Transcript: Trump Erupts in Crazed Tirade Over 2026 as GOP Panic Grows
But I just want to bear down on this one point, Monica. Trump’s takeover of the GOP was supposed to be about a rejection of GOP plutocratic, anti–safety net politics, right? Trump himself kind of talked a good game about getting people health care. He spoke a little differently than, say, Paul Ryan, at least rhetorically. And that might be why he won in 2016, but they’ve had literally a decade to sort this out—to sort their own response out on this—and they’re still lost. I just don’t get it.
Potts: Yeah. I think that rhetorically Trump pays lip service to those things. He has been good at the way that he rallies to a sort of working-class ideal, like an image of what the working class was in the past. And he traveled to factories, and sometimes he’ll put on a hard hat and get in a truck, and he talks about what he thinks of as manly jobs. And it’s always been a very masculine, retro image of what it means to work in America, and it has ignored the realities of working-class America to some degree too, which are that they’re service jobs, they’re jobs in health care and education, and the kinds of jobs that women do a lot too. And the working class in America really needs a lot of help, and America is a diverse country. And I think that for Trump, that kind of harkening back to this false sense of nostalgia worked in 2016, and it’s going to stop working soon. And I think that maybe that’s what the GOP is seeing, is that there’s going to be a time after Trump. He’s not a magician.
Sargent: Yeah, you know you could actually look at Trump’s terrorizing of immigrant communities as a piece with this, because as you said, Trump kind of presents this idealized picture—idealized from his point of view—picture of the working classes as heavily white, heavily male, heavily concentrated in industrial work, in Appalachian fossil fuel mining, that type of thing. But the working class today is really quite diverse. It’s got a heavy immigrant component to it.
