital of Israel.”He did it.People said: “You know what?Palestinians aren’t really refugees anymore, any more than Volga Germans were or the Sudetenland Germans that walked back to Germany in 1945, or all these people were displaced from Egypt and, you know, the Middle East, they went back to Israel.Why are the Palestinians alone refugees?”So he said, “We’re not going to support the U.N. agencies that do it.” …
Trump and the Media
Talk more about the use of Twitter, the use of media.His approach is very different, and it seems to be working in an astounding way.If you can talk about that a little bit and the role of conservative media, the Breitbarts, Fox, and sort of how that has changed the dynamics in the conversation in America, again, leading to a very divided media, a very divided use of the way people use their media, especially with social networks.
Trump revolutionized the use of media in a political campaign and a presidency.What we had had before were the network news.I grew up with John Chancellor and Walter Cronkite, and then later Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather and ABC/NBC/CBS.That was the venue that we got the evening news.They were supposedly bipartisan and disinterested, but in fact if you go back and look at their own political allegiances and their values and their agendas, it was pretty left of center—not hard, but left of center.And so we had sort of a message that was consistent.
And the major newspapers of the time—The New York Times or The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune or the L.A. Times—had become pretty liberal.So we had that venue.
And then people said between the newspapers and the network news, we’re getting one view, and there has to be a different way.The first taste of the different way was talk radio with Rush Limbaugh, absolutely reinvented the genre and said, “I’m going to reach 20 million people a week and give them an alternative voice.”
And the thing about Limbaugh wasn’t just his own genius and his success.He spawned an entire generation of local talk shows.I can remember being, in 1980, in Fresno or Bakersfield never hearing a talk—and five years they were all over, and that gave an alternate view, a populist view, a less prestigious view that people disdained, and they said, “Well, you know, nobody will listen to those.”
The second transformation was in cable news, especially Fox News, where people said that we’re going to be giving a message that is absolutely the opposite of network news.And Fox then created an antithesis with MSNBC, and CNN sort of morphed into an MSNBC, and we had that war.
And the third generation of this media revolution, of course, was technology.And the right would argue that the left had their blogs, and then they said the right had their blogs, and they fought—Breitbart versus the Daily Beast, for example.But then the right made another argument, and that is the so-called neutral platforms that oversee this trench fighting were not neutral.So Facebook, where they deplatform or defriend somebody, or Google, when they calibrate what you pick up when you go through a Google search, or the types of advertising that pop up to you in holidays from Google, they were center left.
And so then—and Trump came along and said: “I’m—I’ve lost social media.I’ve lost even the mechanics of social media.I’ve lost the network news.All I have is talk radio and Fox News, and that’s not enough.So I’m going to communicate in a way that Obama did,” who really was the first person to use Twitter, but in a very mild way, which was sort of poking fun sometimes at enemies, but mostly announcements of what he was doing.
Trump created as an entertainer, and he had an almost hexameter beat to his tweets that we’d never seen.He’d say something like, “Ted Cruz called me a name.Biggest liar, period.Sad,” with one syllable to end the poem.And he had a knack for it.
He did another thing, was he had a cobra-like tendency.He was coiled.But if you go back to almost all of his tweets and the most controversial, whether it was against his Democratic primaries or even John McCain, he waited till he was attacked and then he hit back and attacked.And so people said that’s outrageous, but John McCain called his supporters crazies.Or somebody said that he was orange or—and he hit back disproportionately, but usually it was very rare for him to take some target out of the blue.Rosie O’Donnell or George Conway, it was usually when they had attacked him.
And then the message was: “I’ve actually wrestled in a professional wrestling ring; you haven’t.And if you want to keep continue this, it’s going to devolve into something I’m quite willing to do.”And that created a sense of deterrence by even his most strident leftist critics, [who] said, “You know, when I attack this guy, I may be just a minor—I might be just a minor actor.I could be Cher or somebody, but he’s going to retaliate, and he’s going to keep retaliating, and then the next thing I know, I’m going to be trading insults in a way that I don’t want to do.”And Trump knew that, so that it created a deterrent so that people said: “You know what?Don’t attack the guy because he will attack you back.”
And that also helped him with his base because they always said—they always say the same thing: “He didn’t start it.”He did not start the controversy with AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez].He did not start with Representative [Ilhan] Omar.They attacked him, and then he dropped megatonnage back on them.Crude megatonnage, maybe, but—that’s why he’s able to be very effective on Twitter and Facebook.
Trump’s Remarks on Charlottesville
His comments on Charlottesville became very controversial, and the establishment saw it as a real problem.But again, the base didn’t.Why?Why is that?
Well, Trump’s base was—this is one case where they did take him literally.The paradigm had been, on the left, that because of the history of racism and slavery in the United States, that all commentary about controversial matters were going to be not 50/50, because the country’s history hadn’t been 50/50.So if you had a collision between white supremacists and antifa, and there were other people that were not antifa, and there were other people that were not white supremacists, and they were fighting and there [was] violence, then you would say the very fact that we still in 2017 have white supremacists nullified all the other issues, and therefore, Trump had a duty only to attack the white supremacist.
But what he said—and I’ve read that and listened to the tape numerous times, and he recalibrated over the next 48 hours.He said there are good people on both sides.People got furious, because they said, “Well, there were white supremacists on this side.”We don’t know the actual calibrations, but to nullify the corollary, there weren’t good people on the other side that were objecting.There were.And nobody on the left ever made the argument—I can guarantee you that in that 80%, 75% were white nationalists or Nazis.They weren’t.There might have been 30% or 40%, but there were people in that march who did not want statues toppled at night without a democratic vote or a national discussion, and they were lumped in.
And Trump said: “You know what?Bad here with antifa, bad here with white nationalists.”But given the usual commentary about race, that was lost.And people in the base—I’m not talking about my view; I’m trying to analyze what the base said—they were saying things like, “Well, Barack Obama waded into even a more controversial case because the George Zimmer [sic]/Trayvon Martin fight between a half-Peruvian who… got into a fight with Trayvon Martin,” it was really a Hispanic fellow fighting an African American fellow.
And in the middle of that, what did the left do?They Photoshopped the view in one case, they edited the 911 tape, and then the president of the United States weighed in and said, in racialist terms, “Trayvon would have looked like the son I never had.”And people said: “Well, the left gets into all these controversial things.They editorialize it.And now when Trump does it, it’s, you know, it’s not right?”
And so I think part of the left’s problem in comprehending Trump is they never understood tit-for-tat 50/50, because they assumed they had won the moral high ground and they were allowed not to be symmetrical.And Trump came along and said: “You haven’t won the moral high ground.My base feels that you always set the rules; you always editorialize; you always talk down.But if you actually listen to yourself, and you’re empirical, then the data doesn’t support your hypotheses.”And Trump ripped off that scab, and there was a pretty bad wound underneath.
The Travel Ban
… The travel ban is one of the first things that Trump does right off the bat.Why?What was that all about?And what were the results?
Well, I think you could argue that between 2001 and—I don’t think you can argue that; the data’s there—2001 and 2017, the major terrorist attacks were not white nationals.They were people who said they were Islamicists.So Trump comes in, and he wants to suggest that countries that are in chaos—Libya, for example, and Benghazi or Syria, ISIS—have no ability to screen people coming into the United States.And then he made a key mistake.He used the word “Muslim” or “Islam” rather than “chaotic” states, because obviously, we didn’t have a problem with Muslims coming in from India; we didn’t have a problem with Muslims coming from Indochina.We do have a problem with North Koreans; we don’t want Iranians in.They’re Shia Muslim.
So that hurt him a great deal.And when he recalibrated and included North Korea and Iran in the mix, then it was pretty clear that what he was—should have said from the beginning is, there are states in the Middle East and even outside the Middle East that can’t guarantee that their citizens have a passport that meets our criteria.That’s all he had to say.It wouldn’t have been an issue.But he didn’t.
The Failure to “Repeal and Replace”
When Congress was unable to kill Obamacare, though it was one of the first things on the agenda coming in, what message did that send to Trump? ...
Well, Trump was an outsider, so when he joined the political race and he won the election, became president, he was told by the Republican establishment, especially the congressional Republican establishment, that the repeal or the reform of Obamacare is what had won them the 2010 midterm, and they had all run in the primaries subsequently on that issue, and it was a winning issue.What they didn’t tell him is, if you repeal it but you don’t have an alternative, people have been acculturated to it, and some insurance is better than no insurance, and that would leave them vulnerable politically.They discovered that when Trump came in.He said: “OK, you guys like that issue?Go to it.”And suddenly they went back home in their districts, senators and congressional representatives, and they said, “We’re going to repeal Obamacare,” and then people said, “And what?”They didn’t have an alternative.
If they just had a free-market alternative, or even if they’d said, “We’re going to go back to the prior system, but we’re going to have a government [sic] to include people of low income,” they didn’t even have that.So then Trump says: “What am I supposed to do?You told me this was a winner, and you’re not leading.”And then when they finally got a sort of a repeal of Obamacare, John McCain came in at the last moment, and I think that was out of personal spite.I say that only because he had run in the primaries on positions different than what he actually voted for.Then Trump was done with it, you know.He said: “You can’t give me a bill that the people want.You promised you’d do that.You said this was what—you were the experts, and I wasn’t, and then you couldn’t even give me a Senate majority.This thing died not because of the Democrats.I knew they’d vote against it.It’s because our own people.You had no Senate control.”
And then we entered that bizarre Mitch McConnell–Donald Trump fighting with each other for a while, and I think it was the idea that Trump was versed and schooled and tutored by the Congress on Obamacare and he had his own gut instincts, and when he got in there, his gut instincts as a performer and a real estate guy is you don’t get rid of something unless you’ve got something, and then when you’ve got something, you get your guys together, and they all charge out en masse.And these so-called experts couldn’t do it.And he got very angry at the Congress.
And then how does it move forward?What does it teach Trump at that point, and what it leads to later on?
I think it teaches Trump that his greatest successes, with the exception of Mitch McConnell’s navigation of judicial picks—but even those were picks—Trump decided energy.“I’ll have an executive order on the pipelines.I’ll open up federal lands for natural gas leasing that Obama didn’t.I’ll open up ANWR [Arctic National Wildlife Refuge].I’ll move the embassy in Israel.I’ll cancel the Iran deal.I can do this.I can do this for two reasons: One, Obama set the precedent with an inordinate amount of executive orders; and two, I don’t trust the Congress in general, but I don’t trust my own party’s management of their majority in the Senate.”
And there were limits to that because the Congress really was OK with all of Trump’s executive orders until they hit 50/50, and by that I mean if he was going to make—issue an executive order on a ban on Muslims and it didn’t poll 50/50, then suddenly they made very cogent arguments about the sanctity of the tripartite system of government; Congress was a co-equal branch.But if he ordered an executive order that polled 55%, then the Congress, Republican Congress said: “You know what?We warned you Democrats.You don’t want to work with us, this is what happens.”
And so it was based on the ability to get—the Congress was OK with executive orders on the Republican side if they were popular, and when they were not popular, they regretted that Trump had overreached.
A Divided Nation
And how does all this add or subtract from the divide in America, politics in Washington?How does all this history that you’ve been talking about add to this division in America?
We’ve had times in our history—nullification crisis under Jackson, 1861; some dark moments from 1929 to ’34; but especially in the ’60s—when there were certain issues that could not be resolved, or certain visions.And the combination of changing demography, but especially globalization, and a geographical distinction in per capita income and culture has come to a head, and there’s two visions.
One vision of a blue-state progressive America is the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, whether it’s the Electoral College or whether it’s president’s vetoes or nine people on the Supreme Court, they just don’t work anymore.It’s a callback to Woodrow Wilson’s progressivism.And we were fatally flawed.We were racist, we were sexist, we were homophobic at our founding.And we have, we’ve tried, and we just have to recalibrate.We’ve got to change our thinking on almost everything from energy to gender to sex to race.And we’ve got to, unfortunately, disavow some of our Founders even.We’ve got to take down murals, take down statues, rename.
… So that’s one view.By that, we can synchronize with the world, especially the Western Europeans.
The other view says we don’t have to be perfect to be good, and the sins of humankind are ours, too.They’re not American slavery or racism, but only in this country did we have a perfect system at its inception that was able to be self-critical and to adapt to change—slowly, albeit—but eventually in the right direction.And we’ve got to preserve this exceptional system because empirically, everybody wants to get in.And we have the biggest everything: biggest military, biggest GDP, most everything, universities.And so it’s a clash of visions.It’s a war over our past that’s fought out in the present for the future.
Which America are we going to be?And we’ve had it before, and we all pray that this time, like the ’60s, it can be defused.I will have a caveat.What ended the ’60s or ’70s was the huge election and reelection of Ronald Reagan.That stopped the whole protest—greening of America movement.And what stopped the idea that you could have slavery in one part of the United States and nullify a federal law was a civil war.Let’s hope that we have a resolution through the ballot box and not by violence.I think we can, but one side is going to win, and one side is going to lose.And then the side that loses, let’s hope that they can have a minority view that from time to time will point out in American political traditions that you guys are overreaching; it’s time to listen to us, and we have that ying [sic] and yang.But right now they’re not compatible, these two visions.
The 2020 Elections
And the 2020 upcoming election, how will that define the way forward?And how does Trump see it?What will his approach be towards the election?
Well, Trump—both sides are going to emphasize and double down on their views that are antithetical to one another.So on Trump’s side, he says this is not the Democratic Party of Hubert Humphrey or JFK or even Bill Clinton.They want to tax wealth that’s already been taxed, a wealth tax.They want a 70% to 90% income tax.They want open borders.They want to abolish ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement].They want to abolish Electoral College.They want to abolish student debt.They want to legalize infanticide.They want reparations.We’ve never seen this.Whatever you think about me, they want to change the system, they want to change the results.And it’s a socialist, radical, progressive vision that we don’t see anymore.
This is not your Democratic Party.The Democrats are going to say, because the economy’s doing very well, and foreign policy, they haven’t scored points, and they haven’t—the Mueller special counsel investigation didn’t bring fruit, they’re going to say, rather than look at individual issues, they’re going to say: “This man with no political or military experience is so uncouth and he’s so crass and he’s so indiscriminate that we’ve lost our reputation abroad.He’s torn us apart.”And they’re going to look at the election not in agendas, as Republicans will say, their dangerous agendas advanced by dangerous people.They’re going to say it’s really about Donald Trump.
And they’re going to say that because if you look at all of the issues that have been voiced so far in this very early primary season, none of them on the Democratic side have 51% approval.Nobody can produce a poll that says people want to abolish ICE or have the new Green Deal or reparations or 16-year-old votes, whatever the corollaries are.But they’re going to concentrate on Trump because they feel that he’s only—with a wonderful economy, he’s only polling 42% to 46%, and that the polls are accurate, and they can defeat him on his person.And we’ll see—that’s the two strategies.But really, the war is over two visions of where we’re going to be.
And Trump’s political strategy also.From the very beginning, from when he came down the escalator and talked about the immigrants and the rapists coming from Mexico, to the comments he made that were reported about when they were deciding on moving forward with some sort of immigration agreement, he talked about the “shithole countries,” to the latest debate that seems to be going on about these four congresswomen and sort of how he’s defined them and telling them to go back to where they came from.Is this part of a strategy?Is it to create antagonism, division and fear, or is it something different?How do conservatives view that, and what do you think the reality is?
I think the conservatives view the Trump rhetoric that is deemed excessive by the general commentary in the media in two different ways.There’s a minority of, well, I guess we could still use that archaic or calcified term, “Never Trumpers,” or maybe even the Mitt Romney wing.And they say it’s unfortunate that Donald Trump used the word “s-h-i-t-hole” for Haiti or he told Representative Omar to go back.
But the base will say something quite different.They’ll say Representative Omar came over to the United States; she was in a Kenyan refugee camp; she arrived here; she got a subsidized education; she ran for Congress; she’s an American success story.And what did she say in return?She said, “It’s all about the two Benjamins.”The United States foreign policy is captive by the Jews.The Jews.That’s what she said.Our closest allies.
… Or she’s suggesting that after she got to a Kenyan refugee camp, she said America disappointed her.She said that.
And I could—Representative [Ayanna] Pressley, Representative AOC, Representative [Rashida] Tlaib, I could—I think I could produce similar thoughts that the United States didn’t meet their expectations.And they talked about not meeting those expectations in racial terms.And the conservative base would say, when people come into a country, whether it’s second or first generation, and many of them are immigrants, the accepted American parlance is, whatever you think about America, we’re all lucky to be here.We’re lucky to be born here.We appreciate the country.We accept criticism within certain parallels, but you don’t come into the United States and start voicing anti-Semitic boilerplate and call people racist.
And so mostly we just tune that out.Donald Trump comes in and says, “I have a sneaking suspicion that most people don’t like what they’re saying.”That sneaking suspicion is supported by their individual polls in which people know who they are, which is bad for them.If you look at the polls, they’re about 40% to 55% that they have awareness of who Representative Omar or AOC is.But when you actually look at popularity, it’s below 20% in some cases.
So Trump says: “Everybody knows who they are.They’ve attacked me.I’m going to attack them.”And it’s a winning issue.That’s how he looks at it.And then it brings up all these other issues.
And so the Democratic Party is kind of in a quandary because I don’t think that those four “squad” members, so to speak, represent the Democratic Party.But now the Democratic Party is flocking to them and saying, “We support you.”But what do they support?Do they support Representative Omar, who just recently compared practices in Israel to Nazi Germany?And do they support what AOC said about certain things in the Middle East?Do they support what Representative Tlaib said: “Get the MF out of the White House”?Do they represent—do they agree with what Representative Pressley said, that I’m tired of blacks or browns—she used the word “queer”—not being spokesmen only for their identities.In other words, it’s not who you—what you look like is not incidental; it’s who you are.
I don’t think people agree with all that.And so what we’re getting in this fight is that, according to the progressive dialogue, you can say things that somebody from Mars would say were racist.You can attack somebody for a particular race because you’re calibrating historical circumstances, or you feel you’re a minority.But what the other side is saying is, this is 2020, and it’s been 165 years since the Civil War, and we’re into the seventh decade of the Great Society, and from now on it’s symmetrical.And you say something that’s offensive and racist, and after all, AOC basically accused the speaker of her own party of being a racist when she said she focuses on people of color.
And I think we’re going to see what happens, but if Donald Trump is retaliatory, and he curbs some of—I mean, he should never have said, “You should go back to where you came from,” because that’s technically not true; they’re all U.S. citizens; only one was a first-generation immigrant.But if they’re going to follow the Jacobin cycle of the French Revolution, where they have it in their head that nobody on that stage is ever going to be to the left of me and I can continue to say these racially charged accusations against a majority population, you can see what’s going to happen.
CNN today was airing a clip where they had eight white women, what they felt were suburban swing voters, and they assumed that those voters would be appalled at what Donald Trump, his side in this division, and then they—you could see the host’s shocked face when they all said they were angry at the four new House members for racially polarizing the situation, always talking about white supremacy, white privilege.And that’s where we are now.
I think what Trump’s message is is that finally we’ve got to just talk about who we are as people, and if people continue that progressive dialogue of identity politics, he’s going to redefine it as racism.And he doesn’t care about the historical circumstances or landscapes.He’ll just say if you talk about race and you accuse other people on racial ground, then you’re a racist.And that’s where we are.
… And lastly, you’ve written about and you talked about the divided states of America, how it’s become more and more divided.Look back at the last decade and where we are now.What’s the lesson about these divisions and what is causing it and where we’re going from here?
I think the lesson—and I grew up as a young kid in the ’60s, came of age in the ’70s—it has to be a personal decision.So I think what we all have to do is say, if I say something or write something that’s perfectly fair and legal, do I really want to do this when I know what the effects are going to be?In other words, do I want to go that extra limit?So I know that when I—I try not to attack somebody on the left unless I’ve been attacked, or when I’m speaking to people and I get a question, I try not to say, “It’s stupid,” or—in my own family, I think I’m the only person that voted for Donald Trump.I have a twin brother; I have two brothers.I don’t want to bring up something that’s going to agitate people.
So I think all of us have to realize that we have more commonalities than we have differences.That sounds like sort of therapeutic boilerplate, but I think that if you’re on the left, then try to develop an empathy for the white working class.If you can, go out and work with them.Put your kids in a public school.Live among them.And if you’re on the right, go to the inner city and say, “You know, we’re trying to hire people, and the reason we’re trying to hire people is because we want you, an 18-year-old resident of Chicago, to be able to pick and choose which employer that you want.We want to grow this economy so much that the employer has to beg and empower you, because you’re a noble laborer.Or you can be anything you want to be, but we want the employer to be at a disadvantage and you, the worker, or the employee, to be at an advantage,” and show some empathy.
And that’s been the problem with the Republican Party.They talk in abstractions, but, you know, they’ll say close the border, yes, but they never go into the Mexican American community where I live and say to Mexican American citizens, “I don’t like it when people come illegally and they’re in gangs and they threaten your children in your schools, not mine—your schools,” or, “I don’t like it when you’ve struggled so hard to get $16 an hour as a roofer, and a very wealthy employer will hire somebody from a different country for $12,” or you’re on dialysis, and you have to wait in line in Fresno County, and all of a sudden people from another country are crowding you out of your dialysis.
But the Republicans never make that argument in an empathetic way, and I think that’s what we have to do.Each person should realize who are their potential political opponents and then reach out and try to not talk about coming together, kumbaya, but actually go out and be with them, and do it in concrete action and not rhetoric.Too much rhetoric.
Latest Interviews
Latest Interviews
Policies
Teacher Center
Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation
Koo and Patricia Yuen
FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding is provided by the Abrams Foundation; Park Foundation; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; and the FRONTLINE Journalism Fund with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, and additional support from Koo and Patricia Yuen. FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
