Earth moved this week. Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s “Meet the Press”, went on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and said the following – “I have a good friend who has refused to buy a gun all along. Now he is seriously considering buying a gun“. Todd added that he is seeing a serious concern in people he knows – concern that they no longer feel secure and that is because they have lost their confidence in President Obama.
May be the earth didn’t actually move. But the tectonic plates under the American political landscape certainly shifted this week. Chuck Todd is as much an Obama-camper as there is and MSNBC is all-Obama all the time despite the sometimes heroic efforts of host Joe Scarborough to add some balance. For Chuck Todd to openly talk about people losing confidence in President Obama and approve of his friends buying guns – folks, this is clear evidence of a massive shift in American mindset.
This shift has been occurring under the surface for the past couple of months. But it became visible this week due to the consequtive shocks of Paris & San Bernadino. As Chuck Todd hinted, the response of President Obama shows how irrelevant he now seems to the American people. President Obama is now a mirror image of how out of touch President George W. Bush became in 2008, not just a regular mirror image but a more amplified one.
And that may well become the key to the 2016 Presidential campaign. Back on July 12, 2014 we had written:
- “We think the 2016 campaign will be run against President Obama’s tenure just as the 2008 campaign was run against President Bush’s tenure. That is why the candidate who is most anti-Obama, who seems most capable of delivering what Obama could not, is the candidate most likely to succeed.”
At that time, the only Republicans running were Senators & Governors. In that group, the candidate who was credibly anti-Obama with the best track record was the three-time Governor of Texas, Rick Perry.
Enter Donald Trump and everything changed. He was the only one and still remains the only candidate on either side to speak about what the American people care about, the problems of middle America. Whether by smarts or by sheer luck, what Trump says, what he geuinely seems to believe, is what industrial America, the core middle class of America feels, & wants to hear from those who want to be their next President. And Trump is the candidate with a visibly larger track record of accomplishment than others.
David Axelrod, winning strategist of the two Obama victories, recently said on CNN – I felt sure in 2008 that Obama would win because he was the most anti-Bush candidate. He added that the winner in 2016, at least in the Republican primaries, could well be Donald Trump because Trump is the most anti-Obama candidate today. And that Axelrod admission was pre San Bernandino.
It is amazing that a multi-billionaire from New York City with a Romanesque life style could be so in tune with what the entire belt from Western Pennsylvannia to Illinois feels – that every “free” trade signed in the past 20 years has meant loss of jobs, loss of income to the industrial workers of America, the people whose fathers built post-WWII American wealth. This is something the “elite” Massachusetts Romney could never grasp. It was so beyond him.
It is amazing that an all-NYC multi-billionaire with a Mogulesque life style could be so in tune with what the entire southwest of America recognizes – the flood of illegal aliens has changed the milieu of the southwest. This is something the Arizonian McCain could not grasp. It was so beyond him.
Trump seems to get what core America wants to hear and wants to get done. And, in his characteristic style, he is telling them to trust him to do it.
The bi-coastal television elite of America still don’t get it. They remain focused on the words Trump uses and how he uses them. They remain so despite what rooted people like Mike Rogers, ex-Congressman from Michigan, has said to CNN anchors – his constituents speak just like Trump.
Donald Trump comes across as authentic, real, and like every American who is utterly fed up with the mess that is today’s America – a loser globally, embroiled domestically in peripheral causes that are so outside what mainstream America is dealing with. Trump has a track record of success that every American voter would love to get a piece of. People are hoping that he will deliver to them some of the success he has delivered to himself & his family. And that, as Congressman Mike Rogers said weeks ago on CNN, is a very powerful message.
This why America’s most reliable bellwether county has fallen for the wild man from New York, reports Politico in their cover story Trump County, USA. Read what Parker Eaton said to Politico:
- “There’s only one: Trump, … The reason why, in my opinion: He spends his own money. He’s not going to have any lobbyist or any high zillionaires that he has to do favors for, and I understand Clinton has already got millions of dollars from China and Japan and all them. So who in the hell does she owe favors to? If Trump got in, he doesn’t owe anybody. I haven’t heard him say one word that I don’t agree with. I don’t think he can do a lot of the things he said, but by God, he’s saying it.” [emphasis ours]
Trump is in a zone right now, to use a basketball term. Like Stephen Curry, any shot he takes goes in and all the traditional defenses of his opponents prove useless in stopping him. Just look at his recent promise that sounded so horrific to his opponents, even to fellow Republican candidates – the promise to build a database of Muslims in America to monitor them. Even Ted Cruz jumped on him for being un-American and then what happened?
- Ben Shapiro @benshapiro –
Left last week: Trump is a Nazi! He wanted a registry of Muslims!
Left this week: We need a registry to ban some Muslims from having guns.
San Bernadino happened. A fellow worker that people knew & liked suddenly came in with his wife with military grade assault rifles to kill 14 of his fellow workers & wound 22 others. A man they thought was a fellow American turned out to be an ISIS-type Muslim who killed his co-workers without any human feeling.
All of a sudden Trump did not seem so biased, so hateful or prejudiced at all. He seemed a real leader and almost prescient in things he promises to keep America safe and to blow our enemies away .
As Mr. Eaton said to Politico, American people understand that real change is needed, that America is going in the wrong direction. They don’t expect Trump to do everything he promises. They just want a tenacious, determined, son of a gun who will take America on the path to success & as far away from Obama as possible. And that leader they see is Trump.
As we said, Trump is in a zone right now.
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