Longtime Democrat strategist James Carville had a meltdown over former President Donald Trump becoming the president-elect, telling his podcast listeners that his win is “depressing” and “sickening.”
Carville, who first gained notice as a lead strategist in former President Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign, shared his dramatic thoughts in a Thursday episode of Politics War Room:
“I just have to get over the fact that I’m 80 years old and I live in a country that has put a felonious bigot, who has no idea of what the world is like, is the most parochial, secular person that you could imagine…,” Carville said before pondering where it went wrong for the Democrats.
“And I don’t know what percent of this defeat is because we didn’t embrace the change message or we kept something too long — was there some flaw in our strategy, in our presentation? But at the end of the day, there’s still a lot of people that voted for this.”
Tuesday’s results were not even close, with Trump gaining 295 electoral votes over Vice President Kamala Harris’s 226 — with the Trump-leaning states of Arizona and Nevada still counting.
Trump also won the popular vote by millions, with the New York Times tally showing 72,757,217 ballots cast for him (50.9 percent) over Harris’s 68,103,050 votes (47.6 percent).
Carville then went on to complain about incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) beating Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX).
“And everything people in Texas knew about Ted Cruz, and the thing that hurts so bad, is Colin Allred is the very definition of a really fine person. So, I’m gonna just — I’ll have to reevaluate,” the former Clinton adviser said.
“I’m sure I’ll come up with something to make me feel good again, but right now, today, it’s hard, I’ll be honest with you. And the hardest thing is that I look across this country, and tens of millions of people fell for this shit, and it’s just, it’s depressing, but I will snap out of it,” Carville added.
Going on to say that it is “sickening” that Trump won the popular vote, Carville brought up Adolf Hitler:
It’s not hard to say there’ve been plenty of criminals, charlatans, conmen, traitors, scumbags — we’ve had all of that before. But I don’t — we’ve never had remotely — and people embracing and endorsing this is — it’s just, it’s sickening. But this guy got 50 percent, okay? They can make the argument Hitler never got 33. Okay, this is frightening that we would get here, and by the way, in 4 percent unemployment. Okay, I mean, I’m sorry.
The veteran Democrat strategist added that he is “in a very, very dark tunnel” emotionally.
On Wednesday, he listed President Joe Biden’s “late” dropout from the race and Harris’s failure to distance herself from the administration as reasons behind her loss.
“By Biden staying in so late, we didn’t have any process,” Carville said. “We had all of this unused [talent] sitting on the sideline.”
“If we’d had some kind of an open process, it would have been much better,” he added. “It could have been worse, but it could have been much better.”