Transcript: Trump Press Sec Snaps at Journos as Shutdown Polls Worsen
Sargent: Yeah, I think you’re getting at what I think is a real problem in the Trump coalition, kind of in a very broad sense, right? So if you think of the Trump coalition as being MAGA plus all these voters who kind of have passing familiarity with Trump because he penetrated deep into the culture for many, many years, he builds big buildings, he’s a rich guy, he must be doing something right. That kind of thing. Once he gets in and governs, everything that they do, everything that MAGA governance does, is tailor-made to splitting that coalition. Like that second bucket of voters who understands Trump as kind of a can-do, snap his fingers, businessman type: They hate the anti-vax stuff. They hate the deportations. They hate the tariffs because they’re getting screwed by them and they’re not ideologues about globalization or anything like that. And then same with the healthcare stuff so, you see what I’m saying? The MAGA coalition is almost guaranteed to fracture once these lunatics actually start governing, I think.
Marcotte: I feel like we’ve seen this movie before—the first Trump term. He got elected in 2016 because so many people just thought he was the guy from The Apprentice. They thought he was this great businessman. They were willing to overlook the racism and the sexual predation because they thought he’d do great things for the economy. And then what’s the very first thing he tries to do in office? Take away people’s health care. And he didn’t even succeed at that—because of John McCain. Yet in 2018, Republicans lost much bigger than expected in the midterms. And all the data shows it was because of the attack on health care in particular. I mean, yes, it was also that Trump showed who he really was and people learned more about him. But the threat to health care—people took that very seriously. And now Trump Two, like all sequels, is the same story, just bigger, louder, and with more explosions.
Sargent: Layer on all the fascism as well. He’s getting much more of what he wants with the mass deportations. He’s got tens of billions of extra dollars to play with to terrorize immigrant communities and unleash law enforcement in cities and so forth. So you’ve got almost like the first term dynamic that you’re talking about, but supercharged.
