As the size of Donald Trump’s victory in South Carolina Saturday night became apparent, even CNN couldn’t avoid the truth anymore.
It came, of all places, on a show hosted by Anderson Cooper. It came, of all people, from “The View’s” token Republican Alyssa Farah.
And it summed up the former president’s situation almost perfectly:
“It is the greatest political comeback in history,” Farah said as Trump trounced former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in the state she used to run.
“Just three years ago, he was done in the party. And it only took a matter of months before he came back and handily won in Nikki Haley’s home state.”
Farah’s observation came only about 30 seconds into the discussion. But in the 13 or so minutes that follow, not one of the panelists disagreed with her:
Anderson Cooper and the CNN panel can’t hide the truth after Trump easily wins the South Carolina primary:
“Overwhelming results. It is the greatest political comeback in history. It doesn’t make sense!”pic.twitter.com/6xdf57EIjQ
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) February 25, 2024
It’s worth pointing out, of course, that Farah observations need to be taken with a grain of salt, seeing how she has gone from being an aide in the Trump White House to fronting the Joy Behar wing of the Republican Party.
Is Trump’s path to the GOP nomination clear?
But in this case, she came close to the truth — but only close.
It’s true that Trump’s political comeback is a stand-alone moment in American history — just as the prospect that he’s going to have to fight through a series of spurious, politically driven criminal prosecutions is a stand-alone fact of American history.
What’s not true is that he was ever truly “done in the party.”
Sure, there were plenty of Republican establishment types who would have been more than happy to see the end of Trump after the fiasco of a presidential election in 2020 — with its voting laws ignored, vote-counting irregularities and the ever-present shadow of the coronavirus pandemic to justify pretty much anything biased election officials wanted to do.
But the Trump supporters who make up the vast base of the contemporary Republican Party never abandoned him — and have had no reason to.
Still, the Haley-supporting Farah is correct in hailing the consequence of Trump’s historic “comeback.” He could have flown out of Washington in 2021 and returned to life managing his real estate empire, spending weekends on the golf course and evenings with the lovely Melania.
But he didn’t. He stayed on as the de facto leader of the Republican Party for good and ill (there’s no doubt Democrats did better than expected in 2022 because of the party’s loathing for Trump in a very personal sense).
It was never Trump’s base that turned on him. It was only that a massive coalition of the Democratic Party, a hideously biased establishment media cartel of social media barons that united long enough in 2020 to snatch the presidency from him.
Trump’s supporters haven’t turned — which is why he’s swept all four Republican nomination contests so far, and is almost certain to sweep the remainder.
Democrats — at least Democratic leaders — tend not to understand this, or understand it and lie about it. For either reason, David Axelrod, a one-time strategist for former President Barack Obama, was able to say something as brilliantly stupid as “subjugation is the toll you have to pay when you enter Trump’s world … The whole party is subjugating itself to Donald Trump.”
That comment, coming about the 3:45 mark in the video, has it exactly wrong. It’s not Republicans that subjugate themselves to an individual. That’s a Democratic trick.
Just look at the party’s slavish devotion to Barack Obama, or its willingness to bend to the knee in the service of Bill Clinton — a man who used the White House like a bordello, where taxpayers picked up the tab.
Democrats have even tried it with President Joe “Dark Brandon” Biden. But even most of them can’t pretend Biden is anything but the “elderly man with a poor memory” described by special counsel Robert Hur.
(The only real difference of opinion at this point is how big of a criminal Biden actually is. For his supporters, he’s an idiot who lost classified documents without realizing it. To conservatives and Republicans, he’s clearly lost it now, but has spent a lifetime as a maliciously skillful liar who took classified documents for his own purposes and spent a lifetime in politics pimping his offices for the benefit of himself and his family.)
Scott Jennings, a CNN senior political correspondent and former staffer in the George W. Bush White House, said the currents swirling around the GOP — from Trump’s march to the nomination to the obvious jockeying for a running-mate by South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott — reflect the wishes of the men and women who actually make up the Republican Party on the ground — in the living rooms and workplaces of the United States.
“You act like Donald Trump had the ability to just make these things happen independent of what the voters want,” he said, in summation about the 13:15 mark.
“Tim Scott’s constituents, his party, his party in South Carolina, everybody that votes for him, and most of the people he encounters on a daily basis, are saying, ‘I really think we should do Trump again.’
“So there is some aspect of politics where these people have to respond to the people that they represent.”
Imagine, a political party and its leaders responding to the people they represent, rather than staking out their position and commanding their constituents to follow, the way the Democratic Party tends to do business with its special interest shock troops.
So, Saturday night’s discussion proved once again that the laws that govern stopped clocks and blind squirrels apply to “The View” hostesses and Anderson Cooper panelists.
No one can be wrong every single time.
But Alyssa Farah couldn’t be entirely right, either.
