A Seismic Political Change
Letters from an American
The episode examines Donald Trump's October 2, 2026 campaign rally in Mobile, Alabama, contrasting its subdued atmosphere with the massive 2015 gathering that launched his presidential bid. It details how
Key takeaways
- Trump's October 2026 Mobile rally drew significantly smaller crowds than his record-breaking August 2015 event, signaling waning MAGA enthusiasm.
- Only 31% of Americans approve of Trump's presidential handling, with rising diesel prices and a sluggish jobs report (+29k added, July revised to -10k) driving Republican independents away.
Main topics
- Trump campaign rallies and MAGA voter turnout
- U.S. economic indicators and inflation impacts
Notable quotes
"Can everybody just close your eyes and pretend I'm on the ballot?"
Conclusion
The episode concludes that Trump's original economic grievances have been
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:06) october 2nd 2026. trump held a campaign rally tonight in mobile alabama the city where as sean mccreish of the new york times recalled his manga rallies really took off in august 2015 when more than 30 000 people showed up at a football stadium to hear the television personality turn presidential candidate Just two months before, on June 16, 2015, Trump had announced his campaign for the presidency. In his speech at Trump Tower, he tapped into the anger of those people who had been left behind economically since the 1970s, when U.S. companies began to ship manufacturing jobs overseas and automate factories, taking manufacturing jobs with them. The economy had grown in the 1980s, but most of the jobs had been in the service industries. Those were dominated at the top by men and increasing numbers of women with business or law degrees, and at the bottom by jobs coded toward women and immigrants. At the same time, cuts to education and to the social safety net pushed upward mobility out of reach for families in towns and cities whose disappearing manufacturing base took everything else with it. By 1994, Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton, warned that the U.S. was on the way to becoming a two-tiered society composed of a few winners and a larger group of Americans left behind, whose anger and whose disillusionment is easily manipulated. He explained, once unbottled, mass resentments can poison the very fabric of society, the moral integrity of a society. replacing ambition with envy, replacing tolerance with hate. Today, the targets of that rage are immigrants and welfare mothers and government officials and gays and an ill-defined counterculture. But as the middle class continues to erode, who will be the targets tomorrow? Speaker 1 (2:11) In 2015, in rhetoric mimicking the classic blueprint of rising dictators, Trump tapped into the anger of people who felt they had been dispossessed from their rightful place of importance in the country and tapped into the country's racism and sexism as he told them to blame immigrants and Democratic politicians for their plight. And he promised he was the only person who could restore them to their former significance. He devoted most of his speech to how other countries, China, Japan, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, were killing us economically. Speaker 1 (2:48) American workers had no protection from immigrants, he said, and they were being undercut by their inferiors. When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best, he said. They're not sending you. They're