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You hypocrite! First take the beam out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye
Matthew 7:5
For four years, we’ve been treated to endless diatribes from the opponents of President Donald Trump, attacking his character. Yet the Trump-haters have been notably blind to their own failings. The same people who literally screamed helplessly at the sky, violently rampaged, beating, stabbing and shooting anyone so much as wearing a MAGA hat, and burned dozens of cities across America, were at the same time calling for “civility” and “decorum”.
At least one of their own has seen through their hypocrisy.
Trump’s ungracious and outrageous behaviour over the past week comes as little surprise, of course. For years he has acted as though courtesy and integrity are for losers, coarsening high office with low words, exhibiting not an ounce of the folksy magnanimity of his Republican predecessors; one of several reasons I think the outcome of this election was the right one.
And yet in sidin’ with Biden I find myself in the uncomfortable position of standing alongside perhaps the most insufferable tribe in modern politics: the contemptuous, condescending Trump-haters[…]
The liberals who loathe Trump may think their attacks on him just saved the free world from four more years; I think it more likely that millions of those who voted for Trump were partly motivated by a desire to give this smuggery a slap in the face. Sure, Trump has lost (whether he admits it or not) but this was not the landslide result many were expecting. Tens of millions of Americans still queued to tick the Trump box, despite his official status among detractors as Hitler Mk II – and herein lies a lesson about how not to win voters’ hearts and minds.
Hillary Clinton undoubtedly queered whatever hope she had of winning in 2016 with her “Basket of Deplorables” speech. To the surprise of no one but the left, it turned out that calling half of the country every bad name under the sun was not a winning strategy.
Yet the left didn’t learn a damn thing. If screeching and name-calling was a vote-winner, Biden should have won in a landslide. The fact that he apparently barely squeaked over the line, while Democrats went backwards in the House and Senate, is a massive warning bell that the left will almost certainly ignore.
As the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik – not a fan of Trump – warned, it is a “huge and even fatal mistake for liberals (and constitutional conservatives) to respond negatively to every Trump initiative, every Trump policy, and every Trump idea”[…]
Inconceivable as it may be to some, there are significant entries in the Trump administration’s credit column, too: the pre-Covid economic boom, the lowest unemployment rate in half a century, the extraordinary face-to-face relations with North Korea, peace deals brokered between Israel and Arab nations, criminal justice reforms that had strong bipartisan support. If his opponents had noticed these shades of grey, perhaps their condemnation of the president would have had more force. As it was, millions heard a wall of unvarying anti-Trump noise, and tuned out from it.
Most damagingly, the Trump-haters poured scorn not only on the president but on anyone who supported him. How enraging for voters in small-town Kansas to hear liberal pundits in tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses saying that they must not have known what they were voting for; that they had been conned by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh to vote against their interests.
How irritating for female, black, Latino and Muslim voters to be told they are traitors to their sex or race or religion if they support Trump, as though they were not individuals with views on tax cuts, law and order and defence as well as members of a minority group. The fact that Trump attracted a third of Latino voters, 52 per cent of Native Americans and 55 per cent of white women suggests that many refused to march meekly into the boxes prepared for them by identity politics obsessives.
The clearest sign that the left have learned not one damned thing in the last five years is their open, proud boast that they are drawing up blacklists in order to punish anyone and everyone even remotely connected with the Trump administration.
Far from learning, the left are doubling down on their unhinged hatred. Many voters are going to remember.
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