grieving Muslim Gold Star parents who criticized him from the stage of the Democratic convention. Finally, there was the supposed silver bullet: the 2005 Billy Bush Access Hollywood tape, bragging about grabbing women.
Every misstep of the way they believed—hoped—he was a dead candidate walking, yet to their horror he seemed only to gain steam, with packed arenas and tens of thousands standing outside watching jumbotrons, roaring their approval along with millions doing the same thing at home. But it wasn’t just the maverick nature of this man and the unorthodox campaign he was running. It was the message. The press had no idea how powerfully it was resonating.
Missing the Revolution
The smartest people in the room believe their thumbs are pressed firmly on the pulse of the American public, but their world extends only across a tract of land along the Manhattan–Washington, D.C., corridor, along with some real estate in Beverly Hills. They were clueless as to the mood of an electorate in the real America that has lost its patience with the elites both in and out of government. This necessarily included them.
To understand the electorate in 2016 it is essential that one (re)read Angelo Codevilla’s “America’s Ruling Class—And the Perils of Revolution,” published by The American Spectator six years before. The 12,000-word essay was a masterpiece, read out loud by Rush Limbaugh to his millions of listeners. Codevilla presented an existential struggle for the future of America between what he dubbed the “ruling class” and the “country class.” It was prescient. Codevilla had perfectly described the opposing forces in the 2016 presidential campaign.
The ruling class is a fraternity whose membership includes those in a position of power over a population it views as less able—if not wholly unable—to handle its own affairs. “For our ruling class, America is a work in progress, just like the rest of the world, and they are the engineers.” The ruling class has no party affiliation. “Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degrees, not kind,” the author wrote. “No prominent Republican challenge[s] the ruling class’s claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party [does] not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.”
On the other side of the coin is the country class with its “desire to get rid of rulers it regards inept and haughty. . . . The country class is convinced that big business, big government, and big finance are linked as never before and that ordinary people are more unequal than ever. . . . The country class actually believes that America’s ways are superior to the rest of the world’s, and regards most of mankind as less free, less prosperous, and less virtuous.”
Trump fundamentally understood the divide, and the billionaire chose to champion the country class. That would necessarily pit him against virtually all levels of power in America today: against the establishment elite of both political parties, against the Chamber of Commerce oligarchy, against the unions, against academia, against Hollywood, and of course against the national news media.
Interestingly enough, the country class uprising Codevilla had identified wasn’t limited to the United States. The same phenomenon was emerging in other nations. Many of the same issues, including unfair trade practices, uncontrolled illegal immigration, and Islamic terrorism, were triggering populist uprisings, and just as with the Trump phenomenon, the American news media chose sides.
It started with the elections in Israel on March 17.
The manufactured conventional wisdom and polling predicted a tight race and rough sledding for conservative prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. NPR’s Emily Harris reported from Jerusalem, “We might not know for days or even weeks who the next prime minister of Israel will actually be.” Instead the conservative won quickly and decisively, and that triggered a media explosion with the usual sore-loser outbursts about racist campaign tactics and how Mideast peace was dead. CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour channeled the hostility of Arab Israelis who, she said, “feel that the Likud Party and the right wing do have a, sort of, racist policy towards them and it’s very scary for them.”
Ring a bell?
Next came the British parliamentary elections on May 7. On NBC’s Meet the Press on May 3, host Chuck Todd proclaimed the race between Conservative Party prime minister David Cameron and Labour Party leftist Ed Miliband “too close to call.” Channeling the usual Democrat analysts, Todd declared, “There’s been commentary that if Cameron loses, the Republican Party ought to learn something from that.”
On MSNBC, anchor Andrea Mitchell brought on “senior political analyst” David Axelrod to make a fool of himself: “I think that the polls are accurate. This is a very, very close race, highly likely that this drama extends beyond tonight.” Wrong on both counts. Cameron defied the “experts” and won a clear majority in Parliament.
Like Obama field organizer Jeremy Bird, who had worked diligently in Israel to defeat Netanyahu only to fail, Axelrod had traveled to London to work for Labour, and like a good Obama strategist, he blamed others for the failure of his predictions: “In all my years as journalist & strategist, I’ve never seen as stark a failure of polling as in UK. Huge project ahead to unravel that.”
The defeats for the ruling class just kept coming. In June, the media were shocked again when Britain voted to leave the European Union—for a “Brexit”—over trade and immigration concerns. As in Israel, Team Obama was meddling with Britain’s country class, with Obama writing an op-ed against Brexit that appeared while he was visiting England in April. Only CBS quoted British politicians such as like Boris Johnson criticizing the interference. “The U.S. guards its democracy with more hysterical jealousy than any other country on Earth,” he stated. “It’s a breathtaking example of do as I say, not as I do.”
Speaking of breathtaking, the New York Times actually complained that British tabloids were “pushing an agenda,” dwelling on their “nationalist and anti-European tendencies.” As another omen of things to come in the States, the “Remain” [in the EU] side on the center-left led in the polls, but the polls were wrong, and the “Leave” side won, 52 percent to 48 percent.
How to explain the inaccurate polls? Fox Business anchor Stuart Varney argued that people had been intimidated by the elites and were loath to express their beliefs publicly: “People who wanted to get out of the European Union were shamed into saying ‘Well, I’m not sure. Maybe we should stay.’ Because, in Britain if you wanted to get out, you were labeled a bigot. You were labeled an Islamophobe. You didn’t like foreigners. You were a hater.”
The media’s reaction to the Brexit victory confirmed Varney’s theory. Over at the New York Times they were especially nauseated by the results. Columnist Roger Cohen said Brexit was a “colossal leap in the dark,” and columnist Paul Krugman called for readers to “grieve for Europe.” Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic, announced the Brexit polling didn’t capture enough hate. It was “a clear signal, albeit not surprisingly, for increased skepticism when it comes to all polling that involves xenophobia and racism.”
Julie Bort at the Business Insider website summed it up for the ruling class: “Britain is broken beyond repair and the ignorant are officially running the world.” A Financial Times editor tweeted, “I picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue!”
Trump, the Race-Baiting, Clinically Insane, Neo-Fascist Sociopath
All of this was an early indicator of how badly the elites were going to misjudge Trump. They dismissed him as an unsavory character. They missed the uprising he was leading. In the infamous Republican debate on CNBC in the fall of 2015, lead moderator John Harwood
