As I’ve written in the past, I prefer to read news and opinions rather than hear them spoken. So, this morning, I looked to read Trump’s acceptance speech at the RNC last night. Googling “Trump acceptance speech” didn’t produce the results I expected though i.e. transcripts. While Google did return one first-page link that held a transcript (my mistake – I should have added “transcript” to the search), it mostly returned commentary. A few of those commentaries indicated they were “fact checks.”
Curious, I googled “trump speech fact check.” Sure enough, NBCNews, FactCheck, NYTimes, Twitter, NPR, ABC, the Chicago Tribune, PBS, the NY Daily News, and PoliticusUSA appeared on the first search page, each with its fact checks. This “fact check” business is a relatively new phenomenon in political commentary. Unfortunately, it’s not usually what it promises i.e. a dispassionate assessment of claims by politicians and candidates. I’ve found most of them to be tendentious, battling cherry-picked assertions with carefully curated facts. As unfortunately, given that there are fewer and fewer places one can go that don’t crawl with bias of some sort, I usually have to wade through a few of these pages to drill down to facts of substance and devoid of biased presentation.
The fact-checking itself isn’t of primary interest. Rather, the fact that analyzing Trump’s speech via “fact-check” seems to be a common tactic on the morning-after is what’s informative. It’s yet another example of how the political analysis machine of Big Media still doesn’t get the Trump phenomenon.
If this election was about sound policy ideas, Trump would not have gotten out of the gate. If this election was about meticulous analysis, Trump would have been a non-starter. This is why all these fact-check rebuttals are merely echo-chamber fodder for those whose loyalty to the Left is absolute.
Trump’s appeal is his stark contrast to the browbeating that the Left has imposed on America over the past couple decades. Where Obama, Clinton and their ilk have a love for an vision of America that they wish to create (by force if necessary), Trump’s message is that he loves the America that is.
Obama and his proxies have spent years scolding Americans. Political correctness, social justice, subordination of American culture masquerading as “multiculturalism,” “for your own good” nannying, and the dismissal of so many of the concerns of Middle America are, combined, a declaration that how America is and has been is a massive wrong that must be righted by force. All America’s shortcomings of the past are emphasized, and all that has made it the greatest nation of the past century is denigrated. Average folks have been punched down by angry, sanctimonious, holier-than-thou elitists. This was epitomized by Michelle Obama’s infamous denigration of the entirety of American history prior to her husband’s elevation: “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country” and in Obama’s message of “change.”
Trump’s appeal lies in an appeal to pride, to the American way of yore, to a celebration of all the positives that this country has and has had over its two centuries of existence. The foundation laid by the Left, the over-swing of the pendulum in the direction of multiculturalism and exaltation of foreign ideas and foreign ways, is what led Trump down the nativist path.
Every presidency is a reaction to the previous presidency, and the success of Trump’s nativist message is in no small part due to the anti-nativist message that has permeated the political sphere these past years.
This is why all this fact-checking business isn’t going to amount to a hill of beans. The anti-Trump press still doesn’t get that Trump’s supporters don’t really care about whether Trump lied or exaggerated or spun or misspoke. “After all, the other side has been doing it for years, and Clinton is the queen of it,” is the dismissal. Nor do they care that his policy ideas don’t stand up to history, or that they’re not fleshed out, or that they’re contradictory, that they may come with all sorts of negative effects, or that he’s exhibited signs of authoritarianism on par with Obama and Clinton.
What they care about is that they’ve got someone who’s making them feel good about being American again. That is why Trump won the nomination, and that is why I still think he’s going to win in November.
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This is like the scene in “Field of Dreams,”
“Terence Mann: Ray, people will come Ray. They’ll come to Iowa for reasons they can’t even fathom. They’ll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they’re doing it. They’ll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. Of course, we won’t mind if you look around,…They’ll pass over the money without even thinking about it: for it is money they have and peace they lack. And they’ll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They’ll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they’ll watch the game and it’ll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they’ll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come Ray. ”
It is peace that we lack. Trump does not look like peace, but Hillary looks like war, and riots and unrest.
Peter, this is one of your better essays. The Left *still* doesn’t understand that they, and they alone, have created Donald Trump.
I had the misfortune to listen to WAMC’s morning program today. WAMC is an NPR network out of Albany. It’s the personal playground of Alan Chartok (http://wamc.org/people/alan-chartock), Political Scientist (TM), and noted lefty. He gets together with all of his lefty friends on public radio every Saturday morning.
Anyhow, today’s program, as you might expect, centered around The Horrendous And Awful And Utterly Vile Donald Trump. They all Godwined themselves repeated, recommending that viewers watch speeches by Trump or Guiliani with the sound off and *then* compare them with Hitler. Anything reasonable anyone had said at the convention they totally discounted; anything even slightly non-PC they practically had a shriek-fest over. Lefty heads were exploding, and when they were done, they just about joined hands to sing Kumbaya.
He doesn’t make me feel good about America; I already do.
He makes me feel disgusted with the GOP.
Matt, you and I (and probably most of the rest of Pigs and Sheep members) are not the ones Peter is referring to. Although Trump won the nomination it was with well less than 50% of all votes cast. What would have happened had there not been so many running that the Walkers and Perrys and Jindals hadn’t diluted the votes cast. And that those with zero hope like Graham and Pataki (who the hell is Pataki? I know he was a less than memorable governor of NY many years ago) and others. Or the money sucked in to Jeb when the electorate would not want yet another Bush. Who knows what would have happened if there had only been three or four more besides Trump.
Joining the discussion . Here background is white and fonts grey. Black fonts would be better, I think. Would look clearer. You have black fonts in the “Become a member and get posts like this in your inbox.” fields above.