John R. MacArthur

Divided they stand

How the bickering US left could gift Donald Trump a second term as president

issue 06 May 2017

 New York

As the malevolence and incoherence of the Trump administration continue to amaze, Democrats are taking heart from the popular revulsion against the Mad Hatter of Mar-a-Lago. The media class is chattering excitedly about anti-Trump momentum after special Congress elections in conservative Kansas and Georgia resulted in a narrow Republican victory in the former and a run-off in the latter. Last week, Paul Kane of the Washington Post cited this as proof ‘that Democrats have galvanised the anti-Trump activism of the past three months into votes at the ballot box’. Last Monday, the New York Times went even further by publishing a piece on the already crowded field of Democratic presidential challengers for the 2020 election, a group of politicians the paper said were ‘uniformly emboldened by Trump’s perceived vulnerability’.

I’m as horrified by Trump as the next liberal, but I think the establishment media have got it wrong again, just like last November when they said Hillary Clinton couldn’t lose.

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