John Ganz

The appeal of these politicians only makes sense if you consider the trajectory of the society and the fact that you have large members of the middle and lower middle classes feeling increasingly squeezed and dispossessed and feeling unrepresented by their politicians who they feel are...

intrinsically corrupt.

And I don't think that Trump comes along without the 2008 crash and the feeling that there's something rigged about the system, as he likes to put it.

So I don't think you can really disentangle them.

Yeah, I think that's pretty accurate.

I do think that the new right that coalesced around Reagan, and Reagan was not the first choice for a lot of those guys.

They wanted somebody crazier like John Connolly.

Reagan was kind of too moderate for some people in that version of the new right.

And then they kind of grew to love him and realized he was sort of one of them.

But

The people I write about exited the Reagan years feeling betrayed and let down that he wasn't more radical rightist.

For people on the left like me, you know, that sounds wild because we think, oh, Reagan was an absolute catastrophe and could not have been more right wing.

And as Buchanan said, the biggest vacuum in American politics is to the right of Ronald Reagan.

And there was a constituency for the type of politics they practiced.

It became apparent.

Wallace campaign showed it was there.

It overlaps with, let's say, the Republican primary voter.

But it's not entirely partisan because it's an – I think this is what you have to understand about Trump is and what I was trying to get out of my book.

He also encapsulates the spirit of –

of a third party candidate, right, of a candidate like Ross Perot, who comes out and says, you know, the parties are crooked.