If nothing goes really wrong, President Donald J. Trump can win re-election. This is particularly true if the Democratic Party runs some caricature of liberalism like Elizabeth Warren. She’d be a better president than Trump, but she’d be a worse candidate than Hillary Clinton. Female, extremely liberal and from Massachusetts, she’d get the same numbers that Clinton did in the same places that Clinton did, and that’s not good enough.
You want to know why Trump is on the path to winning?
Unemployment is down. Way down. It doesn’t make any difference if he caused it; he gets the credit. Every elected official, from mayor to president, gets credit for unemployment drops during his/her time in office.
He’s being investigated? So what? The Republicans investigated Hillary Clinton several hundred times and found nothing. Now, everyone assumes the investigation of Trump is as politically motivated as the investigations of her.
Guns. You got a gun? Anyone try to take it? Trump can take credit for that, too.
I know a guy who said to me that he’ll vote for Trump next time because, “At least I know my guns will be safe for another four years.” Don’t laugh at that guy, either. There’s a hell of a lot of him.
Trump went to Korea. Was it a bad deal? Sure, it was. Trump got snookered. But he went, and that’s really all he had to do. Results don’t count.
Trump respects the flag, a phrase which is completely meaningless, but a great number of people think our flag is being burned every day, coast to coast, by Muslims, gays and America-haters. Trump thinks if you kneel for the anthem, you should be thrown out of the country. Ridiculous, no? No. Millions of people feel the exact same way.
Trump respects our veterans. He treated certifiable hero John McCain like something he was trying to scrape off his shoe, but Trump wants to throw you out of the country if you kneel for the anthem, and that means he respects the men and women who died for our freedom. That’s exactly what it means to a lot of people, and they get to vote.
In the newsroom where I work, except for a couple of lonely Trump supporters, I was the only one who thought Donald J. Trump had a good shot at winning.
You know why?
Because my circle of friends is not limited to people who are just like me. White-collar college-educated liberals tend to hang out with other white-collar college-educated liberals. They never saw Trump coming. If you read The New York Times coverage of Trump’s winning run for office, you realize the paper didn’t know you could vote if you had only a high school diploma and lived in Oklahoma.
“What the hell!” the Times said after the election. “Those people can VOTE?!”
Turned out they could vote, even if they owned guns, liked karaoke and believed all that weird stuff in Revelations.
The political establishment missed those people the first time around, and if they miss ‘em again, and he doesn’t get convicted of anything, Trump will get a second term.