Denialism Will Not Prevent Another Trump
Pretending the president's rise had nothing to do with both parties complicity in the financial crisis - and with Democrats' weak response to the emergency - threatens to repeat a bad cycle.
My interview this week with Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner has gone viral — and rekindled a long simmering debate about why America went from Barack Obama to Donald Trump. That discourse is a reminder of how many Democratic politicians and their liberal fans have convinced themselves that Republicans and Democrats (including Obama himself) joining together to bail out bankers who were throwing 10 million families out of their homes had absolutely nothing to do with Trump’s rise.
They have created a fiction inside their mind pretending that for the first time in American history, a population was economically pulverized as oligarchs were given bailouts (that were never paid back) — but in their telling, all of that somehow never affected our country’s politics.
Are they right? It is important question — so important that decided to spend two years reporting on it for an audio series called Meltdown. It is important because this isn’t some academic argument about history. It is actually about the future, and about whether we are about to repeat the same cycle that originally led to Trump.