that hope and this, sort of grand picture inequality, the deterioration of the american dream did not reverse itself. you think of all the things he could have done to change the direction of the country on this. getting tough with wall street. making it easier to form a labor unionme union. starting to enforce anti-trust laws, for pete s sake, any of these things could have made a dent in the big picture disaster we re talking about that has befallen middle america. he didn t do those things and now we have gone, now our hope has sort of curdled into despair. but, you know, j.d., final thought from you, what i think of when i look at the initial graph, not so much zigging and zagging. indulge me, put it on the screen one more time but there was a pretty steady decline from 1940 until the present day which tells me, there it is. frankly, this hasn t been because of any particular administration. it makes me wonder, j.d., have
direction, a lot of people will care who the labor or commerce secretary is. thomas, is part of this aspirational? that maybe they re not caught up so much, these voters that you ve both written to so effectively about, they re not caught up so much on trade policy as they are being aspirational. they look at donald trump. he s a huge success financially speaking and they say, i want to be like him. i m going to cast my lot with donald trump whether he s a republican or a democrat? of course, that s exactly right. but like jd just said, how things change in their actual lives is what really makes a difference. here you have to go back to the lost promise of barack obama. he was elected in 2008 for a lot of the very same reasons, you know. the economy was in free fall. you remember what this was like. and we elected him with all of that hope. and this, this sort of grand picture inequality, the deterioration of the american dream did not reverse itself. you think of all the things h