Episode 28: Donald Trump
Show Notes
Overview
Today’s episode is all about Donald John Trump, the 45th president of the United States. So, so much to say. And yet, Trump’s presidency is also so fresh, what could we say in an introduction that you’d not already know? The only president ever impeached twice by the House of Representatives; he was also the first in more than a century to voluntarily refuse to attend his successor’s inauguration. He was also one of only five presidents to have won the Electoral College vote without also winning the popular vote. Trump’s time in office was…unusual.
That was its point: to break away from the tired and worn in order to “make America great again.” The word “great” in that slogan naturally draws the eye. America must have been great before, and Trump’s policies sought a return. Great again. When precisely? And for whom? These were the central questions of his time in office, and also seem likely the central questions for historians still to come. As we’ve seen over the course of this inaugural podcast season, the promise of America was never fully available to all, and indeed, there were some moments in American history when the long arc of progress on issues of citizenship and racial equality seemed to take a step or two back, rather than forward.
So who was this man? Only the briefest of primers seems necessary. Born to wealth and privilege, recent reporting has revealed that Trump was already a millionaire before he was a teenager, owing to his family’s practice of moving money away from tax collectors. A businessman and real estate dealmaker, in his own words, he was by the 1980s primarily a celebrity, that is, someone famous for being famous. Trump worked hard for fame, and got it, being by the close of the 1980s a household name. The Art of the Deal was a best-seller in 1987, and he could frequently be found on talk-show couches or in movie cameos.
Fortune did not follow, however. Trump’s business acumen was never as impressive as his marketing skills. Six companies he directed filed for bankruptcy, and he was by the 21st century nearly bankrupt himself, though Trump managed to turn his fortunes around in the early 2000s when a television show, the Apprentice, in which he starred and co-produced, became a hit. “Your Fired,” was his catchphrase, and the show brought him newfound fame, and financial success.
Which Trump increasingly plowed into building a political brand. He’d always been on the periphery of American politics, briefly lobbying to be George Bush’s Vice-Presidential pick in 1988, and then briefly as a candidate for the reform party ticket in 2000. He found real traction, however, as a kibitzer, cultivating conservative ire and anxiety over a changing face of America, especially after the election of Barack Obama in 2008. It was Trump, more than anyone, who pushed the false narrative that Obama had been born in Kenya—and was thus ineligible for the presidency. Of course this was hogwash, but it got people talking, and most importantly, talking about Trump.
Which was how he liked it. His raucous and oftentimes profane twitter feed and public appearances drew cameras and eyeballs, which Trump parlayed along with this widespread name-recognition to the Republican Presidential nomination in 2016. Few professional political analysts gave him much chance of winning, but he did. Pick your reason. Perhaps America wasn’t ready for its first female president? Maybe they merely disliked Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent. Perhaps they found his nationalism appealing in an era of economic anxiety, of growing immigration and an increasingly non-white electorate? Or perhaps their vote for Trump was just a giant ‘screw you’ to the entire political system. “Only I can solve it,” Trump said of the corruption, incompetence, and bureaucratic inertia that for many Americans characterized their government. He was the ultimate protest vote.
Trump did not care for presidential norms, and seemed to enjoy igniting controversies, especially over matters of race. He made good on a campaign promise to ban Muslims from entering the United States; he separated migrant parents from their children; he openly railed against the social justice protests of 2020; and he famously said that a white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, one that featured torch-carrying self-proclaimed Nazis and their opponents featured, “good people on both sides.”
“Stand back and stand by,” Trump ultimately told the right-wing Proud Boys, after having only moments before claimed never to have heard of them, and in the midst of a global pandemic, the nation faced last November what easily ranked as one of the most contentious, and likely consequential, elections in American history as Trump sought a second term. He lost, but that didn’t mean he gave up. Two months after election day his supporters invaded the United States capitol in order to stop the counting of electoral college votes that would force him to leave the presidency. Blood was shed. Troops called in. There may well have been a few “good people” among the insurrectionists that day. Prudence and politeness preclude one from the wholesale damning of crowds or blithe characterization of their motives. But one thing is for certain: Trump’s supporters carried Confederate Flags into the halls of the United States Capitol, and no one else in the crowd stopped them, or seemed to mind.
So much to talk about Trump. We will no doubt be studying him and his moment in time the rest of our lives as presidential historians. And we were so very glad to have two great guests with us to help unpack his presidency.
First, we spoke to Professor Carol Anderson of Emory University, one of the nation’s leading experts—ok, THE nation’s leading expert—on the history of voting rights and voting discrimination in the United States. Prolific and influential, she is, among other words, author of One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying our Democracy, and White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide.
We then turned to Jamelle Bouie, New York Times Columnist and Political Analyst for CBS News, where he writes on campaigns, culture, and national affairs, having formerly been the chief political correspondent for Slate. No journalist has done more to provide historical context for our current moment than Bouie.
Together our guests revealed to important insights:
Trump’s presidency represents a key moment for voting rights, as well as a continuation of the trends we’ve been discussing this season.
Trump’s presidency can be boiled down to one factor: who has power, and what that reveals about the Republican Party today.
Guests
Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies at Emory University and author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Nation's Divide, a New York Times Bestseller, Washington Post Notable Book of 2016, and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner. She is also the author of Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955; Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960, and One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy, which was long-listed for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Galbraith Award in non-fiction.
Her research has garnered an array of grants and fellowships, including those sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, the National Humanities Center, Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. She was recently awarded a 2018 fellowship in Constitutional Studies by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Professor Anderson’s role as a public scholar has found her serving on working groups dealing with race, minority rights, and criminal justice at Stanford’s Center for Applied Science and Behavioral Studies, the Aspen Institute, and the United Nations and as a member of the U.S. State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee. She is currently on the Advisory Board of the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative. She has appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show, PBS NewsHour, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and Democracy Now!, as well as providing commentary for the Huffington Post, The Guardian, New York Times, and Washington Post. Her op-ed in the Washington Post on Ferguson was the most shared for the newspaper in 2014.
She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Miami University, where she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Political Science (International Relations) and a bachelor’s in history. She earned her Ph.D. in history from The Ohio State University.
Professor Anderson’s website.
Follow Professor Anderson on Twitter.
Jamelle Bouie is a columnist for the New York Times Opinion section and a CBS News political analyst.