Many Americans say our President deserves another four years to complete the wall, deport illegals, repeal Obamacare, and fulfill his promise to “Make America Great Again.” Others are calling him divisive … hateful … racist … saying he should be replaced by liberal career politician Joe Biden, or even by an avowed socialist like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
Now it’s your turn to take a stand – are you for the conservative values embodied by President Trump? Or are you with Biden, Sanders, Warren and their leftist agenda including free health care, free college, open borders, and the Green New Deal?
If in November 2020 we are looking back on how Donald J. Trump came to be re-elected as President of the United States, those undergoing a second round of horror and dismay will find themselves reflecting on how seriously, and how often, they underestimated their foe.
The left has history when it comes to looking down on, and therefore underrating, its opponents. Ronald Reagan was derided as a genial but bumbling movie actor but was elected twice to govern both his state and his country. As was George W. Bush, who seemed to inspire a kind of hysterical contempt in his adversaries: Haha, he’s so stupid. He says words like “misunderestimate.” Oh, he’s beaten us. Again.
Donald Trump, by the same token, was surely too erratic and offensive and vulgar and narcissistic and unqualified to get his party’s nomination, let alone run an effective campaign. Let alone win.
You might think that the anti-Trumpists would have begun to learn from this long series of events, but apparently not. Their opinion of Trump as a man need not have changed from the one they formed two years ago in the primaries, but neither does their view of his capabilities seem to have evolved. Inevitably, then, their underestimations continue.
This error takes two forms. The first is to deny his achievements, and therefore miss how they galvanize his support. As I found in my most recent round of research, one of the things Trump voters most often say they like about his presidency is the economy: new jobs, higher take-home wages and, of course, the booming stock market. His opponents naturally refuse him the credit for these things. Yet speaking during her campaign about President Bill Clinton’s economic record, Hillary herself said “the results speak for themselves… America saw the longest peacetime expansion in our history.” Well, either a president deserves the plaudits for economic success or he doesn’t. And according to my recent focus groups in Memphis, Tenn., and Oxford, Miss., Trump voters see a direct connection.
(——————- Advertisement ——————-)