Robert Reich, the former labor secretary under President Bill Clinton, thinks Donald Trump has a real shot at the presidency in a general election battle against Hillary Clinton.
“Throughout the Republican primaries, pundits and pollsters repeatedly told us he’d peaked, that his most recent outrageous statement was his downfall, that he was viewed as so unlikable he didn’t stand a chance of getting the nomination,” Reich, who endorsed Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders in February, wrote of Trump in an op-ed on Monday for Newsweek.
“But in my travels around the country I’ve found many who support [Trump] precisely because of the qualities he’s being criticized for having,” he added.
Reich claimed his various encounters with a Latina woman in Texas, union member in Pennsylvania and small-business owner in Ohio have led him to believe that Trump’s ability to capitalize on the country’s “anti-politics” mood is unprecedented and, perhaps enough to take him all the way to the White House.
“In the new era of anti-politics Americans are skeptical of well-crafted speeches and detailed policy proposals. They prefer authenticity. They want their candidates unscripted and unfiltered,” he wrote, adding that “Trump has perfected the art of anti-politics at a time when the public detests politics.”
Reich continued, arguing that “by the same token, in this era of anti-politics, any candidate who appears to be the political establishment is at a strong disadvantage.”
“This may be Hillary Clinton’s biggest handicap,” he wrote of Trump’s likely Democratic challenger.
The longtime political commentator, who also served in the Ford and Carter administrations, had previously pledged to “work [his] heart out to help [Clinton] become president,” if she clinches the nomination.
But Reich claimed recent polls that show Trump closing the gap between himself and the former secretary of state “raise a serious question” about how far he can go in what has already been an unpredictable election cycle.
