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Welcome back.
We're joined now by Tom Hartman, who is the host of the Tom Hartman Program, which is a live nationwide daily that airs Monday through Friday on Sirius XM Radio.
Welcome to Washington Journal.
Oh, good morning, Kimberly.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you for getting up early for us in Portland, Oregon.
What was your take on the outcome of the election?
My concern is that we are essentially sliding into oligarchy.
Seven, eight years ago on my program, President Carter pointing to Citizens United, you know, when the Supreme Court basically said that bribery of politicians is now legal because money is the same thing as free speech and corporations are the same thing as people, that it would be possible for very, very wealthy people to basically buy elections and buy politicians.
And now we have a billionaire coming in as president.
We have the richest man in the world coming in, kind of like his number two.
And both of them have spent the last couple of years, apparently, regularly speaking with Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban.
I mean, you know, Victor Orban, the kind of semi-dictator of Hungary, even came over to speak at CPAC in Dallas a couple of years ago, two years ago, and laid out what he had done in Hungary.
You know, within a year of his second election, his reelection, he had basically destroyed all the independent media.
I mean, people post on Facebook against him and they go to jail.
And I'm very concerned that that's the direction we're heading now.
When you get people like Kash Patel, who, you know, Trump surrogates saying, we're coming for you in the media.
I'm very concerned that Jimmy Carter's essentially prophecy is coming true.
We're going to have a government of buy and for the very, very rich.
And yet Republicans and Donald Trump in particular showed a lot of gains in this election, including among people across demographic groups.
He gained with Latino voters and with white women.
How do you explain some of those gains?
You know, I used to work in advertising back 40 years ago.
I owned an advertising agency in Atlanta.
And if you beat people over the head with a message often enough with enough money and enough saturation, you can largely convince them of anything.
Kamala Harris never once mentioned trans people during the campaign and has never really been a champion of trans people.
I mean, she had that one interview many years ago where she talked about trans people getting surgery in jail.
That's certainly not her position now.
She walked that back years ago.
But the Trump campaign and mostly the very, very large super PACs that are funded, were funded to the tune of literally over $100 million each by multiple right-wing billionaires poured so much advertising into,
in particular, into the swing states, arguing that that was her entire agenda, basically, was, hey, let's elevate trans people that a lot of people bought it, which is perfectly understandable.
Advertising works.
It's the reason why most commercial television networks and newspapers still exist.
If it didn't work, they wouldn't be around.
So I think that the narrative was taken by this.
I understand that there's roughly about 150 billionaire families who threw most of the money that was behind Trump into this campaign.
And of course, they're looking for tax cuts.
And those who are in business in a big way, particularly in the polluting industries like the fossil fuel industry, they're looking for deregulation and more subsidies.
I mean, we subsidize the fossil fuel industry to the tune of billions of dollars a year.
They want more.
And it certainly looks, I mean, putting a fossil fuel lobbyist in charge of the Interior Department, for example, which Trump just announced, it certainly looks like they're going to get their investment is going to pay back.
My big concern is that this Department of Government Efficiency that Musk and Ramaswamy are supposed to run, there's talk that they want to carefully evaluate our entitlements programs, which of course is Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid.
I don't think that average Americans realize how bad it could get.
I don't know that it will, but there are probably some practical political limits to what they can do.
But I'm just very concerned.
So I want to pull up a chart looking at some of these areas where Trump gained voters, including, as we just talked about, 46% of Latino voters backed Trump, up from, it's up seven points in 2020.
Trump won Latino men 55% to 43%, won among white women, 53% to 45%.
But in particular, I want to look at these last two.
Non-college graduates, 56% of them voted for Trump, and 64% of rural Americans supported Trump.
Why do Democrats struggle with these groups in particular, non-college graduates and rural America?
I think, you know, again, to go back to the massive advertising that wasn't limited to television and radio, by the way.
There was also the social media presence and, of course, Elon Musk tweaking his algorithms to promote right-wing messages, suggesting that because the Democrats have traditionally been the party that defended the average working person, Joe Biden was the first president in the history of America to walk a picket line.
It was Democrats who brought us the five-day work week, the 40-hour work week, the weekend, unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, all those things.
But also, Democrats have, since the 60s, been the party that has defended racial minorities and since really the 80s defended gender minorities.
That a caricature of Democrats and the Democratic Party, which I mentioned a minute ago about going after Kamala Harris, has been created that this just absolutely massive right-wing ecosphere that has emerged since the 80s.
You've got three television networks funded by right-wing billionaires, one of them, a foreign billionaire, Fox News.
You've got 1,500 right-wing radio stations.
We now have 300 right-wing radio stations that broadcast in Spanish.
This is new.
This came up just in the last four years.
You've got seven or eight hundred Christian stations that have very, in many cases, kind of abandoned talking about Jesus and started talking about politics.
You've got churches where they're ignoring the IRS law and preaching politics from the pulpit.
It's this massive cumulative effort, and there's nothing like that on the left.
Excuse me, we've never developed a strong, you know, we had Air America for about five years, and I was on Air America.
And in 2008, there was kind of a broad consensus, actually, that Air America helped Barack Obama get elected.
Well, while you, I don't know if you want to grab a drink of water or something, but I do want to read something here.
Well, actually, I'll go back to something you mentioned earlier.
You mentioned that since the 1960s, the Democrats have been the party that supports racial minorities, according to your assessment.
But also, I want to look at this chart here about the distribution of white voters in particular.
The Democrats have not won the vote amongst white Americans since 1964.
Overwhelmingly, over the years, white voters have voted Republicans.
And Democrats have lost support among white voters even since Barack Obama in 2008.
And what do you think that means for the future of the party and the party's dynamics?
Well, I think what that reflects is the deep racism that is still extant among white people in America.
You know, certainly the Trump presidency and even his successful campaign in 2016, frankly, shocked me.
I'm a white guy.
I grew up with white people.
And I knew that white racism is out there.
And I heard the jokes and slurs as a kid and all that kind of thing.
But I never realized how broad and how deep it is.
1964 was the year that Lyndon Johnson put forward the Civil Rights Act and it actually passed Congress.
It was the end of apartheid in the United States.
I'm old enough that I remember as a little kid, seven, eight years old, my parents taking me to the Jack Tar.
I grew up in Lansing, Michigan.
The Jack Tar was the fanciest hotel in town and had a really nice restaurant.
And for their anniversary, when I was seven or eight years old, they took us to my brothers and I to dinner there.
And I remember the sign on the side of the building that pointed to the colored entrance.
This was in the 1950s.
That all ended in 1964.
And that was when, and over the next five years, you saw all these Southern Democrats, Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, all these guys, flip and become Republicans because the Republican Party was not arguably, you know, in a big way taking a position on this.
Barry Goldwater, who ran for president in 64, actually opposed the Civil Rights Act.
His argument was that this is the job of the states, not the federal government, you know, the old states' rights argument.
When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, the first speech he gave as an official candidate of the party was in Philadelphia, Mississippi, which is the site of the murder of three civil rights workers, Schwermer, Cheney, and Goodman.
And his entire speech to an all-white audience was about states' rights, which was code back then for we never should have passed that damn civil rights act and we should go back to apartheid in the United States.
And it's been pretty much that way ever since.
And Trump has tripled down on it.
So I don't have an explanation beyond, you know, for this very, very clear racial divide that has existed since 1964, beyond just the shocking reality that at least half of white America, and arguably a little more than that, is just deeply racist.
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