Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam returned to Boston Public Radio Thursday, where he reflected on his recently published op-ed, titled “The better angels had better show up in November.”
The piece itself is a reflection on Beam’s 2016 outlook on the American electorate, and his writing in the Globe that “Donald Trump won’t be the next president.”
"I thought, well, I don’t mind revisiting this because I was so spectacularly wrong in March of 2016,” Beam said. "And when I wrote the column you’re talking about… it’s just a different me. I know we’d like to think that this situation won’t go on, but as you can see there’s a kind of weird note of dark pessimism in the 2020 version of the piece. And it really lives with me.”
In his 2020 piece, Beam writes about the president’s ability to “[home] in on your worst instincts like a heat-seeking missile where they implode on you again and again.
"I think what I couldn’t say in this piece,” Beam added, “is that I felt like the kind of evil chord that Trump appeals to is inside of me — and I didn’t want to admit that. But there are, you can use whatever stupid metaphor you want, like a devil sitting on your shoulder, but there’re a lot of gateways into people’s negativity, anger and resentment, and it feels like Trump is just a genius at finding the way in.”
