They’re not scared of Donald Trump; they are terrified of the people who vote for Donald Trump. The storyline entering 2024 is that an urbanite establishment has exhausted its patience with rural America and does not want it to have any say whatsoever in the future direction of the nation.
Leave aside the headlines out of Colorado and Maine for a moment and reflect on what is being said about the people who may want to cast a ballot for the former president decreed to be an unacceptable option by those currently in power.
Former MSNBC host Chris Matthews may not still be a big wheel, but he reflects an omnipresent mindset within big-box media circles. On December 26, Matthews blithely compared rural Americans who support Trump to an incipient terrorist threat.
‘We Enraged the Enemy’
“In this case it is rural rage. They are so angry at the liberal establishment, the coastal elite,” Matthews declared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program. “They look at people on television, ‘Oh those people on Saturday Night Live, those snarling rich kids, I know who they are. They are all trust funders. They don’t worry about us.’ And the regular guys in the country go, ‘there they are snarling and making fun of us again,’ and every time we make fun of Trump, we’re making fun of them. It’s a weird thing. But in a way, it’s like fighting terrorism.”
Far from shrinking away from his provocative metaphor, Matthews expounded on the similarities between what he clearly sees as various sets of “enemies” of the America he believes in.
“We think we just put the Army in or Israel just puts the IDF in and they are going to solve the problem. It never solves the problem because you enrage people,” Matthews continued. “And we did it with Afghanistan, we did it with Iraq. We enraged the enemy to the point where they’re more fiery than ever and they hate us more than ever. Armies don’t make peace. We think they do. That’s what this fight is about.”
“We enraged the enemy.” This wording exposes the mentality of a ruling regime worried that the peasantry beyond the capital gates is not being handled in the correct way. It should be astonishing that a veteran dominant media personage such as Matthews feels completely comfortable describing tens of millions of Americans not as fellow citizens who disagree with him on the issues but as implacable foes that must be dealt with in the most tactically expedient way.
A former assistant secretary of Homeland Security in the Obama administration has echoed these disturbing sentiments. Juliette Kayyem is a professor and board member at Harvard who also serves as an analyst for CNN. Kayyem is best known for having distinguished herself, if that is the correct way to put it, for her extreme views in support of harsh social pressures on the unvaccinated during the coronavirus pandemic.
Among other things, Kayyem stated in an August 3, 2021, article for The Atlantic that the unjabbed should not be allowed to fly. At the same time, she admitted her total indifference to those who did not share her view.
“I think the vaccinated forget 1) we are 75% of the eligible vaccinated population so with majority comes benefits; 2) we are right and just; and 3) we are so over their feelings,” Kayyem wrote in an August 29, 2021, Twitter post.
‘I Don’t Need to Pretend Both Sides’
It’s no coincidence that the same haughty “we are right, you are wrong” position is now being rolled out for the upcoming presidential election.
“It’s about to be 2024. We are running into an election period in which violence and the threat of violence are sort of viewed as an extension of our normal democratic differences. This is one of the successes of what Donald Trump has been able to do, to sort of be kind of casual about violence,” Kayyem exclaimed on CNN on December 26.
She is right. She is just. And, once again, the former Obama national security official wants you to know that she is not willing to hear the other side of the argument.
“Trump is not hiding it. I don’t need to pretend both sides here,” Kayyem asserted. “Potentially, the lead candidate for the GOP, who’s going to get the nomination, is utilizing language and violence in the threat of violence as a way to rally his people to get support, and his party is sort of ignoring it. They’re not condemning it. I think that, then, creates an atmosphere in which violence becomes more permissive.”
“I don’t know how to explain or curb how the violence unfolds if Donald Trump does become president,” Kayyem luridly stressed.
Giving Rural America Constitutional Standing Radicalizes GOP
The narrative has been unspooling for some time now. In a shockingly honest August 2021 article also published in The Atlantic, two of Kayyem’s Harvard cohorts declared that the Constitution unfairly protects rural Americans from the urban-centric rule these academics so clearly desire.
“Steven Levitsky is a professor of government at Harvard University. Daniel Ziblatt is the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University,” a bio for the authors of the piece, titled “The Biggest Threat to Democracy Is the GOP stealing the Next Election,” reads.
Levitsky and Ziblatt write:
“We believe that the US Constitution, in its current form, is enabling the radicalization of the Republican Party and exacerbating America’s democratic crisis. The Constitution’s key countermajoritarian features, such as the Electoral College and the US Senate, have long been biased toward sparsely populated territories. But given that Democrats are increasingly the party of densely populated areas and Republicans dominate less populated areas, this long-standing rural bias now allows the Republican Party to win the presidency, control Congress, and pack the Supreme Court without winning electoral majorities.”
Forget for a second that two supposedly erudite Ivy League professors do not understand that America is meant to be a constitutional republic and not a democracy governed by mob rule. Is it not evident in the above paragraph that a palpable loathing of those who reside in “less-populated areas” exists among the “densely populated” habitues who now seek to bar Trump supporters from being able to vote for the candidate of their choice in multiple states?
Of the four Colorado Supreme Court justices who infamously ruled that Trump should be thrown off the state’s 2024 ballot, three have Ivy League ties and the fourth received his law degree from the University of Virginia, current home of Golden Parachute Professor Liz Cheney and a $100 million-endowed, ex-Obama staffer-led “Institute of Democracy.”
The move to ban Donald Trump from the 2024 election should be seen for what it ultimately is: a refusal by the urban elite to stomach contrary beliefs held by rural Americans.
