Monday on MS NOW’s “The Weeknight,” Princeton University professor and network contributor Eddie Glaude, Jr. said President Donald Trump’s MAGA base was willing to “participate in the ugliness” of a white nationalist agenda as long as the economy is strong.
Glaude said, “We’ve been talking about for a long time since he’s elected, and even in the first term, this is the MAGA coalition, and it consists, of course, the corporatist wing and its populist wing. And remember, we were talking about the tension between Elon Musk and Steve Bannon and representative figures of these two components.”
He added, “What is it? Is it the kind of anti-woke stuff, the cultural war stuff or is the economy good? He can be brash and insensitive and crude and racist as long as the economy is cooking. But once this stuff shifts, what happens, right? And so what we see is that people are willing to, in so many ways, participate in the ugliness of what we might call a white nationalist agenda, as long as their pockets are okay. But the moment they begin to feel the pinch of the economy, the impact on tariffs, and we see that he’s actually doubling down on the corporatist wing, that they are making money, that he is making money, that his family is making money over hand and fist while they themselves are struggling. And so then you begin to see the cracks and the cracks in the base, then free up those who disagree with the policy. So I think it’s part of this tension that we’ve been exploring, since he was reelected, and that is between the populist wing and the corporatist wing, it seems to me.”
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