Kellyanne Conway wrote an op-ed for the NY Times about how poor Donald Trump is treated so badly. It’s as awful as you would imagine. I thought J.V. Last at the Bulwark handled it well:
The New York Times is such a liberal media bubble that it paid Kellyanne Conway and handed her real estate on its opinion page for a piece about Donald Trump. Because Kellyanne has a long history as a straight shooter and honest broker who can give truthful and unbiased information while adding value for Times subscribers.
Three cheers for both sides.
Look, I’m not here to rag on the Times. I just want to talk about a single paragraph in Kellyanne’s piece:
Trump Derangement Syndrome is real. There is no vaccine and no booster for it. Cosseted in their social media bubbles and comforted within self-selected communities suffering from sameness, the afflicted disguise their hatred for Mr. Trump as a righteous call for justice or a solemn love of democracy and country. So desperate is the incessant cry to “get Trump!” that millions of otherwise pleasant and productive citizens have become naggingly less so. They ignore the shortcomings, failings and unpopularity of President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris and abide the casual misstatements of an administration that says the “border is secure,” inflation is “transitory,” “sanctions are intended to deter” Putin from invading Ukraine and they will “shut down the virus.” They’ve also done precious little to learn and understand what drives the 74 million fellow Americans who were Trump-Pence voters in 2020 and not in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Where to begin?
When you picture “communities suffering from sameness,” do you think about Trump voters, or Biden voters?
Sure looks like Trump’s support suffers from an awful lot of sameness: White evangelical Protestants, mostly without college degrees. It’s the Biden supporters who are all over the map: Whites, Blacks, Catholics, Protestants, religious and not-religious; college educated and non-college educated.
As for the media bubbles people keep themselves in, say what you will about the woke socialist antifa subscribers of the New York Times—but they are paying their hard-earned money to get the views of Kellyanne Conway and Ross Douthat. How about the people watching Fox News and Newsmax and reading the Federalist and Townhall? Is both-sides journalism a thing at those places, too?
And are Democrats really blind to the weaknesses of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris?
That is not the impression I get from the liberal culture!
But it’s this line that really grinds my gears:
They’ve also done precious little to learn and understand what drives the 74 million fellow Americans who were Trump-Pence voters in 2020 . . .
For starters, one thing “they” did was nominate the most moderate Democrat available who set his campaign up with the explicit goal of winning back some white working-class voters.
In office, the Biden administration has pursued a mostly bipartisan agenda focused on the economy and jobs and has left the Democrats’ progressive wing largely unfulfilled. So as a piece of analysis, Kellyanne is objectively wrong. Whether or not Biden has succeeded, Democrats have clearly been trying to understand what drove Trump voters and win them back.
But the best part—the pièce de résistance—is Kellyanne belittling Democratic efforts to understand the desires of 74 million Trump voters while making no attempt whatsoever to understand what drove 81 million Biden voters.
And all this in the course of a piece in which Kellyanne displays nothing but scorn, dismissal, and mockery for 81 million Biden voters.
As always: Projection is the sincerest form of Trumpism.
KellyAnne is just issuing the usual rightwing grievance about how Republicans get no respect. They’re all so hurt that the rest of the country doesn’t agree with them that they are now deluding themselves that they actually do but their votes are being stolen by nefarious commie loving moonbats. They sound like toddlers wailing, “why won’t you listen to me!!!”
As to why the NY Times decided to give Conway the space to spew this tired whine I can’t imagine. But I’m sure that Trump is very pleased and will reward her with a plum job on his campaign. It’s hard to imagine why anyone else would.