Trump’s contradictory economic agenda
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 11 December 2024
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Before this year’s election, Heather Cox Richardson, a historian at Boston College, joined “Make Me Smart” live in Boston to unpack the high stakes for our economy and democracy. Now that the election is over and the transition to a second Donald Trump administration is underway, we’re following up.
On the show today, Richardson weighs in on the election aftermath. She explains how the current media environment in the United States played into the election, how economic narratives have influenced American politics throughout history, and what the past can tell us about how President-elect Trump might brand his economic agenda while in office.
Then, we’ll get into the bipartisan effort to add federal judges that’s suddenly falling apart. And, author Evan Schwartz was wrong about the inspiration behind L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”
Here’s everything we talked about today:
- “December 9, 2024” from “Letters from an American”
- “What Donald Trump’s Win Means for the Economy” from Time
- Opinion: “Voters prefer Harris’s agenda to Trump’s — they just don’t realize it. Take our quiz.” from The Washington Post
- “On Issue After Issue, Trump Promises the Moon. No Word on the Rocket.” from The New York Times
- “Biden special envoy for hostages is in Beirut in search of Austin Tice” from The Washington Post
- “House sets up vote on bill to add dozens of new federal judgeships” from Roll Call
- “Ernst, Under MAGA Pressure, Signals Backing for Hegseth’s Pentagon Bid” from The New York Times
Power the show with a donation today and don’t forget to pick up one of our thank you gifts at a discount. Head to marketplace.org/givesmart.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, or none of us is as smart as all of us. |
| 0:12.5 | I'm Kyle Rizdahl, Tuesday, 10 December today. So Kimberly and I were in Boston, end of October-ish, I think, to do a live show at WBR. It was great right before the election. |
| 0:21.8 | And we had a kind of an amazing conversation with historian Heather Cox Richardson about |
| 0:26.3 | the stakes, honestly, for the whole damn country is what we talked about. |
| 0:32.6 | And the economy too. And the world and life in existential crises, et cetera, et cetera. And several of you |
| 0:41.7 | since the election have reached out to us and said you'd love to hear Heather's take on the aftermath. |
| 0:46.7 | And so that's what we're going to do. We're going to follow up for our final deep dive of the year. |
| 0:52.0 | We called her back for a follow-up conversation. Heather Cox Richardson is back to make us |
| 0:57.2 | smart about what we can now expect from a second Trump term. As many of you know, she's a historian at |
| 1:03.7 | Boston College, author of the popular newsletter, letters from an American, an author of many books, |
| 1:09.1 | including the one on my nightstand right now, Democracy |
| 1:11.8 | Awakening Notes on the State of America. |
| 1:14.5 | Welcome back to the show. |
| 1:16.4 | Oh, it's such a pleasure to be here with you. |
| 1:19.0 | So like we just said, the last time we spoke was that our live show in Boston at WBUR, |
| 1:23.9 | right before the election, things turned out the way they did. How have you been doing since then? |
| 1:31.3 | Well, first of all, I have been exhausted because I was on the road for 13 months before the election. |
| 1:36.5 | So it's a little hard to use me as any kind of a yardstick for anyone else. But one of the things that I think is different perhaps for me than many people in this |
| 1:46.1 | moment is that as a historian, I'm really interested in why things turned out the way they did, |
| 1:52.1 | what that says about the country, and what it says about what we need to do going forward to |
| 1:56.9 | protect our democracy. So what I've been doing actually is a lot, a lot of reading on the |
| 2:03.1 | philosophy of democracy, the guardrails of democracy, the elements of democracy, and how you |
... |
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