JULIAN ZELIZER:
Welcome back, everyone, to Then & Now. I’m Julian Zelizer of The Long View.
JONATHAN ALTER:
And I’m Jonathan Alter of Old Goats, clearly on vacation but still happy to take part from a beautiful, undisclosed location.
JULIAN ZELIZER:
As I was reading the news this week and thinking about what we could discuss, I saw that Washington is going to host an IndyCar race through the streets of the city. President Trump has made it part of the America 250 celebration.
We know that Trump has connected himself to certain sports, including UFC fighting. This latest event seems to be part of his effort to appeal to mainstream America.
But it made me think back to Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign and presidency, when he was also connected to popular culture in different ways. There were famously the Allman Brothers and Willie Nelson—but there was also auto racing.
NASCAR was a big sport for Carter. I believe he invited NASCAR drivers to the White House, appeared at a couple of races during the campaign and made the sport part of his political identity.
How do you think about the comparison between Carter and car racing and Trump and the car race that’s about to take place?
JONATHAN ALTER:
Both are crowd-pleasers. Carter had been a fan of auto racing before he entered politics. He used to attend the Daytona 500 with friends. It wasn’t all that far from Plains, Georgia, where he lived.
To the extent that anything about Donald Trump is authentic—and, as awful as he is, some things are—I think his love of this kind of spectacle is real. It also happens to be good for attracting votes.
The problem is that, compared with everything else, it’s not going to get the job done. The racetrack is not a road back for Donald Trump, and it’s difficult to see what that road might be.
I recently saw an amazing statistic. In the 2014 midterms, during the sixth year of the Obama presidency, Democrats lost nine seats in the Senate and 13 seats in the House. They already lacked control of the House. The Republicans held a generic-party advantage of 5.7 percent and won the popular vote in the midterms by that margin. They picked up nine Senate seats.
Now there’s a new, reliable poll—and, as we know, many polls are not reliable right now—showing that Democrats have an eight-point advantage heading into this fall. Compare that with the Republicans’ 5.7-point advantage in 2014.
So the chances of a big blue wave are quite good. That doesn’t mean it will necessarily happen. But as things look now, Trump needs a lot more than car racing to get back into this race.
JULIAN ZELIZER:
And it feels as if that’s about as much as he’s willing to do for the GOP at this point.
JONATHAN ALTER:
Everything he does is about building something in Washington and putting his name on it. Now he wants to change the name of a ship that was supposed to honor an African American who lost his life at Pearl Harbor after heroically trying to save others.
The Navy was going to name an aircraft carrier after Doris “Dorie” Miller. Now the plan is apparently to abandon that name and, instead, name the ship after a living American president.
The question is whether a Democratic Congress can take office quickly enough to prevent that from happening—which it could do through an act of Congress.
When the new Congress convenes at the beginning of next year, we’ll see how much Democrats can do to stop some of these ideas. Of course, this is hardly the worst of what we’ve been up against. Stopping ICE and pursuing the rest of the Democratic agenda will depend heavily on the party’s margin of victory and whether it wins the Senate. Democrats can do much more if they control both chambers of Congress.
JULIAN ZELIZER:
Well, that’s Then & Now—a brief look at car racing, the midterms and more.
Jon, thanks for taking a break from your break. Enjoy the rest of your vacation.
JONATHAN ALTER:
Thanks, Julian. You too. Bye-bye.
JULIAN ZELIZER:
Bye-bye.
