If you ask what is Fox, who do they represent? They represent a lot of people, but apart from that, you can’t really say they’re backing a major swath of the institutional power in this country as you might have 20 years ago, or during the Bush years, when Fox News was what you watch to see what the people who are getting us into the war in Iraq were thinking. That’s not so much the case anymore.
I think there’s been a shift in terms of the political picture in this country, and it’s very much expressed by, for me, the censorship issue.
Michelle, what do you think Matt is getting right and wrong about this intersection of power. In my view, wealthy people tend to support whatever will keep them wealthy.
I don’t think you can lump everything together. And I don’t think it works just as purely an economic proposition, especially because populism in this country may have economic roots, but the way it plays out in politics is not economic. It’s kind of ethnonationalist. What Trump was pitching was not an economic populism, that’s not where his policy —
That’s not true.
— that’s not where his policies went. What he was doing had a certain economic flair to it. But when you look at what really motivates people, it was the immigration issue. It was the, they’re coming for your kids issue. It’s — they’re destroying the American way of life issue. So it gets beyond economics pretty quickly.
And I would say — I wrote a piece a while back that, essentially, Trump ran as one thing and governed as another thing, and ran as kind of someone who could be all things to all people type of candidate, and then governed basically as Mitch McConnell.
Well, I covered Trump’s campaign, so I was at his speeches. And it’s absolutely not true that there was no economic component to his address in 2016. It was a huge part of the picture. Obviously, race and immigration were central issues for Trump. There is absolutely no doubt about that. And he played on some of the worst instincts of the electorate.
But there were enormous similarities between the Trump movement and, for instance, the Bernie Sanders movement. And I heard people who I interviewed over and over and over again responding to all kinds of things in Trump’s message. I heard Trump argue against the antitrust exemption for health insurance companies. I heard him going after the press. The elitist press was a huge part of his presentation.
That’s not economics. We’re talking economics —
It’s a class issue.
No, no, we’re not talking about class and culture, because the cosmopolitan —
I’m talking about class.
Well, we were talking about economics, and that’s different. His pitch in 2016, as Jane points out, was not how he governed, and it’s not how he ran in 2020. So he pretty quickly discovered that the key to maintaining his popularity wasn’t to actually provide a huge tax cut for the struggling people. It was to tell them that the immigrants were coming for their jobs.