At a recent New York event, a Democratic business titan grabbed me by the shoulder and asked what I thought. I started to say that Donald Trump has the momentum, but he squeezed my shoulder tighter and cut me off.
“He’s going to be president,” my friend said with conviction.
A similar thing had happened the night before, with a conservative friend, who has not been a Trump supporter, declaring, “Trump is going to win.”
I’m not convinced, but there is no denying that, as the first debate approaches, big change is unfolding before our eyes. The combination of Trump’s rise in the polls and Hillary Clinton’s decline, politically and physically, is so pronounced that it is reshaping voters’ expectations of the outcome.
Nate Silver, the statistical guru who runs the FiveThirtyEight blog, now gives Trump a 42 percent chance of winning and is sounding the alarm to complacent Democrats. “Never seen otherwise-smart people in so much denial about something as they are about Trump’s chances,” he tweeted. “Same mistake as primaries, Brexit.”
The new dynamics are rippling through the left-wing media, too. Clinton’s poor performance is leading to suddenly critical pieces of her, and the daily barrage against Trump has lost some of its zealotry. It could be fatigue, or demoralization that their campaign to bring him down is failing.
Charles Lane, a Washington Post opinion writer, attempted to explain the landscape. Under the headline “Why the media blitz on Trump isn’t working,” Lane wondered why “so many Americans support Trump despite months and months of negative, truthful coverage about him?”
Reflecting his bias — that the media should be trusted and Trump never — Lane answered his own question by likening Trump’s support to jury nullification. Noting that some juries acquit clearly guilty defendants to send a message about something they consider more important, such as the criminal-justice system, Lane sees Trump supporters using their votes as a mistaken protest against the political system.
He has a point, but misses an even larger one. Lane’s logic fails because he is implicitly sneering at Trump backers in ways that echo Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” slur, and reflects the same basic assumption. To wit, a vote for Clinton is the only rational choice and anybody who doesn’t agree isn’t thinking straight.
This is pretty much always how the left sees and talks about the rest of America. Ostensibly open and inclusive, many liberals are in fact parochial, closed-minded and bigoted. They don’t understand or have any respect for those who view the world differently.
Trump’s backers also are demeaned in ways that suggest racial and class bias. White, affluent liberals are contemptuous of his working-class supporters, as if only poor nonwhites can have legitimate grievances.
The numbers show how ignorant their assumptions are. Translating Trump’s polls into votes, his support of 40 percent or more would mean about 50 million votes. Those 50 million Americans, citizens of all kinds and living all across this huge country, are telling us something about themselves, their worries and their dreams, but are being dismissed as ignorant and irrational bigots.
Is self-interest only valid for media-approved groups? Are individual liberty and democracy still respected?
Of course they are — as long as you vote as you are told. Liberals are smarter and better, so they will pick your president. Now shut up.
This is the crux of the left’s insufferable air of superiority and it is driving Trump’s supporters into his arms. A fair, sober dissection of Trump’s many flaws might have hurt him, but Big Media’s hysterical designation of him as Public Enemy No. 1 is helping him.
Some of his support is not coming despite media attacks, but because of them. The more the establishment tries to crush him, the stronger he grows.
The same phenomenon helps explain why Trump’s primary voters dumped Jeb Bush and other milquetoast Republicans. It is also why his core supporters reject Clinton, seeing her experience as proof that she would continue to tilt the political and economic systems against them.
Trump’s voters found a candidate they believe speaks for them and their vision of America, and they will not be intimidated by an establishment they don’t like and a media they don’t trust.
The blinkered elite can call it whatever they want — grievance, nullification, deplorable. But it is democracy, where all voters matter, and thank God it still lives in America.
Cuomo the last man standing
Gov. Cuomo is either the only honest man in Albany, or one lucky guy.
The latest round of criminal charges rocking the capital allege a circle of corruption around the governor. Ten aides, donors and confederates, some afflicted with Soprano-wannabe attitudes, were rounded up over allegations of bribes, shakedowns and bid-rigging, tainting Cuomo and his economic development programs.
Following earlier convictions against his chief amigos, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, Cuomo is left with a Sgt. Schultz defense: I know nothing, I see nothing!
It’s all he has, and it might be good enough. US Attorney Preet Bharara has investigated Cuomo twice, and twice found nothing actionable.
Yet Cuomo’s vow to clean up Albany has been exposed as a sham. In his 2010 campaign, he declared that “Albany’s antics today could make Boss Tweed blush.”
Six years later, Tammany Hall’s rules remain intact and Boss Tweed is still blushing.
What’s really buggin’ de Blasio
Why so glum, chum?
Mayor de Blasio is extra testy these days, railing against reporters, rivals and ordinary citizens. The common threads are questions about his performance and integrity.
It’s all unfair, he declares, so much so that he’s hiding in the conspiracy weeds. When a caller to WNYC radio asked him if donations from animal-rights groups were behind de Blasio’s decision to spend $2 million of taxpayer money to sterilize Staten Island deer, the mayor shot back:
“You just don’t have your facts straight,” and demanded the caller “leave your conspiracy theories at home.”
My, my. Does he see a vast right-wing conspiracy? Or is it an everybody-against-de-Blasio conspiracy?
It’s probably the latter, with even former ally Scott Stringer, the city comptroller, unloading on him.
It would be easy, and wrong, to say public criticism fully explains the mayor’s foul mood. More likely, he’s hearing the footsteps of prosecutors.
The bombshell charges filed by US Attorney Preet Bharara against Gov. Cuomo’s associates and donors could signal that Bharara’s investigations into de Blasio are also near the finish line.
If so, de Blasio soon will be exonerated of pay-to-play suspicions, or hit with serious criminal charges.
Either way, critical New Yorkers won’t matter as much.
Going full tilt in San Francisco
Dubai has the world’s tallest building and China has forests of empty apartment towers. Now San Francisco boasts a 58-story apartment tower that is both sinking and leaning, earning it the title of “the leaning tower of San Francisco.”
Some people will do anything to attract tourists.