Donald Trump’s resounding victory over Kamala Harris in Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election was a remarkable accomplishment — so much so, it should serve as a massive wake-up call to the Democratic party and the political left. Their dislike (or hatred) of Trump was irrational. And their ideas, policies and proposals were clearly out of touch with today’s reality.
Yet this is a message that few Democrats seem to have absorbed. Democratic strategist David Axelrod, a CNN contributor, obtusely stated on election night: “Let’s be honest about this … there were appeals to racism in this campaign, and there is racial bias in this country, and there is sexism in this country. And anybody who thinks that that did not in any way impact on the outcome of this race is wrong.”
Fellow CNN contributor Van Jones then chimed in: “Can you imagine a woman of colour acting like Donald Trump acted, even for one day?” He also said, “There’s a license that he had to just be a fool, just to be an obnoxious ass to everyone.”
MSNBC commentator Joy-Ann Reid rattled off this triggered assessment: “Anyone who has experienced, or been in the United States for any period of time and experienced this country’s history and knows it, cannot have believed that it would be easy to elect a woman president, let alone a woman of colour. Let’s just be clear. And nothing that was true yesterday about how flawlessly this campaign was run is not true now. This really was a historic, flawlessly run campaign.”
The worst of the lot was Democratic strategist Aisha Mills, who appeared on the CBC’s election night broadcast and spewed this rubbish: “You’re talking about the propaganda campaign and the playbook of Trump. This is not new. This is not surprising. This is directly out of Hitler’s playbook. This is out of an autocrat playbook.”
This sentiment continued 24 hours later. Sunny Hostin, co-host of ABC’s “The View,” went off the rails and blamed “uneducated white women” for “voting against their reproductive health freedoms,” and Latino men for voting for someone who “says he’s going to deport the majority of (their) community.”
MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman and longtime Trump critic, suggested that, “A lot of Hispanic voters have problems with Black candidates,” which led race-baiting MSNBC contributor Al Sharpton to pipe in, “Some of the most misogynist things I’ve heard going on this get out the vote tour came from Black men.”
The anger, frustration and pearl clutching that occurred after I supported Trump in a recent National Post column is also worth mentioning. The overall reaction was meaningless to me, but it showed that left-wing Canadians aren’t immune to this disease.
Harris didn’t lose the election because she didn’t have enough time to prepare after replacing President Joe Biden. It had nothing to do with her gender or skin colour, either. She lost for a simple reason: she was a lousy candidate, and many Americans realized it.
Besides being the most left-wing presidential candidate ever put on the top of a major party ticket, Harris was the single-most politically incompetent person to ever run for president. Her campaign was largely devoid of policy ideas, and she couldn’t properly explain the few she had. She handled her interviews poorly, including with Fox News’s Bret Baier. She couldn’t think on her feet, and continually relied on canned responses.
Harris was also unable to spin lines, change political narratives to her advantage and not appear out-of-touch. A good example was her Oct. 8 interview on “The View.” Asked if she would have handled something differently than Biden over the past four years, Harris responded, “There is not a thing that comes to mind. I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact.” She later changed her tune and said that, unlike Biden, she would have a Republican in her cabinet. How magnanimous of her — and phony, too.
The political left hasn’t acted much better. They’ve used lawfare as a political weapon against Trump and painted him as a threat to democracy. They called the president-elect and his supporters “fascists” and “Nazis.” They refused to abandon the belief that only they understand American values, wants and needs.
This infuriated many Trump voters. They realized that the political left was the real threat to democracy, liberty and freedom. They didn’t like being called fascists and Nazis any more than Trump — and felt that by using these terms, the American left proved they knew nothing about what the actual fascists and Nazis were like. They also didn’t want out-of-touch left-wing rabble-rousers to continue leading the discourse in their country.
Democrats and others on the left need to give their heads a serious shake. A return to the political centre and some degree of normality is their only means of survival. If they don’t do this, then Republicans will surely continue to dominate U.S. politics long after the Trump years are over.
National Post