You’ve got to love how they keep trying – the “they” being the mainstream corporate establishment media -- to explain why Donald Trump remains so popular with conservative Republican voters.
One can only imagine the astonished expressions on the faces of education-establishment-trained journalists as poll after poll shows the former Republican president seemingly gaining strength as time goes on – vis-à-vis his Republican rivals, but also in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup with current corrupt-to-the-core Democrat president senile Joe Biden. The latter politician was supposed to be wiping the floor with the politically wounded Trump by now, but the opposite phenomena is taking place.
And there’s little to suggest that the Trump admiration train will be derailed anytime soon – either by his intra-party rivals in the GOP primary competition or by a resurgent “good guy” politician Biden, who Americans seem to be wise to now. The recent sorry episode with “Dr.” Jill Biden contracting COVID for the third time (despite being vaccinated and boosted to the nth degree), once again exposed the ruling class for the bumbling idiots that they are.
Yet the speculation into Trump’s gravity-defying staying power persists. In an opinion piece titled “It’s still Donald Trump’s party: Why the GOP can’t escape his grip”, political swamp pollsters Douglas Schoen and Carly Cooperman wrote last week at The Hill:
“One of the clearest explanations for this shift [towards Trump] is the increasing weakness of President Joe Biden, who GOP voters now view as ‘eminently beatable,’ according to an analysis by pollster Kristin Soltis Anderson, based on focus groups she conducted with Republican voters in early primary states this month. Separately, Republican strategist Josh Holmes recently noted that ‘the perception that Biden is the weakest possible candidate has lowered the electability question in the calculus of [Republican] primary voters.’
“SCR’s most recent polling data lends to this conclusion as well. Only 21 percent of GOP voters in SCR’s poll believe another Republican without Trump’s baggage would be more electable against Biden, while three-quarters of GOP voters (75 percent) say Trump is electable...
“[B]ased on the trajectory of the race, taken together with both quantitative and qualitative research on the Republican electorate, it is abundantly clear that Trump’s overwhelming strength in the primary race cannot be separated from Biden’s perceived weakness.”
Okay, so the two go hand-in-hand like two high school kids experiencing their first crush, or, as Forrest Gump would say, “like peas and carrots”. Essentially, Biden’s weakness is making it okay for the latent Trump support – leftover from 2020 and its awful aftermath – to come out from hiding, dust off the old campaign posters and prepare to get to work again.
And, why would the media hounds imply that the GOP, as a whole, wants to “escape” Trump’s grip in the first place?
I’d argue that Trump was never unpopular – it just took a while for conservatives to become comfortable again saying nice things about him in polite company. The January 6 thing looked awful bad back then, and no one was going out of their way to associate themselves with the mass political demonstration-turned riot. Democrats’ and the establishment media’s (one and the same) overreach helped clear the air for many. Now that it’s all-but been proven that the Feds were knee-deep in fanning the flames that day, well, people are more than a little agitated.
Politics watchers recognize unfairness when they see it, too. It’s never been easy to turn Donald Trump into a sympathetic character, but the Democrats’ hypocritical, free speech and executive privilege squelching legal witch hunt has managed it.
It’s been easy for Trump. All he’s had to do is sit by and watch his opposition continue to pursue their wildly one-sided get-Trump mission. It’s apparently turned a lot of Republican fence-sitters into Trump backers once again.
The Republican primary race reflects this attitude. The people are still searching for someone who will battle the Washington DC swamp establishment. This year, there are two clear “outsiders” absorbing much of the grassroots’ energy – Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy. There’s also Ron DeSantis, but he’s not viewed as an outsider the way the aforementioned candidates are. And Ramaswamy has a long to go until he recreates a Trump-like feeling among the voters.
The difference between Trump in 2016 and Ramaswamy now is name and face recognition (of course, the haters will suggest I’m making a racial reference because Donald Trump’s face is pretty standard Scotch-Irish white and Ramaswamy is south Asian brown). Both Trump then and Ramaswamy today used heated rhetoric and revolutionary concepts – “Mexico is not sending us its finest”, and, Vivek actually calls it “revolution over reform” – but Trump had been in the public eye for decades and Americans knew he was prone to saying and doing controversial things.
Legendary Civil War general Robert E. Lee was portrayed as “Audacity Personified”, but the same descriptive term could be applied to Trump, before his presidency, during his presidency, and certainly after it. The man exudes confidence, never backs down or apologizes (which could also be construed as a character weakness) and is always moving forward, for better or worse.
Trump’s message caught on quickly in 2016 because people trusted him to act as president, if he won, the same way he’d always done in his private business endeavors. With no fear. It’s my opinion, but Trump never tried to get everyone to like him, because he knew it just wasn’t possible. Every politician boasts that he or she is competing for every vote, but from the start, Trump seemed to acknowledge that the leftist hate-machine would never take to him no matter what he did – so he didn’t kowtow to them.
In this sense, Trump departed from the post-Ronald Reagan Republican presidential nominees – establishment candidates – all of whom appeared to water down their messages so as to broaden the GOP’s “big tent”. George H.W. Bush’s “Thousand Points of Light” and George W. Bush’s “Compassionate Conservatism” screamed of wishy-washy nothingness, and conservative voters weren’t about to be fooled into supporting another soulless Mitt Romney-type compromise candidate who excited no one in 2016.
People also saw Trump’s bluntness as a refreshing improvement from the overly slick political pitches of Big Bubba Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, two highly effective vote seekers who went around campaigning as figureheads without a real core message. Clinton’s “I feel your pain” platitude was about as weighty as Obama’s “Hope and Change” bull crap from 2008. Both Democrats could carry a room full of would-be supporters through force of personality, even if what they babbled made average folks scratch their heads and admit, “Huh? I don’t believe what he just said, but he looks like a good guy, don’t he?”
Trump never stooped to the Democrats’ level. He held mass rallies conducive of a political cult figure and initially didn’t even use a teleprompter. He’d speak for up to two hours letting the speech go to wherever it led. He was substantive in the way that the “forgotten Americans” understood and touched a nerve by identifying with real people and their concerns, not worrying about what consultants would’ve advised him.
He was truly unique and contrasted mightily with his opponent, Crooked Hillary Clinton, who had fully adopted leftism while bowing to the Washington establishment and tried packaging her campaign as a female version of Obama. Even Hillary’s “With Her!” slogan summed up the liberal’s pitch – I’m a woman, hear me roar! Let’s shatter the glass ceiling! HRC even chose a “victory party” venue for its glass ceiling, only to have her dreams crushed by the voting results… what a fond memory for conservatives!
Vivek Ramaswamy isn’t catching on quite the same way now in part because his “I’m going to improve on the MAGA agenda”-type platform isn’t as credible as Trump’s return to the highly recognizable “Make America Great Again.” Simply put, Ramaswamy is too new to the American political scene to persuade dedicated Trump backers to abandon his third presidential campaign.
Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is continuing to underperform expectations among the Republican voters. No doubt DeSantis’s advisors are dumbfounded by Trump’s enduring popularity, as nothing they do appears to boost their candidate’s poll numbers. Reports of DeSantis’s excellent Iowa ground game must give them hope that things will turn around, but it can’t be easy watching their candidate struggle in the interim.
It's hard to see how or why this trend reverses itself in the coming months, too. The establishment media’s focus will continue to be on Trump’s latest legal entanglement, senile Joe Biden will be further plagued with new revelations concerning his hopelessly warped son and the economy isn’t likely to rebound as long as interest rates and housing prices remain as high as they are now (or likely, go higher).
If Republicans – including Trump – can tighten their messages regarding the need to assure elections integrity and fair balloting, as well as continue to educate the voting public on topics such as abortion, Americans will weigh the choice of four more years of Democrat dictatorship under Biden (or whomever) versus opting for something different.
The establishment media and Democrat cable news shows will keep up with featuring any anti-Trump Republican voice who’s willing to perpetuate the myth that Trump is toxic, and, early next year, the focus will shift to the first voting states and actual primary results.
Today is the 22nd anniversary of the heinous terrorist attack on our country in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia (Pentagon). Ceremonies will be held, politicians will speak and the people will remember. More than ever, Americans crave real leadership and effective policy. This helps explain why Donald Trump’s popularity perseveres. Will the media finally get it?
Joe Biden economy
inflation
Biden cognitive decline
gas prices,
Nancy Pelosi
Biden senile
January 6 Committee
Liz Cheney
Build Back Better
Joe Manchin
RINOs
Marjorie Taylor Green
Kevin McCarthy
Mitch McConnell
2022 elections
Donald Trump
2024 presidential election
President Trump remains popular because he cares about American citizens and believes in the Constitution. He has rebelled against the Deep State tyranny tring to take away our rights and freedom. The fact that both parties made sure he was not reelected in 2020 is proof positive of that.