Nothing that any Democrat or enemy of Donald Trump has ever said about his MAGA supporters has ever shown more genuine “contempt” for them than the president himself shows, according to one prominent New York Times columnist, and there is a very important reason why they let him get away with it.
In one of his most recent “Takes” videos shared to YouTube, liberal Times columnist Jamelle Bouie highlighted a “striking” recent remark Trump made during one of his ongoing midterm political rallies. In the exchange, while remarking on the “love” he felt from the gathered crowd in Clarksville, Tennessee, Trump claimed, “I could say the stupidest things, and you clap.”
Bouie suggested that this comment was directly tied to the same mindset that led Trump to infamously claim during his first presidential campaign that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose any voters. This sort of thinking, he argued, exposed the deep well of contempt he has for his most devoted followers, showing how little he thinks of their morals and intelligence.
These sorts of comments are also, Bouie added, far worse than anything that Democrats have ever said about Republican and MAGA voters. He singled out three specific examples of remarks from former President Barack Obama, former First Lady Hillary Clinton and former President Joe Biden that got them in considerable hot water, despite the fact that the context around the comments made them far more respectful than the things Trump has said about his own backers.
Obama, during his first presidential campaign in 2008, was attacked as “elitist” for claiming that rural voters clung to “guns and religion,” despite the fact that he was saying so with sympathy, explaining that they were taking comfort in concrete things as the world changed around them. Clinton, during her 2016 campaign, was attacked for calling Trump supporters “a basket of deplorables,” even though, in her full remarks, she made a clear distinction between reasonable Trump supporters and those who backed him out of shared bigotries. Biden, finally, was criticized for supposedly calling Trump supporters “garbage,” though he was doing so in reference to backers like comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”
“You could play this game all day long,” Bouie said. “Nothing Democrats have said about Trump or his supporters really matches what Trump himself has said about them. Why it doesn’t register like that is, in part, the double standard that exists: Republicans are effectively allowed to talk trash about large swaths of the public, and Democrats have to defer endlessly out of a sense that they don’t really represent ‘Real America,’ no matter how many real Americans call themselves Democrats.”
He added: “And part of this is just the way that the political media does treat Republicans is almost as a force of nature, something that you can’t expect to be better. But either way, it’s striking. It’s striking the level of contempt that Donald Trump has for his voters. It’s striking, the level of contempt that Republican politicians show for their voters, where they will tell them all kinds of insane falsehoods and expect them to be lapped up with no obstacle.”
Bouie further argued, however, that it “takes two to tango” in this odd dynamic, and suggested that the real reason Republicans are able to get away with treating their supporters poorly is that those supporters are aware of the dynamic, and let it play out that way.
“The fact these voters eat up this contempt, don’t seem bothered by it, is instructive as well because it’s telling you that they’re not really voting for Trump or supporting Trump for respect or for recognition,” he concluded. “Because they understand that even if he doesn’t respect them, they share hatreds, and those shared hatreds are what absolutely matter the most.”