TDS REIGNS SUPREME: Trump is still scrambling the minds of the elites.
One of Trump’s greatest gifts has always been his ability to make his political enemies match him flaw for flaw in a race to the bottom. But Trump has never mattered as much as who he is supposed to speak for – an abandoned and demoralised multiracial working class, whose communities and families have been destroyed by the elites of both parties, and is viewed by those same elites with nothing but smug condescension.
To many of those people, there is something inevitable about the FBI targeting Trump over what might turn out to be a red herring. Because they can imagine that happening to them – not for having access to classified documents, but for holding the wrong kinds of views in the eyes of the liberal media elites, who sneer at them day in and day out.
Instead of trying to understand these people – who were once the Democrats’ base – liberal elites choose to mock and dehumanise them. As Obama adviser Ben Rhodes tweeted last week as the raid became public news: ‘The strangest thing about this epoch of American history will always be that tens of millions of grown-ups decided to form a cult-like devotion to, of all available people, Donald Trump.’
Apparently, for the left, the working class traded in clinging to their guns, Bibles and bigotries for clinging to Trump. How childish it was of these alleged grown-ups to have voted for someone who promised to overhaul NAFTA – and then did so. Who promised to stem illegal immigration – then did so. Who promised to get unemployment down – and then did.
So often, when you scratch at the pundit class’s claims to ‘expertise’, this is what you’ll find lurking just beneath the surface: a smirking condescension towards those with different views and different interests. And yet those very same grown-up experts are the ones who believed in the ‘pee tape’.
Related: The Elite Panic of 2022. “What terrifies elites is the loss of their cultural monopoly in the face of a foretold political disaster. They fear diversity of any kind, with good cause: to the extent that the public enjoys a variety of choices in cultural products, elite control will be proportionately diluted. Our cultural monolith, never popular, is today pounded by crosscurrents that undermine its solidity. Alongside the vast progressive choir, quieter voices—conservative, libertarian, religious, none-of-the-above—could soon arise, leaving our culture more fractured, more divided, and more representative of the nation as a whole. If that were to occur, sullen elites will point to 2022’s springtime of discontent, and remark, with typical vehemence, that their panic was fully justified.”