The people who hate the Trump voters
Julie Kelly:
The Untouchables Kelly describes continue to ramp up their hatred and lack of understanding of why they lost. There is no room for compromise with them. That winds up making Trump actually stronger. Their defense of John Brennan looks totally tone deft.
One reason Donald Trump won the presidency is that Americans are tired of being ignored by the ruling political class.There is more.
A poll taken several months before the election revealed that neglected voters overwhelmingly favored Donald Trump above any other candidate: “Voters who agreed with the statement ‘people like me don’t have any say about what the government does’ were 86.5 percent more likely to prefer Trump. This feeling of powerlessness and voicelessness was a much better predictor of Trump support than age, race, college attainment, [or] income,” wrote Derek Thompson at The Atlantic.
This is the Trump appeal that the ruling political class refused—and still refuses—to acknowledge. It is why Republicans were willing to overlook his personal peccadillos, and why voters in 206 counties who twice chose Barack Obama helped elect Donald Trump. It is why rural moms, union toughs, small business owners, and soybean farmers fill steamy Midwestern assembly halls during summer’s peak to rally around a thrice-married, brash, egotistical Manhattan billionaire who is the working class’s most unlikely champion. It is why Republican candidates across the country are bragging about their Trump-BFF status in tight primary races.
Trump violates every sycophantic, mannerly rule that politicians and their handlers are taught to follow. The name-calling, the gloating, the fight-picking are precisely what any political consultant would advise their client not to do. “Act presidential,” the memo would say. Let others do your dirty work. Stay above the fray, don’t get in the mud. Keep on message. Politics is a game of addition, not subtraction. Yada yada yada. (Let’s add “Political Consulting Experts” to the long list of professional know-it-alls who’ve been wholly discredited in the Trump era.)
But the jig is up. Trump is a one-man battering ram against a powerful political apparatus—The Untouchables—that ruefully stacks the deck against the very people it purports to understand and protect.
Hillary Clinton embodied all that was wrong with the ruling political class: She was insular, smug, and unapologetic. She snubbed three of the country’s most populous states (and never bothered to campaign in one of them) until the waning days of the campaign.
And she called millions of Trump supporters “deplorables.”
Nearly two years later, the war between The Untouchables and The Deplorables rages on. Last week featured several more clashes, proving again that the president’s opposition remains stunningly and stubbornly tone-deaf. (As Peggy Noonan wrote last year, Trump has been lucky in his enemies.) The Untouchables brandished their revoked security clearances and their opinion pages and their GoFundMe campaigns as the latest weapons against a president they intend to destroy.
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The Untouchables Kelly describes continue to ramp up their hatred and lack of understanding of why they lost. There is no room for compromise with them. That winds up making Trump actually stronger. Their defense of John Brennan looks totally tone deft.
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