Monday marks 10 years to the day since then-reality TV personality Donald Trump descended a golden-colored escalator at Trump Tower in New York City and officially announced he would run in the 2016 presidential election.
The occasion was marked on MSNBC’s “The Weekend” show when The New York Times’ Peter Baker and The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser examined how Trump has completely transformed American politics — but as a person has actually remained exactly the same.
Trump’s divisive rhetoric — including about Mexicans — during his speech announcing his candidacy “is reflective of the same themes, the same arguments, the same language that he uses today,” said Baker.
It was “shocking” at the time and felt like “a huge scandal,” he noted, with “lots of discussion and commentary about how out of the norm it was, how a lot of people thought it was very racist, very demagogic.”
But today Trump used that kind of language “all the time” and “people don’t really bat an eye anymore because it’s become part of our national political conversation, rightly or wrongly,” Baker added.
Glasser agreed, noting how “inured we’ve become to the casual lying as he breathes.”
The “divisiveness, the hatefulness, the demagoguery” were all evident during Trump’s very first speech, she said, and “those have now just become accepted facts of our politics, actively cheered on by a huge swath of America.”
Watch the full analysis here:
