“Wall Street Journal” Gives Trump a Fair Hearing, By Chris Knight (Florida)
We do not know what will happen in the hours and days head. Some of the possibilities will be covered at the blog today. But, for the record, whoever wins, most of the historical background will disappear down the memory hole, so here is one classic piece, where a mainstream site actually gives Trump a fair hearing. One of the main points is that the Democrats such as Biden and Harris have vilified Trump voters, with Biden calling them "garbage." It is speculated that there will be an electoral payback for such comments, but we will see. I tend to think that after electoral fraud, it will not matter much.
"Donald Trump has a taste for hyperbole. But if he wins Tuesday, he will have pulled off the greatest comeback in American political history. What other man could survive two impeachments, a congressional committee investigation stacked against him, two special prosecutors, dozens of state and federal felony indictments and opposition from a significant chunk of his own party, including his former vice president and a chief of staff?
But in a democracy, the first question to ask about an election is this: What are the American people telling us?
In our system "we the people" are the ultimate arbiter of a candidate's fitness for office. But while polite society deems Mr. Trump beyond the pale, he retains an inconvenient popularity with racial and ethnic minorities—e.g., black men and Latinos—that Democrats regard as rightfully theirs and most Republicans never really appealed to. When Democrats have to bring out Barack Obama to lecture African-American men about their insufficient enthusiasm for Ms. Harris, it means Mr. Trump has upset the traditional alignments.
One temptation, at least for Never Trump Republicans, is to read a Trump victory as a sign that his voters are low-IQ dupes bamboozled by Mr. Trump's populism. Of course, if Mr. Trump loses, they will take it as a sign they were right all along and that the American people finally came to their senses.
That's more charitable than the Democrats' take heading into Election Day: Not only are they stupid, they're a bunch of Nazis.
As many have noted, this line of attack started with Hillary Clinton, who at a 2016 Manhattan campaign fundraiser featuring a performance by Barbra Streisand famously dismissed half of Mr. Trump supporters as "a basket of deplorables . . . racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it."
At first Joe Biden looked as though he was rejecting attacks on Trump voters, promising instead to unify the nation. But in 2022 he used a prime-time address in front of Philadelphia's Independence Hall to denounce MAGA Republicans as threats to the nation who "fan the flames of political violence." Today he and Ms. Harris both say Mr. Trump is a fascist.
The unpopular record of the Biden-Harris administration certainly has made Mr. Trump a more plausible candidate. But his campaign has also benefited from a constant stream of snide and disdainful anti-Trump news articles, television panels and declarations by so-called political experts. The memo to these elites from MAGA-hat-wearing voters is this: Your condescension comes through loud and clear.
Trump supporters have mostly reacted with humor, because they aren't as self-serious as their self-appointed "betters." Again this began with Mrs. Clinton. The deplorables themselves happily embraced the label. We saw it again last week after the press made a huge stink over a comedian's idiotic crack about Puerto Rico being a floating island of garbage—then covered for President Biden when he repeated the slur by saying Mr. Trump's supporters were the only garbage he could see. The gaffe launched a thousand memes, as Republicans started dressing up in garbage bags, and Mr. Trump himself addressed a rally wearing a reflective vest.
So maybe what Americans who vote for Trump are saying is that they don't believe the whole lot of you: the press that created a narrative of nonexistent Russian collusion, the scientists and health experts who misled us about Covid, the 51 former intelligence officials who released a statement three weeks before the 2020 election saying the Hunter Biden laptop had "the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation," the federal and state prosecutors who tried to kill the former president's re-election by piling up criminal indictments, the FBI that lied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in an application for a warrant to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, etc.
Whatever Mr. Trump's offenses, his voters have concluded that Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris are worse, if only because they can count on the media and many of the nation's most important institutions to back them up.
Trump voters also don't like being called transphobic because they oppose letting boys play in girls' sports. They don't like when Mark Cuban says the only women who could be for Mr. Trump are weak or stupid. Or when the president insists Bidenomics is a smashing success and they would know that if they were only smart enough to appreciate how good they have it.
Mr. Trump doesn't look down on these Americans, which is why he can work a McDonald's window or ride in a garbage truck though he never did those jobs growing up. A popular meme features a stern-looking Mr. Trump over the tag line, "They're not really after me. They're after you. I'm just in the way."
Trump haters scoff. But if he does win, the message from millions of Trump voters will be "I agree."
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