A Seismic Political Change

October 2, 2026. Trump held a campaign rally tonight in Mobile, Alabama, the city where, as Sean McCreesh of the New York Times recalled, his MAGA rallies really took off in August 2015, when more than 30,000 people showed up at a football stadium to hear the television personality turn presidential candidate. Just two months before, on June 16, 2015, Trump had announced his campaign for the presidency. In his speech at Trump Tower, he tapped into the anger of those people who had been left behind economically since the 1970s, when U.S. companies began to ship manufacturing jobs overseas and automate factories, taking manufacturing jobs with them. The economy had grown in the 1980s, but most of the jobs had been left behind. The economy had grown in the 1980s, but most of the jobs had been left in the service industries. Those were dominated at the top by men and increasing numbers of women with business or law degrees, and at the bottom by jobs coded toward women and immigrants. At the same time, cuts to education and to the social safety net pushed upward mobility out of reach for families in towns and cities whose disappearing manufacturing base took everything else with it. By 1994, Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton, warned that the U.S. was on the way to becoming a two-tiered society composed of a few winners and a larger group of Americans left behind, whose anger and whose disillusionment is easily manipulated. He explained, once unbottled, mass resentments can poison the very fabric of society, the moral integrity of a society, replacing ambition with envy, replacing tolerance with hate. Today, the targets of that rage are immigrants and welfare mothers and government officials and gays and an ill-defined counterculture. But as the middle class continues to erode, who will be the targets tomorrow? In 2015, in rhetoric mimicking the classic blueprint of rising dictators, Trump tapped into the anger of people who felt they had been dispossessed from their rightful place of importance in the country and tapped into the country's racism and their rightful place of importance in the country. He said, and sexism, as he told them to blame immigrants and democratic politicians for their plight. And he promised he was the only person who could restore them to their former significance. He devoted most of his speech to how other countries, China, Japan, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, were killing us economically. American workers had no protection from immigrants, he said, and they were being undercut by their inferiors. When Mexico sent, it's people. They're not sending their best, he said. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. Contrasting American workers with those immigrants, he claimed people from all over South and Latin America and probably from the Middle East were taking American jobs. Although the actual unemployment rate is low, it's not a problem. It's not a problem. It's not a problem. The actual unemployment rate was 5.6%. He claimed it was anywhere from 18 to 20%, although then he upped it to 21%, and the worst since 1978. A lot of people can't get jobs, he said. They can't get jobs because there are no jobs, because China has our jobs, and Mexico has our jobs. They all have jobs. He sneered at the federal government, claiming stupid politicians had no idea how to negotiate and were wasting so much money that the national debt was close to $24 trillion, a number he called the point of no return. That's when we become a country that's unsalvageable. He claimed the Affordable Care Act, dubbed Obamacare, must be replaced with something much better for everybody. Let it be for everybody, but much better and much less expensive for people and for the government, and we can do it. He promised to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, to rebuild the country's infrastructure, and to get rid of the horrible and laughable deal with Iran, finding a better way to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. He promised to bring back jobs, bring back the military, take care of veterans, and be a cheerleader for the country. He boasted he was worth more than $8 billion, promising that he could make the country as successful as he was. He promised to make America great again. And in August 2015, more than 30,000 Alabamians turned out to see him at the start of what would be a rise to the presidency of the United States. As journalist McCrees reported, Trump's return to Mobile tonight had a wistful feel. The stadium where he spoke was nowhere near the size of the football stadium of 2015, and even so it was not full. McCrees noted that some of the upper sections were almost entirely empty. Trump is planning to travel to 17 states before the midterms to rally MAGA voters who might otherwise not turn out. Can everybody just close your eyes and pretend I'm on the ballot? Trump asked the audience in Mobile. That is no longer a selling point, even for many of those who embrace the administration's racism and sexism. An APNORC poll from September 24th showed that only 31% of Americans give Trump good marks for how he is handling the pandemic. In September, it was reported that the U.S. federal government's U.S. tax return to the U.S. has increased by more than 40% compared to the U.S. G. Elliot Morris of Strength in Numbers noted today that in September, rising prices turned a majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents against Trump's handling of the economy. The rising price of diesel has hit rural America particularly hard, and it was in rural America where Trump found his strongest support. Today's jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the U.S. and U.S. has increased by more than 20% compared to last year. The Bureau added just 29,000 jobs last month. Unemployment has risen to 4.2%, and wage growth has slowed. The Bureau revised the job numbers for August and July downward, showing that July actually saw a loss of 10,000 jobs. Trump is aware enough of his falling popularity that according to Maggie Haberman, Hamid Ali Aziz, Shane Goldmacher, and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times, he personally, ordered Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vogt to come up with $20 million to run the new television ads praising him. The journalists report that Vogt took the money from funding Congress had appropriated for the Department of Homeland Security. The Republican Senate Leadership Fund today stopped spending money to elect Michael Watley to the U.S. Senate from North Carolina. The former chair of both the Republican Party of North Carolina and the Republican National Committee, placed in that role by Trump for the months that covered the 2024 election, Watley is down by double digits in the polls against former North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper. They are shifting that money to Kansas to shore up Republican Senator Roger Marshall, recently mired in the revelations that his aggressive debt collection from 700 of his obstetric patients led to the arrests, of 81 of them. Polls show Marshall's Democratic challenger, Adam Hamilton, a pastor who used to be a Republican, pulling ahead. Two of the four living Republican governors of Kansas have endorsed Hamilton. Today, former Governor Mike Hayden said he is backing Hamilton because governing should always center around the best interests of the people. By supporting Trump's tariffs and the war on Iran, which are destroying, destroying markets and driving prices so high that Kansas farmers are at risk of losing their farms, he said, Marshall is failing to live up to that standard. And therein lies the crux of the crisis that is driving a seismic political change. It has become crystal clear that Trump never intended to address the real problems he identified. His tariffs, deep tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, extraordinary corruption, multiple vanity projects, and war on Iran are benefiting him, his family, and his cronies. At the same time, the Republicans are, at his direction, slashing the social welfare programs, medical funding, education, infrastructure, and health care that used to serve the American people. Trump has taken to claiming that the country's economy is booming, but that he and the Republicans have done a bad job of telling people. All over the country, they're building factories, plants, manufacturing's coming back, he told a crowd at a truck facility in Texas. The only thing we're doing badly is at public relations. But as Josh Boak of the Associated Press reported today, people aren't buying it. One three-time Trump voter in Ohio, who was one of 1,400 laid off from a truck factory just days before Trump held a rally nearby, is now knocking on doors for Democrats. Something has to change politically in this country, he told Boak. like it just kept getting worse and worse and worse. The old MAGA rhetoric isn't working anymore and Democrats are taking over the space that Trump exploited. On Thursday, campaigning in South Florida, Vice President J.D. Vance called Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate Angie Nixon a self-described socialist and said the right response was to tell her to get the hell out of here. You don't belong in America. In response, journalist Jim DeFede of CBS News Miami suggested that people were somewhat surprised that the vice president would actually say that based on your political views, you should get out of America if you're not happy here. Nixon herself responded, it's very disrespectful. It's really disheartening, especially knowing that I come from folks who help build this country. And my grandparents were sharecroppers in southern Georgia. And all I want for people is to have access to quality health care, to have access to fully funded public schools, for people to have homes to live in and not have to worry about living on the streets. There's absolutely nothing radical or extreme about that, she continued. And I don't consider myself a socialist. I consider myself a lifelong Democrat who puts people over party, people over politics, and people over profit. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss. Thank you.