Once again, Joy-Ann Reid had to give a perspective that the good-old-boy network shied away from on the MTP Daily Panel. She was succinct and went more in depth than Chuck Todd is used to in her analysis.
Joy-Ann Reid reveals an inconvenient truth to the Republican Elites
Joy-Ann Reid appeared on an MTP Daily panel where she did her usual thing, blow up the prevailing narrative the Republican elites want to ignore.
“The reality is you know you have to ask yourself sort of what was Donald Trump’s crime in the minds of Republican elites, okay,” Joy-Ann Reid asked. “I went, and I looked up Jeff Flake’s voting record. He has voted 95.5% with Donald Trump. Trump’s margin in Arizona was 3.5% so 538.com predicted score would be that he would have voted with Trump about 61% of the time. He superseded that by 30 points. So this is not a difference in content or in what they want to do. It is really, to me about the gap between the text and the subtext. And if Donald Trump committed a crime among Republican elites, is that he made the long term subtext of Republicanism into text; meaning if you’ve been listening to right-wing talk radio over the last twenty-something years, the same anger and rage and anger at the changes in the country, the same ethic, the same sort of, you know, sometimes vulgarity existed. It’s just that elites in the Republican Party didn’t accept that as the way to market the party to the world. Donald Trump recognized, better than they did, better than Jeff Flake did, better than John McCain did. But he could simply identify with the text of what people were saying on talk radio or listening to when they heard Rush Limbaugh, the anger and rage that they felt all the time the sense of political correctness meaning I can’t say these things because I can’t keep my job or being a polite society. Trump said yes you can or I can say them for you. So all Trump did was take a lot of the subtext and anger that was already there. He didn’t invent this. Trump is just making it open, and obvious and Republican elites can’t stand it. They too want to get rid of Medicaid. Trump’s instinct is to say that’s mean. Trump knows more about the Republican base than Jeff Flake does. So I think that’s their problem with him.”
“Jeff Flake is a conventional Republican Conservative,” said John Podhoretz, New York Post Columnist. “Donald Trump is an unconventional non-Republican non-conservative.”
“And most of the base of the Republican Party agrees with Donald Trump because that’s why he beat sixteen other Republicans,” Joy-Ann Reid interjected.
“They also agree with Jeff Flake,” Podhoretz continued. “They like Trump. They have no trouble with Flake’s voting record. They have no problem with the way Flake views things. It’s about character. … It’s about comportment. It’s about behavior.
“If that mattered, Donald Trump would not have been the nominee of the Republican Party,” Joy-Ann Reid again interjected. “He ran against the sort of Kendalls of the Beltway media. He ran against Marco Rubio.”
Podhoretz accused Reid of being inconsistent. She set him straight with the facts.
“I said he understands the base of your party better than the elites do,” Reid said. “The the elites of the Republican Party think that the base agrees with them on eviscerating Medicaid for instance. Donald Trump understands that the base of the party is fine with big government. They don’t like that certain people are getting it. They’re fine with big government conservatism as long as they’re the beneficiaries.”
Podhoretz then accused Reid of caricaturing half the country. Telling the truth is not caricaturing.
“Donald Trump gets them,” Reid continued. “And the elites in the Republican Party clearly don’t.That’s why they lost him.”
Enough said, right?