Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. Welcome to the spike podcast. I'm Tom Slater, deputy editor at Spiked, and today I talk to Thomas Frank about Trump, Hillary,

and how the Democrats lost the heart of America. There was a mock celebration on Twitter last week when Donald Trump's account was temporarily suspended,

apparently the work of a despondent Twitter staffer, but one year on from his inauguration,

Trump and the popular discontent his election represented aren't going anywhere.

Even as Trump seems to prove himself incapable of achieving anything other than outrage,

the Republican and Democratic establishments remain in disarray,

even electoral wins for the Democrats this week,

obscure the fact that their support among the working classes

continues to ebb.

So why did Trump win?

What's happened to the Democrats? And is anyone truly capable of cultivating

the populist anti-establishment sentiment the election unleashed? To explore these questions,

I spoke to Thomas Frank, journalist journalist historian and the author of

Listen Liberal and what's the matter with Kansas. So Thomas if we could just cast

our minds back to November 8th last year Hillary Clinton's going into this

election it's supposed to be

unloseable. She's up against this Bulgarian, this political novice. All of the polls

say it's locked in. Why does she lose? You can think about it in either in terms of the immediate reasons, you know, the screw-ups that she and the Democrats made, or you can think about it in terms of the larger sort of direction of American politics that it's been going in for 30 or 40 years.

And I think the latter is a more important thing,

you know, the direction everything is going in.

But before we do that, go back to Trump.

Hillary out-raised and out-spent Donald Trump 2-1.

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