← Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Trumpism Is Not a Fad
00:23:40
In this special post-election episode, the hosts take stock of Donald Trump’s triumphant night and what a return of his right-wing populism says about America.
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- [00:00]
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- [00:29]
Michelle Cottle
From New York Times opinion. I'm Michelle Cottle.
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Ross Dowsett
I'm Ross Dowsett.
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Carlos Lozada
I'm Carlos Lozada.
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Michelle Cottle
And this is a very special post election episode of Matter of Opinion. Okay, late night, guys. How's everyone feeling?
- [00:54]
Carlos Lozada
Sleepy.
- [00:55]
Ross Dowsett
I'm very tired as well. Not as tired as I feared I would be. I am grateful, I am feeling grateful that the election did not come down to 2,700 votes in suburban Philadelphia, which there was a window of about 45 minutes to an hour there when I was afraid that we could be headed towards a Florida in 2000 scenario, but for like two different Midwestern states. So I'm grateful for that. And you know, I mean, I. The election basically unfolded the way I expected, which has not happened in a presidential election.
- [01:37]
Michelle Cottle
Congratulations.
- [01:39]
Ross Dowsett
2008, I would say, was the last time when I went into election night, the things that I expected to happen just happened. So it's an odd, it's an odd feeling, but I guess I have some pundit vindication this morning.
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Michelle Cottle
There you go. Carlos, what about you? I'm taking this was not the way you thought things were going to go.
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Carlos Lozada
You know, I really had. I mean, it isn't the way I thought things were going to go, not because I had a clear sense of how things were going to go. I honestly didn't. I had bought into the notion that it was a toss up. And so I guess that what I thought is less about like, will Harris win or will Trump win, but I just thought it would take a few days to sort out.
- [02:23]
Michelle Cottle
Yeah. So I should make clear here that we're recording this Wednesday morning when we already know that Donald Trump won decisively. But there's still a lot that we're waiting on to unpack. We will be back in your feets later this week, dear moobsters, but I wanted us to get together first for a quick check in. So go from there, Carlos. Then what does this reveal to you?
- [02:50]
Carlos Lozada
The thing that's been on my mind in this very sort of navel gazing way is that next week on Tuesday will be exactly 10 years since I swore the oath of citizenship of the United States. And so that means that over the last three, my first three elections, presidential elections as a citizen, have all had Donald Trump on the ballot and have been 2016, 2020, and 2024. And, you know, I'm pleased that the election seemed to proceed sort of normally and peacefully, though part of me wonders if that's mainly because the side that has indulged in election violence before won this time. The main thing that I. That I'm thinking about is that all the excuses that have been made for so long to kind of explain away Trump and the support he has built throughout the country are sort of over, right? Like, all the people who's, you know, this is not normal. This is not who we are. You know, normalizing Trump as the great sin of this era, you know, an affront to good taste and to the American experiment. I feel like all that is over, right? Like, this is as if we needed more confirmation. Trump is very much part of who we are. 63 million Americans voted for him in 2016, nearly 63 million, 74 million in 2020. And now it looks like he's exceeded 70 again and may be on track to win the popular vote. So Trumpism is not a fad, and Trump is not a fluke. This is not a fever that will break. This is just our normal temperature. There's nothing more normal than something that keeps happening.
- [04:29]
Michelle Cottle
Flowers, how do you feel about that diagnosis?
- [04:31]
Ross Dowsett
Yeah, I think that's right. I think it's okay to feel that the Trump era in American politics remains abnormal relative to the world of American politics as it existed up until the mid 2010s. I do think that there's been a shift. It hasn't only been a shift in the United States. I think that we're living through the breakdown of a particular period of consensus and relative calm that followed the Cold War. And that's just the reality, right? And what we're entering is a weirder world, and people have to make their peace with that. If you are, you know, working to defeat Trumpism and, you know, win for the Democrats in 2026, the most important place to start is with this reality that we're in right now that is not going away to say something maybe encouraging about where we are relative to 2016. And I say this with a full acknowledgement of all of the chaos and disaster that Trump in the White House could bring. One of the big narratives in 2016 was that Trump was part of who we are in the sense of representing just the Return of white supremacy politics in backlash to America's first black president. President. And it was fundamentally American, but in the darkest, most racist and reactionary possible way. And I think that becomes a harder argument to make with Trump basically presiding over a relative racial depolarization of the parties. It's, you know, it's early. We don't know, you know, the exit polls are going to be wrong. We don't know exactly how many Hispanics and how many African Americans he won. But this was not as racially polarized and electorate as in 2016. Whatever else Trumpism has done over the last eight years, it has proven that, you know, right wing populism can be a pan ethnic phenomenon. And if you don't like right wing populism, you can be upset about that. But you should maybe take a little comfort in the, in the reality that again, whatever you think this represents, it's something more complex and, yes, more diverse and multicultural in some ways than just white reaction.
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Michelle Cottle
Well, see, I want to tweak that, though, because what he did is he created that coalition with a huge charge of xenophobic nationalism and a pretty big charge of sexism. So he brought all these groups together so that they could hate on a different other, which, okay, I guess we can credit him for that. But it doesn't actually give me much comfort. I mean, what I saw this election as, it was basically a rage off. So you had Democrats on one side appealing to women who understandably have felt like this ticket in particular has been incredibly nasty about women.
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Carlos Lozada
Right.
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Michelle Cottle
And it got worse and worse and worse as we went up toward the end. And then on the other side, you had Trump, whose shtick has always been, I am your vengeance against the elites. Everything that's going wrong, your life, I'm going to make better. It's not your fault, we're going to blame the other. And that was a combination of immigrants and snooty elites and things like that. So you had a rage off between a group that had a particular demographic they were hitting and then Trump, who was hitting everything. Anything you're mad about, we're going to give the finger to. It doesn't matter if you're mad about housing prices or trans athletes or whatever. So I think he tapped into this incredible pool of rage that was sitting there for a whole lot of reasons and in part, I think had a lot to do with a Covid hangover and the really long tale of what that did to this country, which we will be dealing with for years. But it doesn't make me feel like he created a kind of positive coalition crossing racial and ethnic lines. He basically did what demagogues always do, which is rally people around to hate on another. And I don't know that that's remotely soothing.
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Carlos Lozada
Yeah, I think that if you, if you look at the electoral coalition, absent any knowledge of the campaign that preceded its formation, you can paint that sort of benign and hopeful picture that Ross is painting. I tend to agree with Michelle that the way that elements of that coalition were activated was in a manner that I personally found abhorrent. I think the closing argument of Trumpism has been identifying enemies and scapegoats, and it landed, it landed really well. I think there's always a danger to a risk. Everyone sort of over interprets a mandate. Even now, looking at the popular vote, which is kind of, you know, I was not expecting Trump to win the popular vote. It's a more narrow, so far, at least a more narrow popular vote victory than what Biden had. It's greater than what Hillary Clinton had. But it's still the country's not as closely divided as the polls suggested, but still fairly closely divided. And I think that Trump and his, the Robin to his Batman, J.D. vance, were very good at trying to win by activating sort of darker impulses in the electorate that that activation worked across a wider array of voters. You're absolutely right. But to me, it doesn't change the sort of final message that Trump offered. Now, Harris's message was all over the map. You know, it went from like joy to weird to fascism to, you know, like, like, I think the Harris campaign was attempting to just throw a lot of things the wall, hoping that something would, would work. You know, democracy and fascism became the big case at the end when it. Something they steered clear of at the beginning, you know. So, you know, I'm not saying at all that that was a sort of an outstanding and coherent counter message, but when I say that, I look on the country that I joined 10 years ago and I'm saddened by what it took to win on the, on the Trump side. That's what I'm talking about.
- [11:20]
Ross Dowsett
So, look, I don't want to claim that I can, you know, speak for all of the different groups in a country of, you know, 300 million people that ended up voting for Donald Trump. I would just say that I think there's a dynamic where, you know, you guys are talking about scapegoats and enemies. Right? Obviously scapegoat and enemy number one for Donald Trumpian populism. Is the media institutions like the one that all three of us work for. Right. Elite institutions of all kinds. But what that means, I think, is that people who are inside those institutions experience Trumpism more completely through the crazier things he says, the vitriolic things he says.
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Carlos Lozada
Like when he said that journalists should be shot. Yes, like that part. He said that he wouldn't mind it so much if journalists were shot.
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Ross Dowsett
When he said that if somebody was going to assassinate him, it was good. That they'd have to fire through the press. Yes. Like things like that. Yeah.
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Carlos Lozada
And he said he didn't mind that so much. I mean, like, I just don't. I want to make sure that we're not saying that it takes some kind of, like, wild eyed interpretation. No, no, no, no, no.
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Ross Dowsett
We're not. We're not saying that at all.
- [12:35]
Carlos Lozada
Like, he's saying very simple things.
- [12:37]
Ross Dowsett
I'm not saying that at all. Donald, Donald Trump, I mean, you know, in his last two weeks especially, which is, I think, something that gave liberals hope, says terrible things. That's absolutely the case. All that I'm saying is that there are a lot of people who voted for the Trump campaign for whom the message that they heard was inflation is too high, the economy has sucked, and, you know, Donald Trump is going to bring back the good times. People heard that message. There are a lot of people, especially I think, the, you know, the young men who we've talked about before on this podcast, the young men drifting rightward and so on, who, you know, listen to Donald Trump and J.D. vance on Joe Rogan and listened to Elon Musk and voted for a vision of America, you know, sending rockets to Mars and things like that.
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Michelle Cottle
Although you're being.
- [13:30]
Ross Dowsett
And I just wait for. Just wait, just wait, just wait. I'm not, and I am not saying, to your point, Carlos, that this stuff, like proves that, you know, Donald Trump actually ran a totally positive campaign and didn't say terrible things, scapegoating his enemies. He absolutely did. He's done it for eight years. I expect he will continue to do it for as long as he's President of the United States. I'm just saying if we're talking about the country and the coalition that he leads, what is actually appealing about Trumpism is more complicated than what you get in the dynamic between Trump and his enemies, that's all.
- [14:09]
Michelle Cottle
And I just want to kind of dig down on that a little bit, which is that you seem to be making a distinction that I have found does not really exist. And let Me, Just be clear. I've spent an enormous amount of time talking to voters in red states. My family's conservative. This is not me existing in a blue bubble and it's not me talking as a journalist. I tend to ignore everything thing he says about the press because that's how he rolls. He has got reporters on speed dial. What other people don't understand outside of the press is that he is a press creature that is like I ignore everything he says about that. I am talking about everyone from friends to family to random voters in states, including young men that I've talked with. They hear his message as your right to be angry. It's not your fault. I'm going to fix it. It's feminists, elitists, everybody else is why you're suffering like you are. And I'm going to give you the answer now. He gives them an answer that, you know, some people think he's going to take them back to the 50s, some people think he's going to take them to Mars. But it is all based on the idea that he's gonna take care of everyone who is standing in their way. And he does it in a way that is not measured and that appeals to that whole kind of middle finger. So I think I totally take what you're saying. And again, this is an angry country. Everyone's angry. You just have to fly with somebody who gets up and slaps a flight attendant to know just how random that anger can be. But it's not a ooh. They've clung to this hopeful vision of the future without acknowledging that that hopeful vision of the future is grounded in the idea that he's going to punish all the people who have been keeping them down. So I grant everything, but you got to tie it to that nastiness. That's just how it works. That's how demagogues work.
- [16:11]
Ross Dowsett
I don't think the country is angry and nasty overall in I said this at the end of our pre election show and you know, I'll say it again, I don't think that we're angry and nasty in the way that you would think from just experiencing American life through social media and things like this.
- [16:33]
Michelle Cottle
I'm not what I'm talking about, right.
- [16:34]
Ross Dowsett
And I don't, and I don't know, but I don't think, I mean, you know, I don't think we're angry and nasty in person on the scale that people think. And I know a lot of conservatives and a lot of liberals too, and like the guys listen like if you go watch, I think it's worth, like, going and watching the podcasts that Trump did as part of his, like, late breaking, you know, pitch to young men with, you know, go watch the Theo or listen to the Theo Vaughn podcast, go listen to the Joe Rogan podcast and so on. Like, the message on these shows is, you know, of course, Trump is a demagogue and he has an us versus them narrative. This is not an unfamiliar part of Democratic politics. Small D Democratic politics.
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Michelle Cottle
It does better than most.
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Ross Dowsett
I don't even know how. I mean, I don't think he does it better than most.
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Michelle Cottle
I don't know.
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Ross Dowsett
I think the people who do it best are the ones who build 55 or 60% coalitions that actually, you know, the most effective polarizers in American history are Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan because they actually build big coalitions. Trump alienates people because for all of the reasons that you're describing, because he goes way over the top and is gratuitously nasty and all of these other things. I'm just saying that I am skeptical that the filters that we are getting on, what is motivating people. And this applies on both sides, right? Just fully capturing how people are approaching politics.
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Michelle Cottle
When I'm on the trail talking to voters, what filter is that, Ross?
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Ross Dowsett
I mean, that's the filter of, like, hyper. Well, I don't know, Michelle. I'm not on the trail, I'm not on the track.
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Michelle Cottle
That's what I'm saying. I will buy a lot of it, but I will not buy that this is just like a filter. I've just talked to too many people. Okay, so moving on. Is there anything anybody wants to talk about with why Harris lost that has nothing to do with Trump? I don't want to treat her like an afterthought here.
- [18:38]
Carlos Lozada
I think we should just for a second talk about abortion. Like, this was the thing that was supposed to turn it around. This was. Abortion was what was supposed to bring out women in droves, you know, that Harris would win women by more than Trump would win men. This animating, I mean, Ross, this is something you mentioned in the, in our prior conversation, that if Harris won, it would be because of this issue, because of Dobbs, because of all that did to animate the Democratic Party and Harris's campaign in particular. And it seems that even when people vote for resolutions, vote for ballot measures on abortion rights, they can distinguish between that and whether they vote for Trump or not.
- [19:18]
Michelle Cottle
Okay, I definitely want to dig more into the abortion question because this is one of the things we were seeing, you know, in places like Montana where the abortion measure was maybe running ahead of tester. But all of that I want to get into later in this week when, as noted, we're going to. We're going to be back doing some more of this. But, Ross, to you, I mean, do you think abortion was the defining problem here for Harris? Do you think they relied too much on that? What is it that you see that Harris did wrong, that you feel like was just kind of glaring?
- [19:53]
Ross Dowsett
I mean, I think what you would say in defense of Harris is that she was in a very difficult position as the running mate of a deeply unpopular president who probably should not be president and should have fully stepped aside. And a lot of her problems reflected basically an inability to define herself fully because she didn't, for, I'm sure, understandable reasons, want to conduct some sort of full strategic break from the administration in which she serves right. So there's going to be a narrative that says, look, it just wasn't Harris fault. She did the best she could. This was all baked in. And I think there is some truth to that. That being said, look, abortion was clearly her best issue. It was the issue she was most trusted on. It was the issue that, you know, drove some degree of mobilization for Democrats in 2022. I don't blame her campaign for emphasizing that the way they did. I don't know how effective it was, but I don't. I don't think it was. That was itself the mistake. I think the problem was you can't run a campaign on a single social issue as large as that issue may loom in an environment where the economy, immigration, and foreign policy are all really big deals. And I just don't think she ever figured out what the broader message was going to be. And that's why, in the end, they were swinging back to Donald Trump as a threat to democracy, which they had tried to swing away from in the beginning because they needed something more. And maybe it's just hard to find that when you're coming in and parachuting into a campaign. Maybe you can't find that if you're locked into a relationship with an unpopular president. I don't know. But it's not so much that abortion was a mistake, it's that you had to have something more than just that argument and they didn't.
- [21:52]
Michelle Cottle
Yeah, I tend to agree with that, although I take it one step further, which is that Trump was in this very unusual and very powerful position of he was both the candidate of change and the candidate of nostalgia.
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Ross Dowsett
Yep.
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Michelle Cottle
And rarely do you get to put those things together. And it was going to take a really talented, gifted retail politician and a campaign that had some big ideas and a better narrative. Politics always comes down to narrative, and the Harris campaign just did not have a really compelling counternarrative. And so I just think that she couldn't clear the hurdle that was there.
- [22:37]
Carlos Lozada
I agree with that. I think the benign interpretation is that Trump never relinquished his advantage on the issues that mattered greatly to a lot of voters, which were the economy and immigrants. I won't say the border, because I think that there's ways in which this was very personalized. It wasn't just border chaos, it was immigrants. And Harris never really found a solution to the problem of being part of an incumbent administration at a moment when people were deeply unhappy with the direction of the country and wanted a big change and didn't like the incumbent. That's the irony of her we're not going back slogan is that a lot of people wanted to go back, and maybe they just wanted to go back to the first three years of the Trump presidency. I hope they didn't want to go back much further than that.
- [23:20]
Michelle Cottle
Certainly, we're going to get deeper into all of this when we reconvene later in the week. In the meantime, people, get some rest. Stay Zen. We'll see you later.
- [23:30]
Carlos Lozada
Thanks, Michelle.
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Ross Dowsett
Thanks, Michelle.
- [23:31]
Michelle Cottle
Bye, guys.
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