Hildebrand: Anti-Trump protesters show streetwise leftists are now simply elite dumb

These anti-Trump protesters outside court in Manhattan last week don’t know it, but they are the former US president’s greatest campaign hope for re-election this year, writes Joe Hildebrand.

When Donald Trump was convicted on Friday, US President Joe Biden tweeted:

“There’s only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: At the ballot box.”

No sh-t. So why has the American left spent all its time and energy trying to beat him everywhere else?

Long before Trump’s petulant and delusional rejection of the 2020 election result, the left had already rejected the 2016 ballot that put him in the White House.

First came the most basic and lazy resistance via the Twitter hashtag #Notmypresident. This was a braindead but nonetheless direct inversion of every democratic principle: the election outcome is invalid because the losing side didn’t win.

Then they claimed he was illegitimate because Hillary had won the popular vote and thus the electoral college system that had produced the peaceful transfer of presidential power for centuries was rigged and unfair.

Then the result was blamed on “fake news” — an accusation that Trump later turned against the mainstream media with devastating impact.

Then came the allegation of Russian collusion, which was accepted as gospel by much of the same media until it was found to be utter fantasy.

There’s only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: At the ballot box.

Donate to our campaign today: https://t.co/aJXS9oti0a

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) May 30, 2024

This in turn gave Trump’s “fake news” accusations a newly apocalyptic power from which many news organisations — and the concept of truth itself — have never recovered.

Innumerable campaigns of indignation, outrage, warfare and lawfare followed, culminating in Trump’s conviction for paying off a porn star to avoid a scandal during his 2016 presidential bid.

If only the Democrats were more focused on his 2024 presidential bid they might have realised that they were giving their nemesis the biggest leg-up in global political history.

But sadly the Democratic Party machine seems incapable of such obvious insight. They have gone from streetwise to elite dumb.

Somehow those who consider themselves the smartest people in the room, with all the right degrees from all the right universities, are incapable of grasping all the reasons why Trump was elected in the first place — namely the massive and growing disconnect between working class people in regional America and preachy urban progressives.

These anti-Trump protesters outside court in Manhattan last week don’t know it, but they are the former US president’s greatest campaign hope for re-election this year. Picture: Getty Images

They focus on Trump the man instead of Trump the phenomenon. They are consumed with destroying him instead of examining why so many millions of one-time Democrat voters have turned to him.

And so for all their supposed smarts they are constantly outsmarted by a man they consider a fool. Because this schism is not about Trump as an individual, it is about Trump as a lightning rod for discontent with a smug progressive establishment.

Indeed, it is not even Trump that is outfoxing them — he doesn’t have to. They are constantly, repeatedly and unwittingly destroying themselves, like lobotomised literati lemmings.

Only 18 months ago the infamous Republican “red wave” turned out to be a miserable trickle. Trump’s hand-picked candidates might have excited Tea Party Republicans but they scared off ordinary voters.

Clearly unable to accept this reality, Trump went ahead with his planned announcement of a presidential comeback in a long and rambling speech at Mar-a-Lago that lacked any real point or purpose.

Former US President Donald Trump at Trump Tower after being found guilty. Picture: Getty Images.

For America’s greatest political showman, it was the ultimate whimper. And then a bunch of Democrat brainiacs decided to give him a bang.

And they did it in the most insufferably elitist way possible, using a convoluted web of impenetrable legalese to try to jail him for paying off a porn star.

Did Trump secretly pay off a porn star? No doubt. But strangely people tend to get worried by the use of the criminal justice system to pursue blatantly political ends.

Yet even when it was clear that this was hurting the Democratic cause more than helping it they kept on marching to the edge of the cliff, culminating in Robert De Niro having some kind of medical episode on the courthouse steps.

Honestly, if you put this in a screenplay it would read like an acid flashback.

And so we are now faced with the possibility that Donald Trump could win the next election from a jail cell — literally doing nothing while his opponents blow themselves up at every turn. These guys are like Wile E. Coyote.

Worse still, by criminalising Trump they are effectively criminalising the tens of millions of Americans who support him. By declaring their candidate null and void they are implicitly dismissing their concerns as well.

Stormy Daniels. Picture: AFP

This is another disturbing default of the modern left — framing politics so that only their approved bandwidth of views is considered legitimate. They are all for free speech as long as you only say the right things.

Thus blind Freddy can see that the prosecution of Trump is about far more than Stormy Daniels’ hush money. It is about sending a message that Trump is a criminal and that therefore his political platform is not just wrong but not allowed. Deplorable, if you will.

Again, this is not just profoundly anti-democratic but doggedly suicidal. If the left sees everything it disagrees with as illegitimate how can it ever hope to understand voters’ minds, let alone change them.

Maybe these guys should stop talking to fancy lawyers and start listening to normal people.

Listen to Joe’s new podcast The Real Story with Joe Hildebrand.