Chris Buskirk at American Greatness reminds readers of MSNBC host Joe Scarborough getting the 2016 election completely wrong, buying into conventional wisdom that candidate Donald Trump was toast. Scarborough is currently on the warpath against Trump’s campaign CEO Steve Bannon, with day-to-day rants portraying the White House chief strategist as incompetent or mentally unstable.
From American Greatness:
Before the election Scarborough repeatedly warned Republicans to cut and run from their nominee. In August, he gravely warned that for Republicans the election is “about saving the Senate, it’s about not getting wiped out in the House, it’s about not getting wiped out in the state legislatures and governorships. We have a lot to lose.”
Instead, Republicans won big in 2016 with Donald Trump. Not only did Donald Trump beat down the Democrats’ vaunted Blue Wall of states from Wisconsin to North Carolina and win the White House, Republicans also retained control of both Houses of Congress and expanded their already impressive dominance at the state level—leaving wise men like Joe Scarborough with egg on their faces. As a result of last year’s election Republicans now control 32 governorships and 67 of 98 partisan state legislatures and have a trifecta (control of the governor and both state houses) in 25 states. In the year of Donald Trump, Republicans even won the governor’s mansion in deep blue Vermont. So much for Scarborough’s insight into the American electorate.
But he stills wants us to take him seriously when he says that Steve Bannon is stupid and can’t implement the putting together of a ham sandwich. Yet Scarborough’s only claim to authority is that he had a brief stint as a Congressman and now has a show on MSNBC. That show is, presumably, built around his alleged insights or practical wisdom. That is, at best, a tautology.
…
It may have escaped the notice of folks who appear regularly on Morning Joe, but Bannon and Co. won. What’s more they tapped into an innate political sensibility that bridges the Right-Left political settlement that has ruled for the past 30 years and, in so doing, they threaten the established political order.
But in Joe Scarborough’s world Bannon, who got the election right, is “stupid.” The 2016 election was about one thing: Who rules? Will it be the permanent political class or the people.
Read the rest here.
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