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On 19 April 2010, the left-leaning web site Truthdig posted a two-page interview with one of the nation's foremost intellectuals on the left, Noam Chomsky, in which the MIT professor talks about the dark mood in the country and compares it to Germany before the rise of the Nazis. After Donald Trump was elected president on 8 November 2016, people began sharing a what appeared to be a prescient segment of the interview in which Chomsky seems to describe Trump and the wave of populist support that brought him to power: While the statement was made long before Trump was publicly discussing an electoral run, Chomsky said that Americans were feeling hopeless and left behind. His description of a charismatic figure that seizes on the disillusionment of working class and impoverished American whites sounds similar to Trump's appeal and some of the rhetoric that studded his campaign. Chomsky, who has written dozens of books on economics and foreign affairs, described his observations: Chomsky, then 81, told Hedges the new, globalized economic system has left people in a state of enraged inertia — from which they have no escape. The circumstances, he said, were unprecedented, at least in his memory, and they have created a roiling pot of despair, ripe for a certain type of leader to tell them a certain message: Critics of Trump have pointed to his comments about Mexican immigrants and Muslim people, accusing him of exploiting the discontent of white Americans who feel left behind by a globalized job force and international trade deals, and increasingly fearful of an ever more diverse country with a shrinking white population.
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