Today, Explained - The Trump Years: State of our union

Episode Date: October 30, 2020

In the final episode of our five-part series, New York Magazine’s Rebecca Traister and Vox’s Ezra Klein explain how four years of the Trump presidency have changed the American people and their politics. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk and authorized gaming partner of the NBA.

BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Please raise your right hand and repeat after me.

I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear That I will faithfully execute That I will faithfully execute The office of President of the United States The office of President of the United States And will, to the best of my ability And will, to the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend,

preserve, protect, and defend, the Constitution of the United States, the Constitution of the United States. So help me God. So help me God. Congratulations Mr. President. It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos-Furham. Four years ago, Donald Trump from reality TV won the presidency, and our shared reality hasn't been the same since. The relentless pace of headlines, controversies, and tweets has rendered the country divided at present and unable to fully recollect the past. I've seen the tweet about tapes. Lordy, I hope there are tapes.

We struggled to remember what this president said or did last month, let alone in 2017. For the past few weeks, we've been helping you remember with our series on the Trump years. We've been looking back on Donald Trump's policies, accomplishments, and scandals during his four years as president to figure out what they mean for the future of the American political experiment. On today's show, the state of our union. It's the final episode of our Trump years series, and we're shifting the focus from the president to the people. The 40-something percent of Americans who have stuck by Donald Trump through investigations, inquiries, scandals, and tweets,

and the tens of millions who have been eagerly awaiting next week's election since the results came in from the last one. We want to try and figure out where four years of Donald Trump have left these two polarized groups and whether there's any hope of them finding some common ground again. We're going to start with Rebecca Traister from New York Magazine, who recently wrote about the awakening of protest under President Trump. Literally the day, first full day of Donald Trump's presidential administration, January 21st, 2017, is the biggest single day protest in United States history. And that was the Women's March.

My body, my choice! My body, my choice! My body, my choice! The crowd was so big that there couldn't be a march, right? It was so much bigger than people had understood that it had originally been planned, you know, for people to march with movement. But in fact, there were so many people there that you couldn't move. The streets were clogged. And so my experience of the women's march was largely sitting on a block where I couldn't see anything, surrounded by shoulder to shoulder with people. We march for women's rights. We march for women's rights. We march for human rights. We are ready for the fight. We are ready for the fight. This is the moment of the beginning of the revival of the women's movement.

This is the moment you will remember when women stood strong and stood firm and said, never again. This is the moment that you are going to be heard. I mean, it was remarkable. And it wasn't. And yes, there are a million different things you could say and have been said and need to be said and should still be said about what was and wasn't complete about that event. but the sheer numbers of people on the first day of his presidency saying, I'm paying attention. I do think it was a really powerful harbinger for what not only was going to come, but what had to come. I mean, the Women's March was the first of many movements and many protests that came after Inauguration Day. There were protests in airports after the president announced his travel ban. No hate, no fear, refugees are welcome here.

Protests in restaurants that administration officials frequented in D.C. and elsewhere. Secretary Nielsen, how dare you spend your evening here eating dinner as you're complicit in the separation and deportation of over 10,000 children separated from their parents? And scientists held their own protests. Were there more protests than we'd seen in prior administrations, or did it just feel that way? Well, there were better attended protests than we've seen in prior administrations, right? So these things wound up being huge. There was the Women's March. There was March for Our Lives.

Young Americans took to the streets today in numbers likely not seen since the Vietnam War. And, of course, led by young people. Six minutes and 20 seconds with an AR-15. And my friend Carmen would never complain to me about piano practice. Aaron Feist would never call Kira Miss Sunshine. Alex Schachter would never walk into school with his brother Ryan. There were the climate strikes. You know, there's this culture of protest, but there's also running for office and then working for campaigns, getting engaged on a local level, which is sort of rare, especially for those who've been politically apathetic, even on a presidential level. Suddenly you have a population of people who are very interested in their state legislative races.

That's something that happened in New York. For nearly all of the past century, with a few brief breaks, Republicans ruled the New York State Senate. Then in 2018, they lost a number of seats to give Democrats a decisive 40-seat majority out of the 63 Senate districts. That's another form that this awakening took. And then, of course, there's Me Too in the fall of 2017 in the wake of the reporting on Harvey Weinstein's serial predation, again, it's not, you know, fists in the air street protest, but the outpouring, the kind of tidal outpouring of stories of ubiquitous sexual harassment and assault that came as part of the hashtag MeToo movement, which I want to point out, MeToo, the MeToo movement was founded

and led by Tarana Burke starting in 2006. So this is building on roots that were put down much earlier. But the mass flood of stories comes in the fall of 2017. What were the tangible upshots of all of these protests? Well, it depends on which ones you're looking at. So one area where you saw a tangible result, the kind of culture of engagement and protest in the spring of 2017 led people to flood the phone lines and the corridors of the Senate to push back against the repeal of the Affordable Care Act.

And protesters swamped town halls that Republican senators were giving. I can tell you three members of my family, including me, that would be dead, dead and homeless if it was not for ACA. They absolutely just overwhelmed Senate offices. You know, the tangible result of that is that that fight ended with John McCain very famously giving his thumbs down and the Republican efforts to repeal the ACA failing. Another tangible result, I would say, are the midterm elections of 2018. CNN can now project that Democrats will win the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. A blue wave that was larger

than Democrats have seen since the Nixon administration. To our immigrants worried about the knock on the door, change can't wait. To women whose rights are perpetually under attack, change can't wait. Spearheaded by a lot of women candidates, many women of color, many first-time candidates, many of whom talked about being propelled into electoral politics by their rage in that period. That's certainly a tangible result. Another tangible result, I would say, if you look at the hashtag MeToo movement or explosion of stories, is that you saw many really powerful people, most of them powerful men, lose their jobs, which is a, you know, it's not a solution, but it's a shift in who has power in the media and in entertainment. I mean, those were repercussions in the midst of

that hashtag MeToo period. I mean, people like Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose and Mark Halperin, who importantly were some of the people who had told the story of politics for decades preceding, lost their jobs as those storytellers. I mean, that is a tangible shift in how these things work. And the fight over the ACA and the blue wave and Me Too might feel like a somewhat distant memory at this point. But as we speak, protesters are in the streets across the country proclaiming Black Lives Matter. Yes. So at the height of the protests this summer, when millions of people rushed to the streets, in cities and small towns, many of them small white towns around the country, public opinion shot up in approval for

the protests. 67% of those polled in the middle of this summer voiced at least some support for Black Lives Matter. And there was a shift at one point in just a matter of two weeks that was greater than the shift had been over two years preceding that, was on the side of the protests. And for all those weeks when the media was covering them, in many cases, as though they were violent, as though they were, you know, worryingly disruptive, and yet opinion remained on the side of the protesters. And that is a remarkable thing. If you look at polling now, that support has receded. And it has receded especially in white respondents. But the degree of engagement in these conversations, even beyond the protests,

aren't meaningless, right? So the people who rush to read books about racial inequality over this summer, so much of this country has changed how we're encouraged to think about the history of this country. Not that it's not contested. I mean, Republicans are trying to ban the teaching of the 1619 Project, including Donald Trump and Senator Tom Cotton. But that's a signal of how disruptive this shift in how we talk about this country and its origins and the fact that it was built around racial hierarchies. I mean, this is a massive shift that has taken place, not exactly in protest culture, but in educational culture in how we talk and think about how the United States was built and how it functions.

When we talk about detractors to these movements, there's perhaps no greater detractor than the president himself for obvious reasons. But I wonder where these movements go after the president, be that in three months or four years. I think there's also a history in progressive agitation that takes sort of first step wins and treats them as like the great victory. And you can look at that. I mean, that's a critique that's been made correctly,

I believe, about a reproductive rights movement that treated Roe as the endpoint rather than the beginning point. And ever since then, you've seen access to abortion erode for millions of people. Lots of people who thought that electing a Black president was like the apotheosis of our racial reckoning, like we fixed it, right? And didn't understand, A, the degree of intense backlash to that was going to get us in part to having this conversation right now about Donald Trump's presidency. But also that that was like a first step. And I'm very worried that a Democratic win will feed a fantasy that things have gone back to normal and that the stuff that was always there before Trump, that Trump just made visible to so many millions of people, will again become invisible to them. Ironically, I guess, one of the things that leaves me with hope that people won't be able to just go back to sleep is how bad things are.

A global recession, perhaps of record dimensions, is a near certainty. Record-setting wildfires burning across the nation's west coast are turning landscapes into an eerie scene, seemingly out of an apocalyptic movie. The U.S. reported more than 80,000 coronavirus cases yesterday, setting a record high for daily cases for the third time this week. We are on a very difficult trajectory. We are going in the wrong direction. The question is, will they be able to connect the catastrophic realities that they're going to be able to see with a political system that is far greater and with roots much deeper than Donald Trump and continue to understand their civic responsibility

to engage with and participate in that system to try to fix it? And that's an open question. I don't know the answer to. Rebecca Traister, she's the author of Good and Mad, The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger. She's also a writer at large at New York Magazine. After the break, Vox's editorlarge, Ezra Klein. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained.

Ramp.com slash explained. R-A-M-P dot com slash explained. R-A-M-P dot com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank. Member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. Ezra, Rebecca just told us all about these changes that happened to movements on the left and the sort of galvanization of the left in this country over the course of the Trump presidency. But I feel like it's important to note here that 40 to 45 percent of the country was seemingly perfectly pleased with the job he was doing that entire time. Yeah, quite a number. So I think there are a couple of ways to think about this. There are people who are Trump fans,

and then there are people who are not that engaged in politics and are judging off of the state of the country. So for much of Donald Trump's presidency, the main contributor from politics that you would expect to be driving presidential approval numbers is the economy. And for much of Trump's presidency, the economy is doing fine. The unemployment number is down to 3.5 percent. So that goes way, way back.

We haven't had numbers like this in a long time. You had very low unemployment. You're beginning to have pretty significant wage gains, particularly for lower income workers. Not only are we already seeing the benefits of higher wages and bigger salaries, much bigger salaries, but we're also seeing the creation, very importantly to me, of new jobs. Democrats will tell you that was a continuation of Obama era trends and in fact a slight slowdown from them and they're right about that. Trump inherited that economy. And if you compare job growth in the last, you know, 36 months of President Obama's term,

it was 227,000 jobs on average and President Trump also good, but 191,000 jobs per month on average. But nevertheless, that is how people judge what's going on. And it was going fine under Trump. I am very surprised at the degree to which that number has held up under the coronavirus. The fact that you have about the exact same approval rating for Donald Trump right now as you did a year ago. And there have been 200,000 deaths in the middle of that. And there's been an economic collapse, more or less. And Trump has managed this in a very erratic and often absurdist way, suggesting injecting bleach, but also just going back and forth day to day on whether or not to treat it like a big deal.

I would have expected that to shake it more. So I think then you have to say that that is the Republican-Democratic divide in this country. Trump does not command a majority, but there is a, you know, roughly 40% group that what they want is a champion against the forces of leftism, the forces of a diversifying America, the forces of change. And one thing Trump always does, no matter whether he is governing effectively or not, is he is always a rhetorical and social media and cultural champion for that revanchist white base that he claims to represent. And they appreciate that about him. opposite of political correctness, the guy who's happy to call half the world shitholes and happy to call Mexicans rapists. Can you put that back in the bottle? I don't think Donald Trump unleashed it. Donald Trump rode the wave. He isn't the ocean. This is like the, he's the, he's the symptom, not the disease. Yeah. He the symptom, not the disease? Yeah, he's symptom, not the disease.

There is one argument that Donald Trump has created an emboldening effect, an unleashing effect, right? He's made, you know, proud boys feel more supported. Proud boys, stand back and stand by. He's emboldened white nationalist marchers and white supremacists to march in Charlottesville. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. But something he's also had is a thermostatic effect on public opinion, where immigration has become much more popular over Donald Trump's term. Polling on race has changed dramatically. Many, many more Americans now have adopted a more structural definition of racism.

And many more Americans, including white Americans, are likely to say discrimination and other forms of racism have been key reasons black people haven't done as well in this country as white people have. So one thing that's just worth noting is that while Donald Trump has certainly emboldened a fringe, he has also, by being a very weak messenger for parts of it, potentially weakened it.

There are more savvy politicians. we've seen them worldwide, and we've seen them in American history, who can smuggle in very racist ideas or very xenophobic ideas in more sanitized ways. But Donald Trump has really associated the ideas that he carries with a very, very blunt sort of bigotry. And for the long-term health of those ideas, that may not have been the best thing for them. It's clear that Donald Trump mobilized so many on the left and the right. Is there any sense, you know, four years later, which mobilization was more significant?

One thing that I would always think about the Trump mobilization is he's a bit of a paradox in that he's an extraordinarily successful political figure judged by the standards of outsider candidates and a very unsuccessful political figure judged by the normal standards of politicians. So his one single election in which he nevertheless got fewer votes than the person he ran against, which in most elections would mean you lose. Then in the midterm election, his party lost by huge numbers. He himself has never been popular with the majority of Americans, never. And he's, at least for right now, quite a bit behind in the presidential election.

So yes, he drove a mobilization among particularly working class white voters who carried a lot of racial or anti-immigrant sentiment. On the other hand, he's never commanded that or built that into a governing majority or even like a majority of people who approve of him personally. So whether or not his counter-mobilization on the left, what that amounts to, I think is also an open question that we'll see what happens to the left after Trump is out of office and what happens to the Democratic coalition when the figure of Trump isn't there to unite him. I mean, there are some pretty big fissures in that coalition that could emerge in a Joe Biden presidency. But, you know, this story is young yet, and whether or not there's a

realignment here, simply an aberration here, I think is yet to be known. You know, we've tried to be fair to President Trump throughout the course of this series in our five episodes, be it talking about his greatest accomplishment, his tax cuts, or talking about his America First policies and his success there, or even his ability to get rid of the individual mandate, which I guess he deserves some credit for. But I think in fairness to the president and to Joe Biden, it's very clear that one of these candidates has made uniting this country more of a pillar of his campaign than the other, which leaves me all but sure that if we do get

another four years of Donald Trump, we will be even more polarized come 2024. But I wonder if the divisions that Donald Trump has sowed can be undone. Is there depolarization in this country in the next four years? Has it gone too far? Polarization predates Donald Trump. He has a political strategy that is obviously built on exacerbating it, on amplifying our deepest divisions, sort of our angriest political conflicts. When he fades from the scene, if he fades from the scene, some of that might ease. I do think Joe Biden will run a more conventional presidency. He'll be more interested in reaching out to people who don't agree with him. But think back, like do the little do-do-do-do-do-do.

Just go back a couple of years to the end of Obama's presidency. We would not have said that was a not polarized time. President Obama, are you listening? We the people need relief from overdose taxation. The Tea Party is alive and well, and we are going to write the obituary for big government. It was a nightmare. And only the Democrats and only liberals could actually elect a guy with a tan suit. One conservative commenter tweeted, Ronald Reagan never entered

the Oval Office without a jacket. Obama poses for crotch shots with foot on desk. And frankly, it's hard to believe that he doesn't just issue his birth certificate. It would be so easy to do if in fact he has one. We saw Republican mobilization against Obama that was extraordinary and, of course, led to Donald Trump himself. Joe Biden's presidency, particularly if Joe Biden wants to have an ambitious presidency that rolls back some of the things Republicans have done, like the way they've taken over the Supreme Court, that is not going to be a small thing. That is not going to be a quiet thing. And Joe Biden, whatever else he is, is a transitional figure, right? He represents a Democratic Party, many factions of it simultaneously compromising on somebody

they thought could win at a time when winning was everything to them. But Biden himself sees himself as a transitional figure towards that more diverse, young, more liberal America. And picking Kamala Harris as his vice president was part of that, right? She is a liberal African-American, Indian-American woman. And so to the degree that part of what the polarization that Trump benefited from and also exacerbated that Barack Obama spoke to and represented for many people, even as he often tried to downplay it in his politics, to the degree that somewhat is simply happening is a collision between a younger, more diverse, more liberal, more secular America and an older, whiter, more Christian, more secular America, and an older, whiter, more Christian, more

conservative America that has traditionally held power and now feels a desperation of beginning to lose it, or at least lose it in an unquestioned fashion, that's not going away. That is a structural thing that is happening in this country. You know, I remember four years ago, I was certainly surprised by Donald Trump's win. The fact that we'd have to start saying President Trump caught me off guard. You know, some reports suggest that he was quite surprised himself. And it's been four years of surprises since.

I wonder what surprised you most about his presidency over these four years, Ezra? That's such a good question. So much of it has been shocking, but not surprising, if that makes sense. I think the thing that has been most surprising to me is Donald Trump seems like a man of very strong opinions. And on most topics, he's actually not. That's a crazy thing about him. But I hear this all the time from Republicans in Congress

and people on the Republican side, that what they thought was Donald Trump, like that he wasn't a policy guy, but that he knew what he thought and he was going to demand other people did it too. But actually he's all over the map on almost everything.

Like one day he agrees with Pelosi and Schumer to an immigration deal in the Oval Office and he backtracks the next day. You know, one day he's not having a stimulus negotiation any more than he is, and he wants a bigger stimulus than the Democrats, and he doesn't. Trump is like, I think it was Chuck Schumer who said, Negotiating with President Trump is like negotiating with Jell-O.

Trump play-acts as somebody with incredibly strong, fixed opinions, but actually he's very, very fluid. And that's made any kind of policy making very tough in the Trump era because he does not act as a stable or stabilizing force, even within the Republican party. There are a couple of things where he's reasonably consistent like trade, but even there, not as much as you would think. So yeah, if there's anything about him, it seems that he's a guy who knows what he wants and will try to get it. And I think that's true for his personal ambitions. But as somebody who has to govern, a guy who knows what he wants and will try to get it. And I think that's true for his personal ambitions.

But as somebody who has to govern, he has never known what he wants and he's never known how to get it. Ezra Klein, he's the host of The Ezra Klein Show, where you can hear him discuss a lot of what we talked about today, only more often. And this is a wrap on our Trump years series. Thank you for listening. If you missed any of the five episodes along the way, or if you want to share them with all those undecided voters in your life, they're bundled together for you at Vox.com slash Trump years. While you're there, go to Vox.com slash vote. If you haven't figured out your voting plan yet.

Happy Halloween. Stay safe. We're back next week. And they say it's going to be a big one. And now, the ones we lost along the way. Michael Flynn. He's now the senior-most member of the Trump administration to cooperate in special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Russian meddling in the election. Fired. Derek Harvey.

Fired. Mark Corallo. Resigned. Sally Yates. The acting Attorney General Sally Yates questioned whether the immigration order was lawful, telling the Justice Department's lawyers not to defend it. The White House then calling it betrayal. Fired. Walter Schaub. Resigned. Michael Short Rich Higgins Tara Dahl Michael Dupke James Comey

I remember saying, I agree he's a good guy, as a way of saying I'm not agreeing with what you just asked me to do. Fired Angela Reed Fired. Angela Reid. Fired. Vivek Murthy. Fired. KT McFarland.

Resigned. Katie Walsh. Resigned. Sean Spicer. This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe. Inaccurate numbers involving crowd size were also tweeted. No one had numbers, because the National Park Service, which controls the National Mall, does not put any out.

Resigned.