With President Donald Trump back in office, Flagpole is conducting a series of interviews to examine the impact his second term will have on Athens, from the economy to marginalized communities. First up is Audrey Haynes, a UGA School of Public and International Affairs professor who specializes in presidential campaigns. This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.
Flagpole: Let’s start at the beginning, with the election. Why did Trump win?
Audrey Haynes: It’s a lot of different things. The country is a really kind of complex amalgamation of people who are making choices based on a lot of different reasons. There are some people out there, a good percentage, who some of the ideas that Trump put forth in his 2016 campaign still resonate with them. There are people who had that hindsight with rose-colored glasses about the economy, that was their No. 1 issue. I mean, most Americans do not have a consistent ideology that they follow, even people who think of themselves as being principled conservatives or liberals. We have a magic wand that we use in our brains.
It’s always in an equation. You have the Trump part, but then you have the Biden part, then you have the Harris part. So you have all of these factors playing into it. I think that sometimes polls don’t always pick up all of that, and polls are very shallow tools. They often don’t follow up with [questions about] the intensity you might have had.
Information is limited. Someone like you or I who studies politics, who is paying attention to the news every day—we know every wrinkle of every story, and sometimes we don’t even have it all. Most Americans get their news from one source. Perhaps if they’re getting their news, they’re getting their news from some uncle or whatever. For the first time ever, I did some canvassing, and I was astonished by what I found. I found people who knew literally nothing, but had very strong feelings about one of the candidates or the other. I had people who would talk about housing or some other economic interest, which was completely the opposite of the candidate that they said they were going to vote for.
So in the end, I think there certainly wasn’t a mandate in the 2024 election, that what we saw was enough of a shift of the fickle American populace, who is paying more for stuff and is unhappy. We do that in America. It’s like, when this isn’t working, we throw it in the trash and we get a new one.
Yet for the Biden administration, it’s almost like optics don’t matter. They were going to defend the fact that his speeches sometimes are incoherent. But his administration really didn’t seem to do well conveying a message. Now historically, maybe he is going to go down in history based on the fact that he did a lot of his agenda. He was really struggling at times, and someone who had promised to be a transitional candidate became convinced that he would be the only person who could beat Trump. So to me, that was the first mistake.
FP: Immigration was another major issue.
AH: Factually, we did have an influx of immigrants coming from countries in Central and South America, primarily that were escaping horrors that might not have been a war, but it was like the equivalent of a war. And whether or not Fox exaggerated all those caravans, there was enough discussion and enough validity to some of that, and then you had just a drumbeat of narrative that Democrats and the administration could not push back against.
The thing that is most interesting is that Trump, like Elon Musk, like [Robert Kennedy Jr.], had all been Democrats in the past, and they’re really not Republicans. They are basically celebrities, and this is sort of an extension of our culture. They have the ability to manipulate narratives. If you’re only getting your news from basically what has become a propaganda voicebox, regardless of what side you’re getting it from, then that’s your reality, right? How do you penetrate that reality with facts?
Whenever you look back, you go, “If only we’d done this, or if only we had done that,” but that doesn’t matter now. What matters is he got elected.
FP: And so what are going to be the consequences of that?
AH: It’s almost like we’re going back to the robber baron age, right? And who knows what will change? There are a lot of people in America, for whatever reasons, that ended up voting for him, but it was not a mandate. It was a relatively slim vote, less than a percentage point in most of those swing states. That is a close election, that is still a polarized, almost evenly split set of voters.
What will he do? Will he consolidate power for the MAGA movement, which will undo the Republican Party as it was when we were growing up? He is norm-busting like crazy, and he is not doing things that a typical Republican would do, nor a typical Democrat. He’s gone back to running things like he did his TV show [“The Apprentice”].
I do think a lot of people like some aspects of Trump, but they didn’t like much about Biden. For some reason, he wasn’t as likable, even though that was his schtick. You know, early on, everybody liked Joe. He was your average guy. He got those Pittsburgh steel workers on his side. What happened to that? And Harris had a lot stacked up against her. You had an incumbent who has now the lowest approval rating going out of office than any other modern president ever. He hit 64% [disapproval] today. And I’m not sure most of them even know what he is doing. They just feel he’s been branded as someone who’s a failure, who was too old to be doing this. And Harris was going to be attached to that administration no matter what she did. They made some errors in their own narrative, but that’s a hard campaign.
So will Trump be successful? What will he do? He did not have a very successful presidential term the first go round.
FP: Other than the tax cuts, I don’t really think he accomplished much.
AH: Well, those tax cuts, what did they do? They just increased the deficit that now everyone is trying to cut. Your original question to me was, what will this mean to people who live in Athens, Georgia? The federal government and its departments do provide a lot of services and support.
FP: We’ve got all the federal funding the university gets, the research grants and agricultural grants from USDA, two hospitals, Title I funding for high poverty [K-12] schools. There’s a lot of money from Washington flowing into Athens.
AH: Agriculture, that’s big in the state, and it’s a big part of the surrounding areas of Athens. It’s not Athens alone, it’s our surrounding areas that are a part of the economy. A lot of people think positively that the Trump mojo is going to cut regulations. Interest rates are going to go down because he’s going to put his thumb on the scale.
FP: With the inflation issue, we see here in Athens that housing is way up, and it’s 18 bucks for a cheeseburger when you go out, but can Trump do anything about that?
AH: It’s actually a little better in Georgia compared to a lot of other states, and that’s one of the ironies—how Georgia thrived so, so well during the Biden administration.
The scary thing, too, with Trump, I think, is a lot of people question whether he’s trolling or is this real? How Trump works as a businessman is he says something strong, he’ll tell you, Barack Obama, you weren’t even born [in the U.S.], but then he’ll see you at [Jimmy Carter’s] funeral and crack a joke like he was just kidding.
Americans tend to have a short memory. [Special prosecutor] Jack Smith is now coming out on the losing end of an effort to make Trump accountable for what happened on Jan. 6, when a lot of other people that don’t have his money, stature or had been president went to jail. He was a part of everything that led up to that, and he was a part of that “stop the steal” narrative, which everyone knows that in reality was a big lie. That’s not a patriotic thing to do; it was a self-interested thing to do. But what is amazing about this country is that, if you deliver a few things, all of that is erased, and there’s this new narrative that [Jan. 6] was a picnic.
FP: I see this kind of violent style of politics now trickling down to the local level. After Laken Riley’s murder, we had situations where people were disrupting county commission meetings and even assaulting people.
AH: Which is not the America you want to live in. Protest is a great thing when it is done in a peaceful, thoughtful manner, but it’s not OK when it becomes intimidation for having a different opinion. It’s not OK to have ideas that threaten people, that make them afraid, but it looks like sometimes we are passing laws that, in a way, threaten people.
FP: One example might be the transgender sports bill in the Georgia legislature, that Trump made an issue of in the campaign by running all these ads.
AH: Trump made that an issue because people are susceptible to it. No propaganda, no ad is effective unless those feelings already exist. I always tell students that, if you really want to change public policy, it really is something that is interactive. If people are unwilling to accept those kinds of laws, then candidates won’t run on them. They run on them because they did focus groups and they did ad tests, and they got what we call “lift”—people liked it, responded to it, were afraid of it.
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