Democrats haven’t got a clue.
Democrats and their media enablers are trying to make sense of last Tuesday’s election – the biggest shift to the right since Ronald Reagan became president in 1980 – searching for where they went wrong. The good news for the GOP is that they haven’t got a clue.
The main disconnect is that they fail to acknowledge that tens of millions of Americans actually like Donald Trump; many even love him. Democrats are so blinded by hatred (there’s a reason that Republicans have coined the TDS label) they literally cannot fathom that Trump is personally popular. The reasons for that affection in a moment, but first it is worthwhile (and, frankly, fun) to explore the self-flagellation and circular firing squads taking place on the Left.
Many Democrats, led by Nancy Pelosi, are blaming Joe Biden for not dropping out sooner. Others have dared suggest that Kamala Harris ran a lousy billion-dollar campaign by, for example, declining Joe Rogan’s podcast invitation which might have upped her performance among men. (Donald Trump’s free-flowing three-hour conversation with Rogan was watched by 47 million people; as Trump cheekily pointed out in a post offering to help Harris pay off her campaign debts, he got plenty of “Earned Media” which “doesn’t cost very much.”)
Bernie Sanders is rightly blaming his colleagues for forgetting their roots, saying “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” Yes, when you vow to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to pay off student loans, and only 34% of Americans are college graduates who typically out-earn non-college grads, you should not be shocked that most of the country thinks you don’t care much about them.
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All those reflections may be somewhat valid, unlike charges of misogyny or racism, but it is astonishing that not one Democrat has admitted that the genuine appeal of Donald Trump also helped him win. Liberals have so bought their own narrative about the president-elect, and live in such a cocoon of groupthink, that they cannot conceive that he might be the kind of guy people would like to have a beer with.
More importantly, they cannot imagine that he might not be a reflection of our country’s worst impulses and attitudes but instead embodies some of our best. What would those admirable impulses be? Honesty, common sense, patriotism, humor and authenticity.
DEPRESSED MEDIA REACT TO TRUMP VICTORY: HOW COULD THIS POSSIBLY HAVE HAPPENED?
Let’s start with honesty. Democrats accuse Trump of lying about everything, all the time. They have made a cottage industry of fact-checking his every utterance, every facial expression, every sneeze. What do they find? A tendency to exaggerate, to overstate the size of his crowds, to puff up his wins and minimize his losses. His is a great, big, beautiful world and those are the terms he deals in. His overstatements and hyperbole are often tongue-in-cheek and amusing, but only to his supporters. To Democrats, they are disqualifying.
By contrast, Democrats have been authors of some of the greatest and gravest falsehoods in our history. Pretending Joe Biden was fit to serve another four years was an outright lie spun by the White House, leading Democrats and the media. That is a consequential lie, and they are now paying for it.
In addition, the left-wing media and Hillary Clinton’s campaign cooked up the undermining Russia hoax, while Democrats also smeared the former president with dishonest interpretations of his comments about Charlottesville, about veterans and immigrants. These profound mistruths unfairly colored what many thought about Trump.
Even in the final days of the campaign, Democrats took a stupid joke from Trump’s Madison Square Garden event and dishonestly pretended it reflected the former president’s racism. Supporters knew better.
The Left has branded Trump anti-female despite his record of hiring women for important posts (including his daughter Ivanka), anti-gay even though he chose the first openly-gay cabinet member in our history and anti-black despite his adopting measures like permanently funding the historically black colleges and setting up opportunity zones in black communities. These are false charges and dismissed accordingly by his fans.
Another Trump virtue applauded by and shared with his supporters is common sense. Allowing biological men to compete in women’s sports is ridiculous; over 70% of adults agree. Allowing millions of people to enter the country illegally, unvetted, is outrageous; a poll that favored Harris shows a majority of the country approves of mass deportations. Allowing criminals to walk free is dangerous; even the voters in ultra-liberal Southern California agree and booted progressive DA George Gascon in a landslide. Common-sense voters chose Donald Trump to stop the progressive nonsense, like prioritizing DEI practices in the military, and he will.
Liberals cannot comprehend that Trump is authentic. You may not like what he says, but it’s pretty clear that he is telling you what he thinks. Polling showed that voters thought Trump meant what he said; that was not true for Kamala Harris.
Finally, Trump has an excellent sense of humor, something his fans enjoy, the media never displayed and the left never appreciated. Showing up at McDonald’s and driving around in a garbage truck late in the campaign was funny and appealing. It was extremely difficult to square those gestures with the Left’s desperate portrayal of Trump as authoritarian and the second coming of Hitler.
Finally, Trump is a patriot. Democrats tried to climb aboard that train at their convention, which was festooned with American flags and punctuated by renditions of the Star Spangled Banner. But since the left for years has decried our nation as “systemically racist,” has rewritten our history to defame our country’s brilliant Founders, and has denied that the U.S. is a land of opportunity and promise for all, their conversion came across as inauthentic as their candidate.
When Donald Trump promises to Make America Great Again, the left sneers. Voters believe him and have given him a mandate to try.
