Donald Trump has faced more media criticism
than any other candidate in recent memory. Yet he beat Ted Cruz and John Kasich
in the Republican primary in Indiana on May 3 and is all but assured of his
party’s nomination.
He also bested all of the 15 other entries
that started the marathon back in the fall. That field included Jeb Bush and
Marco Rubio, who had piles of cash from the “donor” class.
But the talking heads in their silos on
CNN, MSNBC and elsewhere immediately announced that Trump will lose to Hillary
Clinton in November. They’re sure of this. The mainstream media, especially the
Boston Globe, New York Times, and Washington Post, concur, and remain
positively vitriolic in their denunciations of Trump.
The fact that they’ve been wrong all along about
this race doesn’t matter, because they have the Ivy League diplomas and go to
the right Washington cocktail parties.
They’re forgetting, but Trump will remind
America, that Clinton has now been around for almost four decades, starting with
Bill Clinton’s victories in Arkansas, serving as an enabler for her sexual
harasser husband. And that she is the candidate of the financial establishment
on Wall Street.
Certainly Clinton is more vulnerable than
the “punditocracy” thinks. An April Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll found
that just 20 per cent of independents viewed Clinton positively, compared with
62 per cent who viewed her negatively.
And in a Washington Post-ABC News survey
taken in March, only 37 per cent of respondents said they found Clinton honest
and trustworthy, while 59 per cent said they did not. She has a
scandal-ridden past.
It’s possible that more Americans hate
Clinton than hate Trump – and that includes a lot of women, holding down
horrible jobs while their unemployed husbands sit at home. These are not the
older women who have done well for themselves, even if not as well as men,
since the 1990s.
Will Republicans in November be able to
bring themselves to vote for Clinton, after despising her for decades? Hard to
believe.
Remember this: Clinton was unable to beat a 74 year old Brooklyn
socialist in Midwestern "redneck" Indiana and West Virginia in the
Democratic primaries of May 3 and May 10, because so many young
Democrats, including women, prefer Bernie Sanders.
I’m not sure she will get their vote in
November either. They might sit it out. (Many Republicans will do the same,
with Trump as their candidate.)
This will be an election between two nominees
who between them are hated by the vast majority of Americans. A CNN poll
released May 4 showed that 51 per cent of those backing Clinton said it comes
from their opposition to Trump, while 57 per cent of those supporting Trump
said it was driven by opposition to Clinton.
But win or lose, I’m sure Trump will do
better than Mitt Romney did in 2012. Romney was so delusional he actually
thought he would win! Sell this guy a bridge! Trump will also do better than
the McCain-Palin duo did in 2008.
“He ridicules the leftist propaganda machine,
its brainless Hollywood cohorts, and their power-hungry political enablers,”
writes Julian Wan in “Trump Isn’t Hitler, He’s Galileo,” in the Daily Caller of
May 3. “He openly mocks neoconservative warmongers and corporatist profiteers.”
Bill Clinton during the 1992 campaign
famously told a voter that “I feel your pain.” But now it’s Trump, not Hillary
Clinton, who is using that message effectively.
Ironically, in this coming contest it’s the
Republican who is the populist, the Democrat the ultimate insider. This
election will be one for the ages, no doubt of it.
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