Graham Platner On Why America Went From Obama To Trump
The populist Democratic senate candidate discusses how Democrats "did not stop the neoliberal project" - and how they must change in order to prevent the same kind of cycle from repeating.
How did America go from Obama to Trump - and how can Democrats avoid repeating that kind of cycle again?
In an exclusive interview with The Lever’s weekly podcast LEVER TIME, Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner says Trump’s rise wasn’t some great mystery: Democrats bailed out banks, abandoned working people, and let corporate power keep running the party — which ultimately created conditions for a backlash.
“We did not stop the neoliberal project, that’s why,” Platner told me. “When Obama comes in and so many people are looking for this significant change, and then materially, we kind of just continue with the same neoliberal policies (of) trickle down economics (and) bailing out the banks and not bailing out the homeowners…That engenders an intense amount of anger and frustration and I think total disillusionment with the system itself.”
I’m working on a longer piece about Platner, but in the meantime, go and listen to the full episode of LEVER TIME on The Lever’s Youtube channel, search “Lever Time” in your podcast app, or go to LeverTimePodcast.com.
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From a Dutch perspective, the choice for Trump was a binary choice. 27 parties participated in our last elections in October 2025.
It is fascinating that we are grappling with the same issues here. The leader of the largest social democratic party embraced liberalism (now dubbed 'neo') in 1995 as 'the liberating effect of shedding ideological feathers,' after which practically everything was privatized and marketized. The Netherlands practically invented the welfare state and impoverished it at a time when the economy has nominally doubled.
It is striking that since 2000, the Netherlands has received a protest party out of nowhere almost every four years that attracts enough votes to form the government.
Reversing policy has been a major theme in every election but has proven practically impossible because it is precisely the political control that has been relinquished.