https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=5KxDWOPW73M
To what degree do you think that the thing that concerns me, let’s say, about figures such as Trump, even though he’s singular in many ways, is that when you’re attempting to redress populist concerns, you can go in two directions, right? You can listen to the concerns, and you can honestly try to formulate responses and policies that would deal with those concerns, or you can capitalize on that resentment and foster it. And that’s a very, very dangerous road to walk down. Now, I’m not making a categorical judgment that Trump did one or the other of those. I’m curious about what you thought, because of course, his populist front was what in principle terrified his, though the people who became incredibly paranoid about him. But what was your sense? You watched him and you watched his handling of the crowd. You said that he would do things like single out the journalists and turn the crowd against them, you know, for better or for worse. Was your sense that he was, was he manipulating the crowds? Was he manipulating the crowds and himself at the same time? Was he playing a relatively straight game? You know, what do you think he was up to? And you kind of, you also compared him to a comedian, right? That could read the crowd. And a leader can do that, but you can be led astray by the darkest impulses of the crowd too. Yeah, so it was interesting because I was covering Trump and Bernie Sanders at the same time. And Sanders was picking up on a lot of the same things, but his answer to those grievances, he had a long list of policy solutions that he was really, really anxious to implement. Trump, on the other hand, I think at heart, Donald Trump is a salesperson. Like that’s who he is. He’s always selling something, right? And it was funny to watch the reporters because they were all carrying around you know, books about fascism and you know, like, you know, the 1930s, whereas they should have been reading books about sales culture, because that was the key to understanding Donald Trump. And I thought Trump basically was selling outrage. He was selling, he was selling the experience of feeling solidarity with other people who’d been screwed over. And he was fostering those feelings in people, I think, you know, to answer your question. As the holiday season unfolds, it’s a time of joy, gratitude and reflection. In the midst of the festivities, consider taking a moment to reflect on the digital footprint that accompanies you through this season. Think about all the information on your phone, from anything you search, your location, to the websites you shop at and more. Companies can legally gather this information and sell your data for profit. 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And did you detect a danger in that? Did you get it? Did you detect a danger in that? I mean, because look, there are times being frustrated and wanting justice, those two things aren’t that easy to distinguish, right? And being resentful and wanting justice, those two things aren’t always that easy to distinguish either, right? I mean, it’s a tricky business, because, you know, you say, well, you should forgive and forget and people think that’s the highest possible dictum, but justice has its place as well. And if you have been screwed over, and I think the American working class has been screwed over in many ways, although whether that was planned or just incidental is a different question, they had their reasons to be outraged. Now, Trump obviously appealed to that outrage. You’re intimating that you believe that he capitalized on it as well, though, in a way that you didn’t see characteristic of Bernie Sanders. Now, of course, Bernie also didn’t, wasn’t burdened with the delusion that he was likely to win. No, and Bernie didn’t really, he didn’t have the same ability to connect with people that Trump had. Right, right, right. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. You know, that’s a difficult question, right? Because it gets to the question of motivation. I would say I never got the sense that Donald Trump was honestly a reformer, that that was really his motivation was to, you know, change the system and that he was up at night reading policy proposals. That wasn’t my impression. I think Donald Trump, you know, over time, I got the idea, basically, and this was in part from talking to people who knew him, which was that he was insecure, but mostly just wanted to be liked. I didn’t find that, you know, the core of him was terribly scary. Maybe I was wrong in perceiving it that way. But I don’t think the evidence is clear that you were wrong. I mean, look, under Trump, we had no wars. You know, that wasn’t such a bad thing. And we did get the Abraham Accords and the economy did quite nicely. And I don’t think the culture wars were raging as intently under Trump, even though they raged away quite madly as they are now. So, you know, for all of Trump’s purported dangers, he was much less of a threat, certainly on the international stage than he might have been, and that everybody had been afraid he would be. And I do think also that he generated a certain degree of respect and apprehension from, you know, the more authoritarian types around the world. And I certainly don’t think that’s the case with Biden at all, because I think Biden, like Trudeau, I think is beneath contempt in relationship to people like the president of China. So, and I don’t think that was true for Trump, because at least he was unpredictable or had that appearance. So I don’t think you were out of line in your failure to see anything truly malevolent in Trump. Yeah, I mean, I don’t know. I mean, my impression of him was that he was doing this for a lot of reasons, that it was complicated. He has a mischievous streak in him. It was clear watching his family early in the campaign that they wanted no part of any idea that he might win. And I wasn’t exactly sure that he wanted to win. But, yeah, well, I thought it was an exercise in brand awareness expansion, at least, and quite a brilliant one in some ways, if you’re thinking purely from the perspective of sales. Right. And he was selling himself the entire time, and he was doing a great job at it. I mean, you know, with the tools that were available to him, he was a pioneer in many respects, bypassing the media and going straight to people using Twitter and that sort of thing. All that was very interesting, and I think that was something that if people had looked honestly at the situation, they would have found really compelling to study. Instead, you know, the establishment press just settled on a narrative about him about halfway through the campaign, and from there it was just attack, attack, attack, and it became, I would say, a sort of ongoing, uninteresting diatribe from that point forward. Yeah, well, it would have been a lot more compelling had there been real journalists covering the Trump phenomena, trying to figure out what the hell was going on, because at minimum it was insanely interesting and not predictable in the least and mysterious, and it would have been good to get to the bottom of it. Like I said, I think Victor Davis Hansen did a nice job in his book, The Case for Trump. I think it’s a very even-handed treatment without the kind of crazy gonzo journalism style that, you know, might have added something quite compelling to the overall analysis of Trump.