Huffington Post political reporter Daniel Marans on Wednesday said that President Trump has not stuck to his anti-establishment ideas that he espoused during the 2016 election.
On Hill.TV’s “Rising” on Wednesday, Marans cited a FiveThirtyEight poll from 2016, which showed that a lower percentage of voters saw Trump as “conservative” than any of his immediate Republican White House predecessors.
Marans argued that Trump blew up a lot of norms of the Republican Party, but stated that he did not think Trump would stick to these ideas once in office.
“I think this was something I was intrigued by when Trump was a candidate, when a lot of us sort of took perverse pleasure in seeing him sort of destroy some of the sacred cows of the Republican Party,” Marans explained. “In seeing him mock the corrupt campaign finance system, promise to defend social security, Medicare and Medicaid in a way that to some degree put Democrats on the defensive because Barack Obama himself had pursued cuts to some of those benefits.”
“I thought that Trump was not a very deep guy,” Marans continued. “I thought it was very unlikely that he would stick to this stuff, and I was sort of fascinated by the way [Sen.] Bernie Sanders [I-Vt.] latched onto this and immediately tried to create a frame of saying, ‘I’m going to hold you to this, Mr. President.’”
“I guess kind of knowing that Trump, or really predicting that Trump would not hold to it, Bernie really sort of created this frame as, ‘I can be a genuine populist for some of the constituencies that Trump brought in,'” the reporter said.
Watch the entire interview above.
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