The Washington Free Beacon’s editor in chief, Matthew Continetti, called Donald Trump’s election victory a repudiation of President Obama’s legacy in an interview with the Hoover Institution’s Peter Robinson released Wednesday.
Continetti was joined by The Weekly Standard‘s senior editor, Andrew Ferguson, for the interview in which they discussed how the conservative movement will fit into a Trump administration.
Continetti said that he believes Trump’s victory is a repudiation of Obama but not in the way the media has portrayed it. Referencing the identity politics employed by the Hillary Clinton campaign, Continetti argued that Trump actually won the election using a positive campaign message.
“The reason I think he won in the end was that he won the economic issue,” Continetti said. The Clinton campaign was so focused on organizing the Obama coalition that it failed to deliver a coherent economic message to the voters, Continetti argued. In contrast, Trump and his campaign hammered home their economic message to voters at rallies and through social media.
Robinson brought up Continetti’s recent column entitled “Crisis of the Conservative Intellectual” in which he covered the long-standing conflict between the conservative intellectual and populist wings of the Republican Party. Continetti called this a “perennial conflict” and said that voters in the 2016 election rejected the arguments from the conservative wing of the party, instead choosing Trump’s brand of populism. He also noted that while Trump comes from the East Coas,t he was able to present a populist argument to his voters because he was talking about the “forgotten man” in Middle America.
Later in the interview, Continetti said that “Trump has the potential to be a great president” but prefaced his comment by saying Trump’s presidency might not be great for the conservative movement. Continetti argued that the ideas coming out of the conservative movement have grown stale, a suggestion that Ferguson seemed to agree with. Ferguson remarked that conservative intellectuals had been under a false illusion that voters were reading and studying the same works they were.
Noting Trump’s unique relationship with the press during the campaign, Robinson asked Continetti and Ferguson how a Trump administration would engage and interact with media institutions. Continetti referenced Trump’s post-election interview with the New York Times, an organization he railed against during his rallies, to highlight Trump’s complex relationship with the media.
Trump knows and understands how important the media is to getting his message out to the public, Continetti suggested, predicting that the president-elect would not hold as many press conferences as previous presidents because of his willingness to control his own message. Ferguson even suggested that the Trump administration would not need to hold daily press briefings because of the president-elect’s ability to blast out his message through his large social media following.
To end the interview, Continetti and Ferguson both reflected on how the conservative intellectual movement should approach a Trump presidency. Continetti said he was much happier with the election results than he expected to be but noted that conservative intellectuals need to reflect on the divisions within conservatism.
“I think this is an opportunity to actually think through what is actually happening in this country,” Continetti said. “The Washington, D.C. bubble has done very well the past eight years. No wonder nobody here thought Trump had a chance. We didn’t go out to the Rust Belt and see what life was like, and there I think it’s a very different story.”
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