It's Democratic National Convention time and thus time for another fun and informative lunch with Tom Frank, who surely is America's most lucid chronicler of the political process today—and someone with a heavy-hitting collection of t-shirts. Last week his luncheon attire promoted Olathe, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City where Tom grew up and where, so I gather, he got his first taste of the importance of working-class America and… the Populists. In his widely praised 2020 book, The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, he described populists as those who look to ordinary people, and not those who admire highly educated people, to make the right decisions on our behalf.
How has relying on the elites turned out, Tom asks?
Our lunch took place in a restaurant in Bethesda, Maryland, that promotes healthy food. I ordered a modest salad and he? A Korean BBQ pork sandwich.
He has a wonderful laugh. We got into it right away.
SEYMOUR HERSH: You went to the recent Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. How did it go?
THOMAS
FRANK: The convention was very well organized this time. I also went to
the last one they did in 2016. They didn't have one in 2020. In 2016 it
was a shambles. The party was not completely on board with Trump, its
presidential candidate. There was a lot of dissent and a lot of
technical things went wrong. The convention was just a mess. I was there
at one point when they booed Ted Cruz so much and so loudly it wrecked
his speech.
Cruz was giving this long, very typical
Republican speech about law and order or whatever, and he refused to
endorse Trump in the course of the speech. You remember, the two hated
each other at the time. Anyhow, the audience started screaming at him
and yelling at him. It was a kind of disruption you never see at
conventions anymore. Well, this year he opened his speech by saying...
I'm not going to get the quote right but you could look it up. He opened
his speech by saying, "God bless Donald J. Trump" and thanking God for
protecting Trump.” He's such a bootlicker.
SH: Is it cowardice? What is it?
TF:
Well, he's an opportunist, in my opinion. Both parties are filled with
these opportunists, of course, so he's a very familiar character. He's
certainly not a man of principle or anything. But Trump sat there… at
conventions, the presidential candidate generally does not show his face
until the very end when he comes out and accepts the nomination and
gives a speech. Trump was there every day. They had a special chair for
him where he would sit and watch the speeches. The whole performance was
for him, and he was the audience. When they would flatter him from the
dais or whatever you call it, the platform, when the speaker would
flatter him… there are these jumbotrons all over the auditorium.
Whenever they would flatter him, the camera would go to Trump. The image
would go to Trump, and you would see him and he would mouth the words,
"Thank you." You know? You would be watching the speaker flatter Trump,
and also watching Trump accept the praise.
None of
the previous Republican candidates or presidents were there this time.
There was no representative of the Bush family, at least not that I saw.
No Mitt Romney. No members of the McCain family. No Cheneys. Well, Bob
Dole has died.
SH: Was there something noticeably different about this Republican convention from the others?
TF: I got the feeling that there was not a big media presence this time. I mean, there were a lot of reporters, of course, but not anything like the numbers in the past. In the old days, the reporters would outnumber the delegates. I doubt if that was the case this time. I’ll give you an example of what I mean. My credentials are pretty low in the pecking order. And yet I was able to get credentials to go on the floor on the last day and watch Trump's speech. I was about 20 yards away from Trump while he spoke. I was just standing right there. That never happens.
Another thing missing was the street carnival. Other conventions, both Republican and Democratic, have these areas of the host city that are open to the public where all kinds of vendors set up shop, and there are restaurants and all kinds of crazy protests and demonstrations that go on all day long. There was very little of that in Milwaukee this time around.
But the important thing about that convention was that everyone assumed Trump was going to win. It was the week after somebody shot at Trump and hit him in the ear. You remember, he had this incredible moment where his face is covered with blood, and he's waving his fist in the air. His name is defiance. That image was everywhere at the convention. It was on T-shirts. It was on the Jumbotron all the time. And you’ve got Biden still as the Democratic candidate, after giving this extremely weak performance in the debate.
So the Republican National Convention was absolutely and utterly convinced that Trump was going to win. That was the essential condition about it. Everybody was convinced he had this thing in the bag. Then the Democrats pulled the switcheroo on him. You can say what you want about Kamala Harris, but that was kind of a brilliant political move. They did it right at the end of the convention, so instead of getting a bounce out of the convention, all of a sudden nobody's talking about Trump at all. Nobody's talking about someone taking a shot at him. They're all talking about her.
SH: Given what you've written and your attitude, and your skepticism, what does it tell us that Trump is so in our lives? Why is he still here? Are we so lacking in people?
TF: It is fascinating to me the way discontented people of every stripe seem to project their discontent onto Trump. He's not necessarily sympathetic to their feelings or their views. Well, some of them he is, of course. But whether he shares their discontent, there's this whole cult around him, that it's Trump or it's nothing. I mean, we've talked about this before, but if you had told me that when I was young that the Republican Party would fall into the grip of this guy, I would never have believed it.
SH: He's not Ronald Reagan.
TF: No, although he steals phrases from Reagan all the time. But no, Reagan was competent, whatever else you say about Reagan, and I really disliked Reagan. I was a punk rocker in those days, and I really disliked Ronald Reagan, but he was competent. He had been governor of California. He knew how to get things done. He appointed competent people, and he changed this country.
By the way, remind me to talk about that, because I wrestle with the subject, which one is more consequential? Was it Reagan or was it Clinton? When I was younger, I would have said, "Well, of course it's Reagan.” He was the mastermind of the great turn to the right, the living spirit of the 1980s. But I’m not so sure anymore. I think that Clinton’s role in the big right turn was maybe even more important than Reagan’s.
SH: You did say that Clinton was very interesting to you, because he was sort of a new generation.
TF:
You were asking why Trump keeps going. Because there is massive... I
mean, it's too big. There's massive dissatisfaction with American life
in all sorts of different ways. I’m talking about the way people
experience their everyday lives and are unhappy about all sorts of
things great and small. Their towns or regions are in a state of
permanent hard times. There’s inflation. There are lots of homeless
people. Lots of immigration. People feel disrespected, they get insulted
on social media, they hate the news, they feel like the TV insults them
all the time.
We could talk about this all day, but
the thing is that there's many different streams of dissatisfaction,
sometimes deep dissatisfaction that doesn't go away, even when the
economy improves, even when the economy is doing well. And all of this
stuff gets projected onto Trump, the permanent outsider, the champion of
the disgruntled.
SH: In good times and bad times, still there's dissatisfaction?
TF: Only once in my lifetime has there been a sense of general satisfaction in America. It was in the nineties. We can read in history books about the Great Society and the Affluent Society and the days of the universal middle class. But for us, there’s only been one brief moment where we actually experienced that stuff. Remember the internet bull market of the nineties? The New Economy, they called it. There was this idea that everybody was participating in the prosperity, which of course turned out to be false, turned out to be a bubble. That's the only time in my life that I can remember when there was that feeling of universal prosperity. I tried to write about it, years ago, that sense of universal contentment which then turned out to be hollow or false.
If you look at the economic facts on paper, Biden's done pretty well. The recovery since the pandemic has been pretty good, and yet people are deeply unhappy about the whole thing. That’s largely thanks to inflation, but there's also a kind of permanent anxiety out there that never goes away.
SH: About the political process or the future?
TF: I think both. When you're in a place like this which is booming—we're in Bethesda, Maryland, we're sitting at a restaurant on Wisconsin Avenue. If you walk down this street after lunch, it looks like Midtown Manhattan. They're putting up tall buildings. It's crowded. It's busy. But if you go out to western Maryland, or if you go out to West Virginia, or if you keep going and you go to a small town in the former steelmaking regions of Ohio, there are people watching their way of life crumble and disappear. There's no politician that has any intention of doing anything about it, or has a plan for doing anything about it. I mean, Biden probably comes closest, of anyone in our era, with the CHIPS and Inflation Reduction Acts. But those are ultimately small potatoes. And for whatever reason, the underlying anxiety gets projected onto Trump, onto this cranky New York billionaire.
SH: What do you mean by ‘that anxiety gets projected onto Trump’? Why isn't it projected onto the Democrats?
TF: Well, it should be, right? They're the traditional bearers of the popular spirit. They’re the traditional voice of the hard-done-by. But by and large they’ve left those traditions behind them. I want to leave Biden out here because I think Biden did some genuinely good things on the domestic front.
SH: The clever timing aside, what did you think of the decision to replace Biden at the top of the ticket with Kamala Harris?
TF: I will almost certainly wind up voting for Kamala Harris this fall, but even so, I have to say I really don't like the way that they made her the candidate without any input from the public. It's just a handful of guys who chose her.
SH: I think she was the only one who was able to step in.
TF: Of course, that's right. They had no choice. It was too late to do anything else. But Biden should have dropped out a long time ago, and there should have been a primary. A real primary. Harris is now the candidate but we don't really know what she stands for. She seems like a nice person. She laughs. She has a sunny disposition.
SH: I suspect that she's not going to be able to get away without talking about Gaza and Ukraine.
TF: Well, so far she has.
SH: I know, but that's going to end.
TF: She's in a honeymoon period now where people are so relieved, after that disastrous debate, to have Biden replaced by somebody who can speak in complete sentences and who can stand on their own and argue with Trump.
SH: She has a certain amount of charm. There's no question about that. But eventually, somebody's going to have to start talking about the massacre, this international trauma, this horror show that's going on.
TF: Or is it possible that we'll elect her president without her ever taking a stand on anything? I mean, it could happen. Purely as a rejection of Trump. The Democratic Party will have to have a platform, of course, but platforms, they don't mean anything anymore, as you know. I understand why she's the candidate, and she might even turn out ot be a great candidate, but I still don't like the process. I would have liked to have had a choice, find out where the different candidates stand, you know, democracy.
SH: There is no process.
TF: Exactly. Some democracy. Again, a country of 300 million people, Sy Hersh, a country of 300 million people and the presidential candidate for one of our two major parties was chosen by maybe eight guys.
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