The Politics of White Men, From Obama to Trump

The Politics of White Men, From Obama to Trump

Melissa Harris-Perry and Dorian Warren weigh in, plus Sherrod Brown on voting and Eric Foner on disputed elections.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener
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Melissa Harris-Perry and Dorian Warren talk about the changing voter turnout among white men and people of color over the last three presidential elections—and other features of our political system. They are hosting a new podcast for The Nation, “System Check”—checking the systems that hold us back: premiering Friday at TheNation.com, Apple podcasts, and elsewhere.

Also: talking politics, and history, with Sherrod Brown. Of course he’s the senior senator from Ohio, first elected in 2006. He was re-elected in 2018—he won by seven points in a state Hillary Clinton had lost by eight points just two years earlier. He talks about how he did that, and how Biden has learned the lessons of that campaign.

Plus: disputed elections past and present: Maybe the election next week will have a big enough vote for Biden so that it can’t be challenged in court; maybe the Republicans won’t dispute the outcome. But maybe they will. We’ve had other disputed elections in our history—of course, we had the Supreme Court stopping the count in Florida in 2000; and there was another one, much less well known: the election of 1876. Historian Eric Foner explains.

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Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets. 

Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.  

As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war. 

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Start Making Sense Start Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon Wiener Jon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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