How Glenn Beck laid the tracks for the Trump train

Much has been written about Trump’s success with white working class voters, largely because this is where Hillary, despite winning the majority of voters with incomes less than $30,000, lost ground from 2012. But it’s useful to remember that Trump also won the majority of all white voters making over $50,000. This citizenry may not have been front and center in much of the coverage leading up to, or in the aftermath of the election—indeed few polls or even heated reports from Trump rallies seemed to catch them—but they were very visible on the Mall on that August day IN 2010. And they had a great appetite for Beck’s message: that America’s greatest days were behind it, and the media was not telling us the true story about anything. When Trump threw his hat in the ring with a nearly identical message five years later, it was not falling un untrained ears.

When Beck held his rally, few failed to note that it fell on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream Speech, held in the same location 47 years earlier. Beck himself made a well-publicized point to invite Alveda King, MLK’s niece and former GOP state senator from Georgia, and give her a speaking slot. Less noted was the fact that then-Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama had also held his convention acceptance speech in Denver on the same day two years earlier. Between the staging and the date and the crowd size it seemed very clear that Beck was eager to both place himself in the pantheon of iconic American leaders, as well as the main opposition to then barely two-year-old candidacy of Barack Obama.

Certainly with regards to that latter, he had been doing just that since his FOX News show had launched on Jan 19, 2009, the day before Obama formally took office. That the network run by former Nixon advisor Roger Ailes had set itself up as Obama’s main opposition party was no secret, but for the first few years Beck, with his specific calls to “return” America to its glory days, and his penchant for unpredictability on air (in 2010, he famously turned to the camera during a live interview with Congressman Eric “tickle fight” Massa, who was under fire for sexual misconduct, and apologized to America: “I think I’ve wasted your time.”) was its loudest, most compelling voice.