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Part One:
We speak with Bill Curry, two-time Democratic nominee for Governor of Connecticut and a White House advisor in Bill Clinton’s administration, about the negative effect Pres. Trump is having on the national psyche. Commentators have discussed Trump’s own mental illness, but his words and actions are also making us all a little bit “crazy.” When he lauds racists and white nationalists, all of our collective blood pressure rises. When he denies true facts (yes, those based on actual evidence) and when he invents his own versions of the truth, he makes all of us — at least a little bit — look inward and question our own perceptions. We doubt what we see with our own eyes; we question the research that we hear or read from scientists and other experts.
When Trump creates chaos, when he tells us different stories every few hours, when he shouts at us that anyone who disagrees with him is a traitor or an idiot (or both), he increases our anxiety and neuroses while lowering our self-esteem. And when the president “normalizes” venom and violence, when he denies known facts or demonizes other human beings, he legitimizes the ideations that many of us might have to revert to our primal instincts to destroy our competitors rather than utilizing the powers of reason and compassion that we have developed through millions of years of evolution.
Curry advises us to reclaim our own lives and to reclaim the national debate. When we hear Trump speak, we should ask if he’s offering “fake news” and what the real truth is. We should also consider whether there is a more important topic that we should all be talking about, rather than letting Trump draw our attention to just another distraction. For example, we should be worrying more about fires in the Amazon than about whether the U.S. should buy Greenland.
Part Two:
We meet in-studio with “Dr. Politics,” Steffen Schmidt, professor of political science at Iowa State University. We discuss the 1619 Project and its lesson that slavery had a formative effect on the development of the U.S. economy and its government. We ask what similarities (and what differences) exist between chattel slavery of Africans and the exploitation of other people working in dangerous conditions for low pay and no respect. We wonder whether we are on the verge of resolving America’s “peculiar institution,” or whether it’s still almost as terrible as ever.
We segue to a discussion of politics and defeating Pres. Trump. We note that who gets elected and what candidate-qualities voters respond to is a very different process than the substance of any particular issues. Donald Trump has considerable skills in manipulating people’s fears and perceptions. Do any Democrats have the ability to overcome him despite those skills?
