Author Tressie McMillan Cottom discussed the results of the 2024 presidential election on the Daily Show.
Cottom, a New York Times columnist and a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of two books, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy and Thick: And Other Essays.
Daily Show correspondent Desi Lydic asked Cottom how she was feeling after the election.
“I tried to be pragmatic,” Cottom said. “People read me and follow me. I really tried to keep myself grounded, but even I, up to the end, had a little secret hope hanging around in there. I’m a little embarrassed to admit it.”
Cottom said that she believed voters were not as scared of the prospect of a second Trump administration as Democrats thought they would be.
“That stuck with me, especially with young voters,” she said. “And we’ve seen how well Trump did with young voters. It isn’t that they didn’t remember Trump’s presidency. A lot of people misremember it. They misattribute what they remember as positive to Trump, when in fact it was just government working the way government should.”
Lydic asked Cottom why people remembered the first Trump administration so differently.
“I think those of us on the other side really need to believe that Donald Trump is just stupid and lucky,” she said. “It feels good. It explains away a lot of stuff if he is. But the fact is, you can be stupid and lucky and have a weird gift. And he has one. His weird gift is he knows what people really want, not what they say they want, not what they report to a pollster, not what they say at Thanksgiving dinner.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
