Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris in the presidential election this week, and Tiananmen Tim Walz may now claim to have witnessed a massacre. We were told it would be tight, but when they completed counting the votes, it was as close as Maine is to Maui. And “THEY” refers to everyone except Arizona and Nevada.
President Trump’s detractors in what he refers to as the Fake News Media blame his landslide victory on racism, sexism, or both, if you chance to be watching that well-dressed insane asylum we call “The View.” History will demonstrate that another “ism” fueled his White House sequel:
Donald Trump achieved unprecedented levels of popularity among working-class people by promoting the gospel of Podcast Populism.
He’s always had an advantage on key topics like the border and the economy, but it was his willingness to engage in open-ended discussions with phenomenally famous broadcasters like Joe Rogan that finally exposed his America First principles to millions of potential new followers.
At a time when far too many people believe Washington elites are ignoring them, Trump spoke for hours about their problems in open and conversational ways that Kamala Harris appears to have refused or could not.
For the most of this election, Harris’ standard response to rising grocery prices has been to pretend empathy by claiming to have grown up in a middle-class household. There was also a promise to combat corporate price gouging, which sounded terrific until you realized it didn’t exist.
In contrast, Trump has gone into great detail about his plan to frack our way out of this crisis by increasing energy production and cutting shipping costs so that they cannot be passed on to consumers. Regardless of your position on fracking, it must have felt great for a struggling single mother to hear a guy campaign with ideas while his opponent campaigned with celebrities.
Love Beyoncé as you may, you didn’t get the impression she felt your anguish in the self-checkout line. You couldn’t feel any better about the border situation watching Bruce Springsteen promote Kamala after she admitted millions of illegal immigrants who weren’t “Born in the U.S.A.”
AHEM.
These insider access talks on various podcasts also helped to humanize Trump, taking the sting out of the left’s harshest character attacks. If you only listened to the screeching heads on MSNBC, you’d believe he was a hellbent Hitler bent on destroying democracy and everything in his way. If you watched Jimmy Kimmel every night, you could think he was a vengeful Russian operative, which I wouldn’t do under duress.
Despite all of the hype about vibes in this election, nobody’s brand trended higher than Trump’s when he told comedian Andrew Schulz a humorous story about coming home early and catching a young Don Jr. throwing a party at Trump Tower. He also went viral for discussing his late brother’s troubles with booze on Theo Von’s podcast, as the comedian explained why he no longer uses cocaine. (At least we know they didn’t find Theo’s coke in the White House.)
The Harris campaign had the whole legacy media on her side, but it’s difficult to endear oneself to voters when your strongest character recommendations come from folks who spent four years telling us President Joe Biden was sharp as a tack. Unfortunately, Biden will be remembered as the only president in history to make a sign language interpreter shrug.
This explains why voters threw up their hands when it came to supporting her.
Trust in corporate media has reached an all-time low, and Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter has only increased voter reliance on alternative news sources such as social media and podcasts. Trump’s instinct to embrace them paid off with a 12-point lead among working-class voters, as he defeated Harris 55%-43%, an eight-point improvement on his performance against Biden in 2020.
There are a million reasons why people were inspired to vote for Trump this time around, from his tenacity in the face of several assassination attempts to the fact that 70% of voters believe the present administration is taking the country in the wrong way. As vice president, Kamala Harris is one half of that faulty GPS, but she has often stated that she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently than her boss. That is the political equivalent of telling your cruise liner passengers you would never do something that the captain of the Titanic would not do.
Which is all a clever way of saying, spare me the attacks on Trump’s character and, more significantly, the people of all colors who supported him.
Donald Trump may have been the wealthiest president in history, but he won a second term by making working-class voters feel heard.