What The Hell America!

Sargent: So to bring this back to Bezos and Trump, I think what’s emerging here—the big story—is that there’s this small authoritarian core in the country, but there’s this large body of voters in the middle that includes independents. Maybe a fair amount of whom voted for Trump, who originally went into this—meaning voted for Trump—with the thought that, as you said, this is a guy who will break the furniture, he’ll knock heads together, he’ll make things work, but they’re not there when it comes to the actual authoritarianism. And when they start to see that, they get alienated.

What strikes me about all this is that you’ve got today’s thing where Trump bullied Amazon and Jeff Bezos and the White House threatened Amazon [and] they’re all out there boasting about this. Trump advisers are out; Stephen Miller went on TV and basically gloated about what had happened. Karoline Leavitt was clearly flaunting the fact that they were bullying Amazon, a private company, with White House power. Trump gloated about the fact that Bezos had essentially bent the knee to him. They don’t seem to care that the middle of the country is alienated by this stuff. What do you make of that?

Deckman: I think you have really a newly emboldened Donald Trump who has learned some lessons from his first term in office. He, of course, has surrounded himself by administrators who are willing to really not even just push the needle but to go all the way over into acts that, I think, frankly are quite unconstitutional. It’s not necessarily something though that we see in our survey today that most Americans endorse. To be fair, I think that most Americans voted for Donald Trump, and we did see him make gains with Hispanic voters, with some African American voters—[though] not as many as I think initially thought—with younger voters, Gen Z men in particular. I think what was really driving that was really frustration, not just with the political system but with the economy. You had for the first time in decades sustained inflation that was largely a product of Covid, and looking at supply chains and the vestiges of that. But nonetheless, this was really new for a large share of American voters.