There’s really just no other way to look at it.
Despite the four indictments handed down against former President Donald Trump in a span of five months, he continues to grow in popularity with GOP voters in presidential candidate polling.
Understandably, many of these voters view Trump’s growing legal woes as further evidence of a blatant banana republic-esque attempt at election interference by the sitting President of the United States seven years after the Clinton campaign-funded Russia collusion hoax was born in an effort to derail Trump’s campaign.
One would think that it would be just that obvious why Trump’s numbers with the Republican faithful are still holding strong, but not to NBC News anchor Chuck Todd, who on his “Meet the Press” program Sunday just couldn’t understand why a majority of Republicans would stick by Trump despite his current predicament:
Of course it used to be that extramarital affairs, campaign trail tears, forgetting a cabinet agency, even a weird scream could end a presidential campaign. Now, Donald Trump has been criminally indicted four times in as many months, and faces 91 felony counts, and so leads the Republican field nationally by nearly 40 points. Yet, outside of former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who is polling at 3% in a new Quinnipiac poll and, to a degree, his former Vice President Mike Pence,Trump’s Republican opponents, for the most part, are declining to take him on directly.
Watch:
https://twitter.com/KevinTober94/status/1693271562034569461?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1693271562034569461%7Ctwgr%5E3949e92545a0c30f822a05c3bf3391bfbb7fe495%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fredstate.com%2Fsister-toldjah%2F2023%2F08%2F21%2Fwatch-chuck-todd-melts-down-over-trumps-popularity-with-gop-voters-bidens-hillary-like-polling-woes-n2162859
Later during the panel discussion, Todd’s frustration with the current electoral picture only grew after he pointed to a graphic showing that Biden’s approval numbers at this point look more like Hillary Clinton’s in the fall of 2016, right before she lost, rather than how Biden’s looked in 2020, right before he was declared the election winner:
And the one thing I want to point out here is I want to show you his – this stuff has taken a huge toll on him. You know, Biden right before the 2020 election, he was right side up, which in our polarized politics is quite astonishing. Look, Trump and Rudy Giuliani began this campaign to try to tarnish Biden, to try to turn him into the Clinton name, you know, with the – with the obsession over the Ukraine businesses with Hunter. And it’s worked. His numbers now look more like Hillary Clinton ’16 than Biden ’20. Kimberly, we – maybe abortion is the difference, there? That – that – that will bail him out. But that doesn’t look good for him.
Watch:
https://twitter.com/KevinTober94/status/1693318836768981200?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1693318836768981200%7Ctwgr%5E3949e92545a0c30f822a05c3bf3391bfbb7fe495%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fredstate.com%2Fsister-toldjah%2F2023%2F08%2F21%2Fwatch-chuck-todd-melts-down-over-trumps-popularity-with-gop-voters-bidens-hillary-like-polling-woes-n2162859
First things first, though it’s not surprising it’s still SMH-worthy to see that Chuck Todd still has not learned the lessons from the 2016 presidential election. Republican voters, fed up with picking milquetoast candidates in the past who they viewed as morally upstanding enough but getting little in return for their loyalty, decided on the rabble-rouser guy who early on was considered the longshot precisely because he demonstrated that he didn’t give a rip about conventionality and decorum and civility and all that.
Trump promised to, in a metaphorical sense, turn over chairs and tables if necessary in order to implement a conservative agenda that he pledged would prioritize, among other things, a southern border wall, tax cuts, robust job growth, regulatory overhaul, and a “reshaping” of the federal judiciary including nominating a Supreme Court Justice or two if the situations presented themselves.
Whether Trump delivered on all of the above is a matter of opinion, but any Republican voter who shared those priorities in 2016 – and now – was/are bound to gravitate toward him or someone like him, with the various “official” elements working against Trump now (and then) only fueling the fire with what to many on the right look like nakedly partisan which hunts from Democrats, designed to take down a potential Republican opponent.
As to Biden’s numbers looking a lot like Hillary Clinton’s, isn’t it just precious that Todd – like CNN’s Jake Tapper – just can’t bring himself to admit that Joe Biden’s political woes, like Hillary’s, are mostly self-inflicted? Instead, it is the fault of his political opponents who had the nerve to do the digging into the Biden political machine that the MSM largely failed to do.
As usual with Chuck Todd, it’s all sound and fury signifying nothing – except the fact that seven years after Trump stunned the political world, the Beltway media elites still just don’t get it.
