Pollsters, bookmakers, and political analysts seem to agree these days that former President Donald Trump is the favourite to win the presidential election in 2024. However, columnist Peter Van Buren with The American Conservative is taking this a step further: right in the title of his latest opinion piece, he boldly declares: ‘Trump Will Win’.
The author starts by sharing polling data we did not include in the analysis of our own, ‘direction of the country’ questions. As he points out, a record-low number of Americans agree with the proposition that the country is heading in the right direction, just 22 per cent. This is definitely not a good sign for an incumbent.
Yet, what Mr Van Buren describes as ‘the intellectual industry’ is trying to delude people into thinking everything is actually fine, and what is wrong with the current American economy is just their perception. According to the author, the elite of the intelligentsia came up with
three theories on why Americans, in particular the non-coastline populace, believe that the country is doing so badly.
The first one he dubbed ‘it’s the media, idiot,’ a reference to a quip made by Demcorcat strategist James Carville on live TV during Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign (his original quote was ‘it’s the economy, stupid’). According to Mr Van Buren, the liberal elite likes to chalk up the Biden administration’s low approval ratings to conservative media, such as talk radio, manipulating people into thinking that the economy is not doing well.
This is an ironic point to make, given the concentrated effort by the liberal mainstream media to sway public opinion in favour of the incumbent liberal administration. A prime example of that would be late-night comic Stephen Colbert’s monologue on his CBS show. It seemingly gave up on its original purpose of being a comedic monologue, and turned into a nicely produced propaganda piece about why ‘Bidenomics’ is actually working, and how strange it is that the average American is just not noticing that.
The second theory the left-wing elite touts, as outlined by Van Buren, is the ‘Referral Syndrome’. He credits The Wall Street Journal with the creation of this hypothesis, which purports that negative domestic and world events, such as mass shootings and foreign wars have an adverse effect on Americans’ view of the economy and the direction of the country. However, that is questionable, to say the least, given that there is no provable historical correlation between foreign conflicts and Americans’ economic outlook. Also, the presence of armed conflicts abroad and domestic shootings is constant, yet there have been plenty of times when people had a lot more confidence in the US economy than today.
The last of the theories explaining widespread pessimism comes from Paul Krugman of The New York Times, who blames it on the contagious apathy of Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was stolen. That is even more of a stretch than either of the ones listed above, which is indicative of the general attitude of the liberal intelligentsia—
talk about anything just to avoid admitting that the Biden economy is not doing so well.
However, as the author points out, there is a major challenge there: all the sleuth explanations and ponderings by the liberal elite cannot put any money into the American people’s pockets. As Mr Van Buren put it: ‘People know when they can both afford to feed the kids and pay the rent and when they cannot.’
And the economy is just one of the issues that causes problems for President Biden.
He has a very negative approval rating on immigration as well, the focal point of President Trump’s campaign messaging. People seem to intuitively agree with President Trump’s core message—which happens to be that of Viktor Orbán as well for Hungary—that is, the United States should dictate whom they allow into the country and whom they do not. The author writes that everyday Americans, unlike the coastal elites, see the adverse effects of mass illegal immigration in their own neighbourhoods. They also fear that the incoming masses of people may take away job opportunities from them.
‘Biden, in a way, should be thanked for drawing such a stark contrast between his immigration policy and Trump’s, and what the coastal elite minority hold true and what the majority of inner Americans believe and will express by voting for Trump,’ Mr Van Buren summed it up eloquently.
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