Miranda Devine: Donald Trump opponents can’t have it both ways
Talk about having it both ways — furious opponents of Donald Trump heaped hatred on the President and his supporters, but now plead for love and harmony, writes Miranda Devine.
It’s a bit rich for Joe Biden to be preaching “unity” and “healing” now he’s been crowned president-elect by the media. “Let this grim era of demonisation in America begin to end,” he said.
Easy for him to say.
The Democrats and their media comrades have spent the past four years demonising President Donald Trump and his supporters, and now they think they’re in the hot seat they expect sweetness and light in return.
They spied on him, lied about him, goaded him, investigated him and impeached him. They called him a Russian agent and weaponised the intelligence agencies against him.
They did whatever they could to delegitimise his presidency and sabotage his administration. They blamed him for every coronavirus death They called his supporters “deplorables”, “chumps” and “ugly folk”, and made wearing a MAGA hat an invitation to scorn and violence.
From the minute Trump took office they had a four-year tantrum.
Just two weeks ago Hillary Clinton was still whining about the 2016 election in an interview with the New York Times: “There is an air of illegitimacy that surrounds Trump’s presidency … because I was the candidate that they basically stole an election from.” Now they’re telling Trump and his supporters to “suck it up” despite mounting evidence of industrial-scale voter fraud. There’s much more evidence that this election was stolen than there ever was of Russia collusion but Democrats and their media allies claim the allegations are “baseless” and “conspiracy theories”.
If Biden were serious about “healing” America, he would not have prematurely declared himself the victor of last Tuesday’s presidential election before the counting had finished and before ballot irregularities had been tested through the courts, as the Trump campaign wants.
He would have called for complete transparency in vote counting and tabulations and declared he had nothing to hide from an audit.
Because as it stands at least 70 per cent of Republicans don’t believe the election was free and fair. They think it was rigged for Biden, according to a Morning Consult poll. That’s a recipe for disunity and conflict. When people lose faith in elections as a way to sort out their differences, society can take an ugly turn. If Biden cared about unity, he would have repudiated Michelle Obama for deriding Trump voters after the election.
“Let’s remember that tens of millions of people voted for the status quo, even when it meant supporting lies, hate, chaos, and division,” she said in a statement of congratulations to Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris. She’s talking about 71 million decent, hardworking Americans who voted for Trump, of all races and walks of life.
A president maligned for the last four years as a racist, “white supremacist”, homophobe, xenophobe, you name it, managed to expand the demographic appeal of the Republican party in historic ways, especially among black and Hispanic voters.
Exit polls point to the GOP share of non-white voters at 26 per cent, the highest since 1960.
Trump increased his share of the black vote since 2016 from 8 to 12 per cent. Black men went from 13 per cent in 2016 to 18 per cent this year. He did particularly well with black men who identify as ideologically conservative, over half of whom voted for him, according to an NBC News poll.
So did 26 per cent of black men with a high school diploma or less, and 22 per cent of black men with bachelor’s degrees. Overall, Joe “you ain’t black” Biden recorded a historic low black vote for the Democrats.
As well, Trump doubled the black female vote from 4 to 8 per cent and won the support of a majority of white women. His share of the LGBT vote doubled to 28 per cent. He attracted 35 per cent of the Hispanic vote nationally and 55 per cent of Cuban Americans in Florida. So much for the Democrats’ cynical identity politics.
Trump voters are people who can think for themselves, who weren’t stupid enough to fall for four years of relentless lies about Russia collusion, golden showers in Moscow hotel rooms, Ukraine corruption, “suckers and losers”, “white supremacists”, and all the other Democrat delusions.
Now they’re being instructed to embrace “unity” by the very people who have tried to disenfranchise them for four years.
There wasn’t much unity from the socialist Democratic congresswoman from Queens, Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, who threatened to Trump supporters with a Stalinist enemies’ list.
In a tweet after the election she called for “archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future”.
She wasn’t alone. Democratic National Committee Press Secretary Hari Sevugan tweeted a link to a revenge website, “The Trump Accountability Project”, and chillingly declared that “employers considering [Trump White House staff] should know there are consequences for hiring anyone who helped Trump attack American values”. CNN anchor Jake Tapper joined in, tweeting yesterday: “I truly sympathise with those dealing with losing … but at a certain point one has to think not only about what’s best for the nation (peaceful transfer of power) but how any future employers might see your character defined during adversity.”
Tapper was among the most enthusiastic media identities who spent the past four years poisoning American politics with fanatical lies that Trump was a traitor who had colluded with the Kremlin to steal the 2016 election. We now know from a declassified US intelligence document that the story was fabricated by Clinton’s campaign to distract attention from the scandal of her missing emails.
Her campaign and the Democrats paid former British spy Christopher Steele to compile a dossier of false allegations against Trump, including lurid tales of prostitutes in Moscow.
That tall tale was peddled by the Resistance media for years.
And now, rather than showing grace in victory, Tapper’s CNN colleague Anderson Cooper couldn’t resist a parting shot at the President, calling him an “obese turtle on his back, flailing in the hot sun, realising his time is over”.
Good luck with the unity.
Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph
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