At a time when far too many people feel ignored by elites, Trump spoke for hours about their problems in ways that Harris seemingly wouldn’t or couldn’t
Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris so badly in the presidential election this week that now Tiananmen Tim Walz can say he’s witnessed a massacre. We were told it was going to be tight but this thing turned out to be as close as Maine is to Maui when they finished counting the votes. And by “THEY” I mean everybody except Arizona and Nevada.
President Trump’s haters in what he likes to call the Fake News Media are attributing his landslide victory to racism, sexism, or both, if you happen to be watching that well-dressed insane asylum we call “The View.” History will show it was another “ism” that powered his White House sequel:
Donald Trump connected with working-class voters on unprecedented levels by spreading the gospel of Podcast Populism.
He’s long held the edge on top issues such as the border or the economy but it was his willingness to engage in free-range conversations with wildly popular hosts like Joe Rogan that ultimately showcased his America First ideas to millions of potential new supporters.
At a time when far too many people feel ignored by Washington elites, Trump spoke for hours about their problems in candid and conversational ways that Kamala Harris seemingly wouldn’t or couldn’t.
For most of this election, Harris’ stock answer on how to combat soaring grocery prices was to feign empathy by opining that she was raised in a middle-class family. There was also a vow to fight corporate price gouging–which sounds great until you realize it doesn’t exist.
Contrast that with Trump, who has gone into great detail on his plan to frack our way out of this mess by creating more energy and lowering shipping costs so they can’t be passed onto the consumer. Regardless of where you stand on fracking, it had to feel better for a struggling single mom to hear a guy campaigning with ideas while his opponent campaigned with celebrities.
Love Beyoncé as you might, you didn’t really get the feeling she felt your pain in the self-checkout lane. Nor could you feel better about the border crisis watching Bruce Springsteen endorse Kamala after she let in millions of illegals who weren’t “Born in the U.S.A.”
These inside access sessions on various podcasts also served to humanize Trump in ways that took the teeth out of the left’s sharpest character attacks. If you only listened to the shrieking heads at MSNBC, you’d think he was some type of hellbent Hitler obsessed with destroying democracy and everything in his path. You might believe he was a rage-filled Russian operative if you watched Jimmy Kimmel on a nightly basis, which I wouldn’t do at gunpoint
Yet for all the talk about vibes in this election, nobody’s brand trended better than Trump’s when he told a hilarious story to comedian Andrew Schulz about the time he came home early and caught a young Don Jr. throwing a party at Trump Tower. He also went viral for detailing his late brother’s struggles with alcohol on Theo Von’s podcast, as the comic explained why he can no longer do cocaine. (At least we know it wasn’t Theo’s coke they found in the White House.)
The Harris campaign did have the entirety of the legacy media in her back pocket, but it’s hard to endear yourself to voters when your biggest character endorsements come from the people who spent four years telling us President Joe Biden was sharp as a tack. Sad as it might be to say, Biden will go down as the only president in history who makes the sign language interpreter shrug.
Which explains why voters threw up their arms when it came time to support her.
Trust in corporate media is at an all-time low and Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter has only furthered voter reliance on alternative news sources like social media and podcasts. Trump’s instinct to embrace them paid off in the form of a 12-point edge with working class voters, where he beat Harris 55%-43%, which marks an eight-point improvement over his performance against Biden in 2020.
There are a million reasons why people were inspired to vote for Trump this time around, from the resiliency he showed in the face of multiple assassination attempts to the reality that 70% of voters think the current administration has the country headed in the wrong direction. As vice president, Kamala Harris is one half of that broken GPS, yet she proclaimed on numerous occasions that she couldn’t think of anything she’d do differently than her boss. That is the political equivalent of telling your cruise ship passengers you wouldn’t do anything the captain of the Titanic wouldn’t do
Which is all a fancy way of saying, spare me the attacks on Trump’s character and more importantly, the people of all races who voted for him.
Donald Trump may have been the richest man ever elected to the presidency but he got back there a second time by making working-class listeners feel heard.
