Author John Ganz says President Donald Trump is not, by any definition, a “big reader.” But he does have a political cunning for picking up on populist ideas and commandeering them for his own gain.
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“[But] he was aware, he saw Pat Buchanan and David Duke running and noted ‘look, they’re doing well because there’s a lot of anger in this country’ … and he for a very long time have these in protectionist instincts essentially you know he temperamentally goes along with this ideological program which is that the United States relationship with the world is adversarial and our so-called allies are trying to screw us and immigrants are sucking up our resource,” Ganz told Bulwark podcaster Tim Miller. “It’s a very zero-sum hostile and paranoid attitude towards the world.”
Helping Trump was the fact that the Democratic Party had moved too far away from its populist tradition, and the fragmentation of media, which “opened up the doors for a lot of things that would not have made it into you know the previous ecosystem of media and that is a boon to all kinds of crackpots and charlatans.”
Additionally, Trump encapsulated the spirit of a third-party candidate.
“Like Ross Perot, who comes out and says, ‘you know, the parties are crooked. I’m going to reform them. I’m going to change everything.’ So there is a populist spirit which is not entirely contained in either party and in fact can attack the party’s system itself,” said Ganz. “And if you look at the way Trump takes over the Republican Party, he kind of attacks it as almost a third-party kind of candidate.”
That populist appeal still exists today among a huge swathe of voters — only now the primaries are shaking out in way that puts Trump on the bad side of a populist war, with voters turning on him over his many failures.
“There’s probably going to be some coalition a mixture of the Democratic Party, an amalgam,” said Ganz, of a “moderately populist” that will likely be successfully coopted by Democrat for a while.
When asked by Miller about Trump’s political challenge of “reaching the aggrieved,” Ganz said “Trump’s coalition of the alienated obviously was extremely fragile and temporary and many of the people he brought on board he quickly alienated himself and they’re up for grabs.”
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Ganz added: “Are they all going to become Democrats? No. Some of them will just be demobilized. But I do think … a politician who seems to be a fighter against entrenched sloth and privilege and systemic corruption is going to appeal to a certain type of voter.”
But Trump personalizes everything, said Ganz and is “not able to think in terms of systems or abstractions, and “psychologically incapable of understanding things as processes that don’t have a person behind them.”
Trump’s mental malfunction is sinking his and Republicans’ chances for the next few years.
For that reason, Ganz said it was good that populist Democrat senatorial challenger Graham Platner is working for Democrats, because the hunger for a populist personality is still burning strong among the electorate.
“I would say I would rather Platner on our side than the other side. I would say from my perspective, he’s lending his powers for good,” he said.
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