Repair-It

A melodramatic Van Jones is free to claim that Trump’s victory is a “white-lash.” But ever since Barack Obama’s unprecedented passage of Obamacare, his party has lost more than a thousand seats nationally in three wave elections. From 2010, the electorate demanded Washington share power, but the president didn’t listen, relying on executive power, the bureaucracy, and judiciary to pass agenda items without consensus or compromise. A couple of weeks ago I asked, “When Will Liberals Answer For Obamacare’s Failures?” Today, apparently.

The media never treated Clinton as an atypical candidate, although she was in so many ways. No matter how often she lied or much we learned about her racketeering or her malleable positions on foreign policy and everything else, her defenders could claim that there was no moral equivalency between her and Trump.

There was. Democrats nominated one of the least trusted people to ever run for the presidency. According to the final Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll, Americans trusted Hillary six points less than they did Trump, whose absurdities and outright fabrications probably came off as straight talk to millions of Americans sick of hearing manicured talking points.

Trump might also have been the beneficiary of decades of vacuous liberal attacks on Republican candidates who, as you know, are always racist, homophobic, transphobic xenophobes because they have different ideas about society or policy. Voters might be becoming increasingly immune to these histrionics. Yet, as soon as it became apparent that Trump would win, liberal commentators began blaming bigotry again. The Left has become so saturated in identity politics, it can’t imagine that anything else might drive a voter.

As my colleague Sean Davis has noted, though, seven states that voted for Obama twice voted for Trump in 2016. Did all these Americans suddenly become racist in a few years time?

Certainly none of these voters cared for the reasons I was opposing a Trump presidency, either — which, broadly speaking, would be the preservation of constitutional process and the expansion of free trade. The consensus solidified around one thought: Hillary was worse. A lot worse. She was corrupt, power hungry, and a would-be dictator who needed to be kept out of the White House.

Because they were so convinced Trump was going to win, I sort of felt sorry when anticipating their disappointment. Not only because I personally disliked many of Trump’s positions and the thought of one-party rule, but because nothing I read or saw from the experts pointed to a GOP victory.

The joke, of course, was on me.