almost exclusively with mexican trade last october beat out los angeles as the united states busiest sport. but these promising economic winds are being stifled by politics. for the last three decades mexico has had a run of presidents that while they ve had their flaws were serious about policy and tried to modernize the country with varying degrees of success. that luck has run out. mexico s president since 2018, manuel lopez obrador is a populist demagogue who regards the strong man tradition in latin america history. the covid policies were a disaster. mexico has had one of the highest covid case fatality ratios in the world. his economic policies have been anti-growth. by one estimate nearly 4 million meck c mexicans have slipped into
it was sinclair lewis famous warning about how a populist demagogue could win an election on fear and nationalism, and then turn the u.s. toward authoritarianism. anything can happen anywhere. and just because president trump attempted this and was thwarted does not mean this is anywhere near over. the white house lawyer who stopped president trump from the plot is gone from the white house. don mcgahn turned bob mueller witness. while some of the walls may close in on some of the people, there isn t any evidence in this reporting that president trump is going to change who he is on these issues. he told us who he was during the campaign, running on jailing hillary clinton, and now, through the this reporting, he s told us again who he is in office. one of the most important lessons i ever learned here, when people show you who they are, believe them.
your book is all about your journey from being a lifelong republican to a trump opponent. you said, when the primaries began and trump began winning state after state, i thought i had entered the twilight zone. the torment worsened when he locked up the nomination and republican after republican dutifully lined up to endorse his candidacy after having lambasted him in the harshest of terms. former governor rick perry had called trump a cancer on conservatism before endorsing said cancer and being rewarded with a cabinet post. i ve been asking people this. what happened to the republican party? i ve been asking myself that question, don. it s it s soul crushing for me. i mean, this is just unbelievable. because i was a part of the republican party and the conservative movement my whole life. i could have never imagined that they would support this kind of populist demagogue like donald trump who has very little in common with the beliefs that conservatives have been propounding for
they had been hollowed out and waiting to be taken over. that is if the party had been a robust real thing, donald trump would not have been able to take it over. so i don t know why someone like condi rice or why people like paul ryan or mitch mcconnell as i mentioned earlier, didn t do their duty, their civic and patriotic duty but is a process that left the republican party in a place where a populist demagogue and no background and no experience and taking the race that seriously could walk there and perhaps not even wanting to win. perhaps. but whatever his genuine motivations were, the man a real political party in really good health could not have been taken over. that easily. and it wasn t even hard to take it over. and that tells you about how weak and corrupt the party is. we have to sneak in a break. the last word and then we ll be right back. ely. so graceful. the corkscrew spin, flawless.
much what it set up to do. the founding fathers did not write into the constitution that the president of the united states had to be a saint, that he couldn t possibly be a racist or sexist. that is not in the constitution. in fact, the founding fathers said and knew it was quite likely that a populist demagogue could at one point become president. alexander hamilton talked about this. it was one of the reasons they set up the separation of powers, and so i d say on the one hand american political culture seems to be pretty much turned off. the majority of people are turned off by donald trump, and the constitution is constraining him. but at harvard university, if a student if a high school student gets a perfect s.a.t. score and is valedictorian of their class, harvard doesn t admit them if they behave like an animal. we re not talking about running a university here. we re talking about running the united states of america. shouldn t the united states of america have a high