Former 60 Minutes anchor Katie Couric recently joined Bill Maher on his podcast Club Random. During a discussion on income inequality, Couric mused that those who support Donald Trump are motivated by anti-intellectualism and jealousy.
Couric, who has declared herself “liberated” from the necessity of being a straight newswoman, told Maher that “The socio-economic disparities are a lot and class resentment is a lot and anti-intellectualism and elitism is what is driving many of these anti-establishment — which are Trump voters — so, I think that is a huge problem that we have to address.”
She would also add “I mean globalization and, you know, the transition from an industrial to a technological society and I don’t know if you’ve ever been jealous of someone else or resentful — it is such a corroding and bitter, almost bile feeling.”
Later, Couric would reply to Maher’s suggestion that current culture consists of poorer people aspiring to be like richer people by countering that some think “I’m angry about it, I’m angry about my lot in life and I’m going to take it out on, sort of, the coastal elites and the intelligentsia and that’s where I think a lot of this support is deriving from.”
As for Maher, he believes that if you want to combat Trump, the way to do it is not by going after his fans, “Take something like the sanctuary cities hypocrisy, these elite cities said ‘we’re the good people, we’re always the good people--’” Couric acknowledged the point, by continuing the sentence, “until—”
Maher continued, “until they send the immigrants, actually, to their city.”
Couric claimed to understand, claiming she thought it would be advantageous for news organizations to head to the border to see how the surge was impacting border towns, but whether she really understood is not as clear because earlier in the episode, Maher explained Trump voters, “What they see on the other side, to them, is even more dangerous. Because it’s closer to home, ‘My kid is coming home from school and he thinks he’s a racist? He’s five, what have you been telling him? My son thinks maybe he’s not a boy.’ And maybe that’s true, that happens, but, you know, those kind of things are what they say. ‘That’s why I’m voting for Trump.'”
Couric ignored that basic fact of contemporary political life when she went on her bender about Trump supporters being a bunch of jealous anti-intellectuals.
