Author and advocate for economic populism Anand Giridharadas told MSNBC on Thursday that President Donald Trump was the symptom of a disease you didn't know you had -- and that Joe Biden wasn't the cure Americans need.
"He's only been in the race like seven minutes, but that video was an 'edit-undo campaign,'" Giridharadas said of Biden's announcement. "The whole entirety of it was 'Trump is the problem, Trump is the problem.'"
"I think Trump is the kind of problem that is a symptom. Trump is a boil on your body that is actually a clue that you have a really big problem, you have some disease that you haven't gotten diagnosed," he went on. "And if you say that the premise seemed to be things weren't great in America and then Trump got in and besmirched the character of our country and made things ugly -- "
"Except things were broken in America, and that's why we ended up with Trump," interjected host Stephanie Ruhle.
"But the only person who can't say that is Joe Biden, because he was vice president for the preceding eight years that launched us into Trump," Giridharadas shot back. "So he is the person least able to tell the truth in this Democratic primary about the fact that there were conditions of inequality, of anger, of dispossession, of rising racial resentment -- "
"But Joe Biden and Barack Obama don't own that," Ruhle insisted. "Inequality is a massive problem around the world."
"You're absolutely right but here's one way in which they do," Giridharadas said. "I don't think Barack Obama made it his point to fundamentally change power equations in this country in eight years. And I think we're going to have a referendum on maybe Joe Biden continuing that approach, and others saying 'we're going to keep getting Trump-like figures over the next 30 to 40 years.'"
"The next time we get a Donald Trump," he added, "it actually may be someone who can read."
Watch the video below.
