Following Thursday night’s final presidential debate, MSNBC contributor and presidential historian Jon Meacham weighed in on President Donald Trump’s performance.
According to Meacham, Trump “did himself good with his base” by appealing to the “nervous white guy’s lizard brain.”
MSNBC’s Brian Wallace asked Meacham, “Is there any example from history in the sway a president has over members of his party, duly elected grownups who can bathe and clothes themselves and get a paycheck and a healthcare plan who have in all other ways signed over their names and reputations and in some cases the public offices they were elected to?”
“Yeah, I don’t know if this is going to happen, but all of those relationships, almost all of them, are transactional. In the age of Trump, they are mega-transactional,” Meacham replied.
He later added, “It may have been watching it in person as opposed to the way it was experienced for the country. There is a lizard brain in this country. Donald Trump is a product of the white man’s, the anguished, nervous white guy’s lizard brain. And there could be a twitch there that ‘You know what, we sent this disruptive figure, Biden, maybe that 47-year thing helps a little bit.’ I don’t think there are enough of those folks, but I think just as an observer of this — I think Trump did himself good with his base tonight. The question for America is how big that base is.”
(h/t Newsbusters)
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