With what President Trump endured over the course of his term in office, it’s astounding that he could even get 10% of the nationwide vote, let alone (so far) nearly half of it.
As of Thursday morning, the Associated Press said Trump had 48% of the popular vote to Joe Biden’s 50%. It’s a shockingly close race, given that the media told us it was likely to be a blowout. Even the New York Times was admitting that Trump had done something impressive.
“He received at least 68 million votes, or five million more than he did in 2016,” the paper said, “and commanded about 48 percent of the popular vote, meaning he retained the support of nearly half of the public despite four years of scandal, setbacks, impeachment and the brutal coronavirus outbreak that has killed more than 233,000 Americans.”
Wow! But equally extraordinary is the suggestion that Trump was responsible for “four years of scandal,” a series of “setbacks” and roughly 1.5 million attempts by Democrats and liberals in the media to remove him from office.
He didn’t do that to himself. It was done to him. All of those accusations and stories about a Russia collusion scheme that never manifested. All of those rumors about administration officials plotting to invoke the 25th Amendment that likewise failed to materialize. The endless elevation of two-bit political players endowed with unquestionable authority by the media, so long as they said the right thing. (And the “right thing” is anything extreme and fantastical about how evil the president is at his core.)
Not a day goes by that we aren’t told over and over again in the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, on CNN and MSNBC that Trump is a racist, a misogynist, a xenophobe, a bigot, and even, according to the New York Times‘ Bret Stephens, not funny.
It’s all empty noise, but it’s exhausting, and anyone could be forgiven for saying, “I just want this all to go away, so tell me what I have to do.” It turns out all they would have to do is vote Trump out of office, and yet, many have decided that he’s worth the noise.
