Trump Takes a Hammer to the Carefully Maintained Delusions Inside the Left-Wing Bubble
May 13, 2023
Despite an audience that was friendly to the candidate, CNN’s recent town hall hosting Donald Trump was anything but an effort to inform independent and Republican voters about the candidate’s position on the substantial issues faced by struggling Americans. It was a hedonistic exercise to satiate its left-wing producers’ and viewers’ desire to emphasize all the criticisms that CNN talking heads have been levying against him since 2020.
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CNN certainly didn’t expect that Trump would simply concede to all the nonsense that they’ve been unsuccessfully peddling to Americans these past few years. He wasn’t going to say that he’s really sorry for purposefully stoking an insurrection that was worse than 9/11, or that he’d suddenly come to realize that the 2020 election was all on the up and up, or that, despite the worst inflation in decades, a massive invasion of aliens illegally crossing our borders, and the planet being on the brink of World War III, his successor is actually doing a bang-up job in the White House.
The CNN brass got exactly what they expected, though, which was peak ratings. As a medium for information delivery, cable news is clearly dying. But for a brief moment, CNN got to feel like Fox News felt nightly in the Tucker Carlson hour of prime time. Over three million Americans tuned in to watch Trump do what Trump has always done, which is to defend himself against hostile corporate media. Most of them tuned in to be entertained, and they weren’t disappointed.
But there was a minority among the audience, including several talking heads with the network, that was furious that CNN even allowed the spectacle. How dare they host a town hall for the Republican presidential frontrunner, they fumed. After all, people might hear what he has to say!
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They’re right to be worried about people hearing what Trump has to say. But not for the reasons that they once imagined.
They once imagined that they’re righteously defending the truth against a radical fringe minority. That fantasy has now tumbled like a house of cards.
A forlorn Anderson Cooper tells his audience that it was “indeed disturbing” that Trump was given a platform to “answer questions” only to proceed to tell “lie, after lie, after lie.” And it was “certainly disturbing to hear that audience, young and old, people who love their kids and go to church, laugh and applaud his lies.” He continues:
But here’s what I also get. The man you were so disturbed to hear from last night, that man is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for president. And according to polling, no other Republican is even close. That man you were so upset to hear from last night, he may be president of the United States in less than two years. And that audience that upset you? That’s a sampling of about half the country. They are your family members, and your neighbors, and they are voting. And many said they’re voting for him.
Just two months ago, Anderson Cooper’s show occupied the 8PM CNN timeslot in which the Trump town hall appeared. It garnered, on average in its first week, 584,000 viewers. It’s safe to say that he’s not speaking to “MAGA Republicans,” as Trump supporters are frequently called in an effort to make them seem like fringe radicals. No, he’s specifically speaking to his audience, which we can safely assume is the minority among the 3.1 million people who tuned in to watch that town hall.
He and his viewers are members of a sect of left-wing elitists who are so ensconced in their gated communities and left-wing echo chambers that they believe that it could only be a fringe minority of Americans that refuse to understand that Biden rescued the economy from Trump’s disastrous policies, or that only racists and xenophobes could see any problem with the unprecedented invasion by foreign nationals occurring at our borders, or that the average American could have any questions about the legitimacy of the 2020 election.
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One can hardly blame Anderson Cooper for imagining that he represents some obviously righteous majority. He has lots of money and influence, and represents the status quo, after all. The unelected politburos of the American government, media, academia, and corporations are all of the left, and they are staunchly anti-Trump. They spend ample amounts of time, energy, and money telling Americans to see things their way, and have, as of late, spent even more energy seeking to silence anyone trying to tell Americans anything different.
Anderson Cooper sadly informs his audience that it’s not actually a small minority of Americans that refuses to accept all the bad things CNN and Co. are saying about Trump, but “about half” of Americans are in that camp.
And if they’re sad to hear that, they really won’t like to hear the truth about how Americans feel about the narratives that CNN’s been peddling.
First of all, there’s the economy.
Energy is the lifeblood of any industrial power, and just two years into the Trump presidency, America was energy independent.
That might not mean much to a younger Americans, but it was once an impossible dream for America. We didn’t even speak of it, because it was too outlandish a goal. With the exception of Reagan, every president going back to Richard Nixon imposed an anti-oil stance.
Trump was a “radical departure from 50 years of received energy wisdom,” wrote Investor’s Business Daily in 2018. He told Americans that, for decades, the “myth of energy scarcity” was peddled.
What the country needs, he said, isn’t ‘alternative’ energy, or new austerity measures. It’s a government that ‘promotes energy development.’ Trump listed actions he was taking to lift federal impediments to energy production.
Lo and behold, Trump was right.
Within two years of his inauguration, Trump had done the unthinkable. We were energy independent, and the economy was booming.
As if it were a purposeful effort to be the exact inverse of that success, Biden’s first action was to kill the Keystone XL pipeline “while issuing a moratorium on oil and gas leasing on federal lands and waters,” which are the source of roughly 25-percent of U.S. production.
Coupled with inflation, which was perhaps inevitable after COVID intervention but was certainly exacerbated by the out-of-control spending supported and signed by Biden, it wasn’t even two years after Biden’s inauguration that U.S. energy prices rose at a higher rate than they had in 41 years.
Most Americans care less about Trump’s mean comments than being able to afford the costs of daily life. Also in 2022, we saw that it wasn’t just half of Americans, but a full 70-percent of Americans that believed that our government should encourage increased energy production to reduce our dependence upon foreign countries.
What about illegal immigration? Any attempt to frame what is occurring at the southern border as an “invasion” would surely earn at least a few accusations of racism or xenophobia. Yet over half of Americans openly frame it as an “invasion.” 27-percent of Americans would not say one way or another in response to that loaded question, and only 19-percent would say that the we are absolutely not being invaded through our southern border.
Get that? Only one-in-five Americans is willing to openly attest that we are not being invaded by foreign nationals across our southern border.
As Trump-era Title 42 ends, unprecedented waves of foreign nationals stand ready to break our laws and enter this country. It is Biden’s decision to rescind Trump’s policies that is driving this outcome. And well more than half of Americans do not approve of it.
But it is left-wing commentary around the 2020 election that is most fascinating. Pundits like Anderson Cooper speak about it as if only kooks at the local Elks Lodge would be raving about a rigged election, but because Cooper and Co. live in a left-wing bubble, they don’t understand that skepticism around the election is far more pervasive than that.
First of all, you don’t have to believe that voting machines were hacked, or that millions of fraudulent ballots were collected and counted, to understand intuitively that the election was rigged. The very best explanation as to how that happened was delivered by a pro-Biden conspirator at TIME, Molly Ball, who speaks of how a “shadow campaign saved the 2020 election”:
[T]he participants want the secret history of the of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a fever dream – a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.
I’m not sure that her confession was necessary, but the American people believe her. According to a poll observed in late 2020, 40% of Americans believe the election was “rigged or stolen.” Of note, only 36% disagree would say that it wasn’t “rigged or stolen.” The remainder said that they “neither agreed nor disagreed” or “didn’t know.”
That’s hardly a consensus against the “rigged election” theory. And when you look deeper, it gets more telling. Of that 36% who disagree that the election was “rigged or stolen,” one-in-three find it “understandable” that others would think it was.
What this means is that only one-in-four Americans agrees that the 2020 election was absolutely honest and fair. The remaining three-in-four Americans either believe it was “rigged or stolen,” or could understand how someone might think that it was, or they don’t know and/or simply refuse to answer the question.
For every one American who is as confident as Anderson Cooper that Joe Biden was constitutionally elected without any shenanigans at all, there are three other Americans who either disagree, or they aren’t so sure about that claim.
Cooper embodies the anger and sadness among progressives in learning that fact, having just recently discovered that as many as half of Americans somehow disagree with the standard CNN talking points that he espouses nightly.
Imagine their chagrin in discovering that they are now a smaller fringe minority than they once believed Trump supporters to be.
Photo credit: YouTube screengrab (cropped)
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