Is former President Donald Trump’s hold on his Republican base waning? Vice’s senior political reporter Cameron Joseph thinks so.
“Trump is slipping. [He] doesn’t have the grip over the GOP that he once did,” Joseph tells Molly Jong-Fast in this episode of The New Abnormal. “A lot of Republicans, even really hardcore conservative MAGA-y type folks, are sick of his bitching.”
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Joseph says that, in his opinion, the base is realizing that Trump is not the only politician who can execute “the thing that powered Trump to power” in the first place: standing up to status quo politics and fighting for “white, straight, more rural America.”
“Even if they think that he did kind of get screwed in 2020, they’re worried about inflation, they’re worried about Critical Race Theory. If they’re hardcore folks, there’s this stuff about trans students playing sports,” adds Joseph. “I think it’s weirdly a way that the Republican Party is actually moving on and moving past Trump, by focusing on these latest freakouts.”
Later in this episode, historian Jon Meacham, host of the new Reflections of History podcast, gives Molly a preview of some of the juicy tidbits from history he covers on his show, including how NATO was an unpopular organization when it began and how The New York Times magazine passed on publishing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter from a Birmingham jail.
Meacham also happens to be an unofficial adviser of President Biden, and Molly does not let the interview end without pressing him on that.
“It’s kicked around in some parts of the right-wing internet that Biden came into office fancying himself another FDR. What they take from that is that he was gonna be this huge Big Government guy. And he had these delusions of grandeur. I swear to you, before God and my country, that is not what President Biden thought,” Meacham says.
So what did he think, Molly asks?
Find out in the latest episode.
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