Donald Trump's bizarre winning formula - Washington Times

County by county. 

Makes you wonder how he didn't reap the popular vote.

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By Victor Davis Hanson

The Democratic Party handed Donald Trump a rare opportunity to make radical changes to the electoral map that could last for years to come.

First, the Democrats gave Mr. Trump a great gift by completing the ongoing radicalization of their party under President Obama. After 2008, it was no longer a party of the working and middle classes, but a lopsided political pyramid.

On top were the cynical elites who turned up in the WikiLeaks John Podesta email trove: self-important media members, Ivy League grandees, Silicon Valley billionaires, Wall Street plutocrats and coastal corridor snobs. They talk left-wing but live royally. They court minorities to vote in lockstep, then deride them in private. The vast lower tier of the party comprises government employees, the poor, minorities and the millions dependent on state and federal assistance. The Democrats in between were ignored, and so they kept fleeing the party. Look at the red-blue map of the election. Democratic strength retreated to the inner cities and the rich coastal suburbs.

The Democrats also, in suicidal fashion, stoked racial chauvinism, or the notion that one’s tribe should transcend all other affiliations. After pandering to various minority groups, Hillary Clinton apparently believed that they suddenly would forget her emphasis on race and ethnicity to vote for her, a 69-year-old white multimillionaire.

But the Democrats learned a bitter lesson in 2016: Mr. Obama’s left-wing, rich-poor ideological agendas do not appeal to most of the country. Despite a hard progressive agenda, Mr. Obama was able to win two terms by relying on racial and ethnic solidarity, earning record numbers of Latino and black votes.

The logic of such a formula could not be easily transferred to a non-minority Democratic candidate. So Mrs. Clinton lost key blue states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin because minority turnout in cities such as Detroit, Philadelphia and Milwaukee fell off from 2008 and 2012.

Worse for Democrats, by pandering to tribal solidarity, they polarized the white working classes. When physical similarity is touted as the best argument to vote for someone, it green-lights everybody to do the same — including huge numbers of less affluent whites who voted for Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump took advantage of these openings. By reformulating the old Republican messages to include so-called fair (rather than free) trade, by leaving Social Security alone and by promising to create more jobs, Mr. Trump plucked millions of lower- and middle-class voters from the Democratic Party.

Republican elites may have been appalled that Mr. Trump blasted global trade agreements and promised to punish corporations that outsourced jobs overseas. But those who have been left out of the globalized economy flocked to that message after not warming up to John McCain and Mitt Romney in earlier presidential elections.

Mr. Trump’s populism also appealed to a surprising number of blacks and Latinos. Although Mr. Trump was even richer than some multimillionaire Republican nominees of the recent past, he posed as a man of the people, eating fast food and speaking in a Queens accent.

For many non-whites, Mr. Trump’s message was more about class than race. Inner-city dwellers share many of the same worries as the poor whites of the Ohio Valley and southern Michigan. Some blacks have more in common with poor whites than with Colin Kaepernick or Van Jones. And many whites have more in common with less affluent blacks and Latinos than with Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush.

These populist economic interests had been ignored by Democrats and Republicans, as coastal-corridor economies made multimillionaires of 30-somethings in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street — with only crumbs left for those who work with their hands.

In other words, Mr. Trump miraculously won the Electoral College despite adversarial media and hostile Democratic and Republican establishments. He ran with relatively little campaign spending, virtually no ground game, few political handlers, little celebrity backing and few establishment endorsements. And he won because he rewrote the traditional rules of red-blue presidential politics.

Democratic Party chiefs slammed Mr. Trump as a bigot. “Never Trump” Republicans trashed him as a protectionist and populist rather than label him a true conservative. Some elite Democrats rightly feared that he might revolutionize politics by stealing minority and working-class voters from Democrats on shared class concerns that transcend race. Some elite Republicans worried that he could win new converts who weren’t concerned with whether The Wall Street Journal found him to be an apostate and so often a vulgarian.

The strangest irony of all?

Establishment Republicans who hated Mr. Trump sounded a lot like establishment Democrats.

In sum, the billionaire Donald Trump thinks he can forge a new kind of “Republican” majority, to the chagrin of elite Democrats and elite Republicans alike.

And he could be right.

Donald Trump's bizarre winning formula - Washington Times

Senate Dems to Trump: Fire Bannon

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A growing number of Senate Democrats are demanding that President-Elect Donald Trump fire Stephen Bannon, arguing he should not be given a White House position.

"We call on President-Elect Trump to exclude the proponents of discrimination and hatred from the ranks of his administration and that includes immediately firing Stephen Bannon as his chief strategist," said Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.). "It is time for Donald Trump to act boldly... to put the nation on a path of healing."

Merkley, as well as Democrat Sens. Debbie Stabenow (Mich.), Ed Markey (Mass.), Mazie Hirono (Hawaii) and Senator-elect Chris Van Hollen (Md.), spoke to reporters during a press conference next to a sign that read "fire Bannon."

Stabenow added picking Bannon as a chief strategist and senior counselor is the "wrong message" after a contentious presidential election.

"This is a someone who has expressed racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, anti-LGBT sentiments," Stabenow, a member of Senate Democrat leadership, added to reporters. "This is someone whose views do not belong in the White House."

Democrats have widely panned Trump for giving Bannon a White House job. Tuesday's press conference comes after Dem Sens. Cory Booker (N.J.), Sherrod Brown (Ohio) and Al Franken (Minn.) separately said on Tuesday that Trump must take back his job offer to Bannon.

Merkley also launched a MoveOn.org petition urging supporters to "tell Trump: Fire Steve Bannon."

Democrats argue Bannon's appointment goes against Trump's pledge during his victory speech that he would work with Democrats and reach out to voters who did not support him.

Markey said Tuesday that appointments like Bannon "will forever poison the well with Congress and the American people" after Democrats offered a tentative olive branch to Trump.

Republicans in Congress have generally avoided discussing Bannon, while other Trump advisers have defended him. Bannon served as the campaign chairman for Trump.

Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said people should look at Bannon's entire career, which besides his work at Breitbart includes stints on Wall Street, in the Navy and in Hollywood.

"He has got a Harvard business degree. He's a naval officer. He has success in entertainment," Ms. Conway told reporters Monday in Trump Tower, according to The New York Times. She also called him a "brilliant tactician."

Bannon has repeatedly attacked House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). But Ryan shrugged off questions about Bannon at a press conference earlier on Tuesday, saying it was time to "look forward."

Senate Dems to Trump: Fire Bannon

One thing most of us can agree on after the election

One thing most of us can agree on after the election

PLEASE PLEASE make this guy the DNC Chair

Keith Ellison would be a bold pick for DNC chair — and a controversial one

I love it. Are they going to go from Wassermouth to this guy? 

That's a step up?

This tells you all you need to know.

One of the reasons Trump won is because the current administration (Barry) consistently coddled illegals, made excuses for Muslim terrorism (workplace violence), and supported BLM while simultaneously stabbing every PD across the country in the back. And let's not forget about the disastrous Iran Nuke deal. The white electorate had enough of Barry tearing the country apart, blundering through his presidency, living in his idealogue fantasy world.

 So the solution in their eyes is Keith Ellison?

 With this guy's track record, some of which I didn't know about, I'm sure he's going to be a big hit. 

For us that is. 

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Representative Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) with colleagues at a Dec. 9, 2015, ceremony in Washington marking the 150th anniversary of the passage of the 13th Amendment. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post) 

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) appears to be the early favorite to become the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He's already earned high-profile support from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), incoming Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-Nev.) and liberals across the country.

And as we wrote last week, Ellison provides perhaps an unrivaled contrast to President-elect Donald Trump — particularly as a black Muslim from the Midwest, a region that lost the election for their party last week.

But Ellison hasn't been a stranger to controversy, either.

Earlier in his career, Ellison apologized for and/or backed off a number of controversial statements and politically dicey moves, from likening George W. Bush's consolidation of power post-9/11 to the rise of Adolf Hitler, to defending the leader of the National of Islam, to labeling his 2012 reelection opponent a "lowlife scumbag." These comments have rarely been an issue for Ellison in his safe Minneapolis-based district, but now that he's competing to lead the Democratic Party, they've resurfaced.

Since his candidacy for DNC chair became official on Monday, conservative outlets have been quick to seize on the Hitler comments — often stretching them further than the words dictate. An Ellison spokesman is dismissing them as old attacks and emphasizes the congressman long ago denounced anti-Semitism within the ranks of the Nation of Islam. He also pointed to the congressman's work with Jewish groups and support from the Jewish community.

Here's what Ellison said back in 2007 during a meeting with a group of atheists: "It's almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that. After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it and it put the leader of that country in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted."

Ellison didn't say the name "Hitler," but the arson attack on the Reichstag building — the home of Germany's parliament — in Berlin in 1933 is remembered as contributing to Hitler's consolidation of power. Hitler used emergency constitutional levers to crack down on the press and opposition groups, eventually extending the crackdown to even more civil rights.

The then-freshman congressman's comparison drew criticism from the Anti-Defamation League, which combats anti-Semitism. Then-head Abe Foxman called it "odious" and said it "demeans the victims of 9/11 and the brave American men and women engaged in the war on terror. Furthermore, it demonstrates a profound lack of understanding about the horrors that Hitler and his Nazi regime perpetrated."

Ellison admitted it was a poor choice of words. "They told me they understood the point I was trying to make, but they didn't think it was the right way to use that historical example, because they thought any sort of comparison to the modern world we live in in some way diminishes the horror of the Nazi era. I told them I feel they're right." At the same time, Ellison didn't back off the underlying claim that 9/11 had allowed Bush to attain too much power.

The country's first Muslim congressman has also backed off his involvement with the Million Man March in 1995 and his comments in defense of Nation of Islam Leader Louis Farrakhan. As the AP's Patrick Condon wrote in 2006, when Ellison first campaigned for Congress:

Around 1990, Ellison — then a University of Minnesota law student known as Keith E. Hakim — wrote several columns in the student newspaper that are getting a second look.

One column defended Farrakhan against charges of anti-Semitism; a second suggested the creation of a state for black residents. In 1995, Ellison helped organize a delegation to Farrakhan's Million Man March in Washington.

Ellison, 42, said he was never an enrolled member of the Nation of Islam. He got involved to help improve the lives of black men, he said, and did not fully grasp concerns about Farrakhan's anti-Semitism until after the 1995 march.

"There are legitimate concerns in the Jewish community. That's why I'm happy to answer them," Ellison said. But, he added, "I do also think there are people out there who are fearmongering, who are trying to scare the Jewish community and manipulate this issue."

In 2006, he said, "I wrongly dismissed concerns that [Farrakhan's comments] were anti-Semitic. They were and are anti-Semitic, and I should have come to that conclusion earlier than I did."

He added at the time: "I have long since distanced myself from and rejected the Nation of Islam due to its propagation of bigoted and anti-Semitic ideas and statements, as well as other issues. I have a deep and personal aversion to anti-Semitism regardless of its source, and I reject and condemn the anti-Semitic statements and actions of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, and Khalid Muhammed."

Separately, in 2001 while working as a lawyer, Ellison stood up for accused Sara Jane Olson, a member of the so-called Symbionese Liberation Army, which has been called a domestic terrorist group. Olson, formerly known as Kathleen Soliah, pleaded guilty shortly after 9/11 to attempting to murder Los Angeles police officers more than two decades prior but maintained her innocence. "I think it's dangerous to prosecute people for their political views and their political associations," Ellison said at the time. "I think you prosecute people for what they do, for their acts."

During his time in Congress, Ellison has sought to make inroads with Jewish groups and has spoken out against anti-Semitism.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of the liberal Jewish group J Street, told The Washington Post in an interview Tuesday that Ellison is a "friend of Israel" and a "friend of Jewish people."

Yeah...so is Louis Farrakhan.

"These kinds of attacks that have been leveled against him are symptomatic of a mood and fervor on the political right that needs to be countered," Ben-Ami said, adding that Ellison is to be commended for recognizing when he said the wrong thing.

Ellison spokesman Brett Morrow added: "These are old stories the right wing has rolled out to attack Keith for years. He's focused on moving the Democratic Party forward so all Americans can be successful — no matter their race, religion or ethnicity."

Should Democrats pick Ellison as their party leader, they'll be picking someone with a completely unique background who would provide a huge contrast to Trump. They'll also be picking someone who, like Trump, could well be a lightning rod.

PLEASE PLEASE make this guy the DNC Chair

Hillary Clinton Screaming Obscenities and Throwing Objects in Election Night Meltdown

On a tip from Ed Kilbane

As the tables turned, and Trump's MSM concocted arduous path to 270 became hers, and the walls crumbling around her, she descended into a fit of rage. Now we know why Podesta had to take the stage.

What was that about temperament?

Bitter, vindictive, irate, sorrow, contemplating what could have been...God, I love it so.

The mystery of Hillary Clinton, milk-carton missing on election night, appears solved.

A Tuesday of catharsis for Donald Trump voters turned into an evening of rage for Hillary Clinton. The Democratic presidential nominee, anticipating the postelection reaction of many of her supporters, began shouting profanities, banging tables, and turning objects not nailed down into projectiles.

“Sources have told The American Spectator that on Tuesday night, after Hillary realized she had lost, she went into a rage,” R. Emmett Tyrrell reports. “Secret Service officers told at least one source that she began yelling, screaming obscenities, and pounding furniture. She picked up objects and threw them at attendants and staff. She was in an uncontrollable rage.”

The appearance of campaign chairman John Podesta at Manhattan’s Javitz Center, and the dematerialization of his heretofore ubiquitous charge, perplexed in the first hours of Wednesday.

“They’re still counting votes, and every vote should count,” Podesta declared to a sad and stunned hall. “Several states are too close to call, so we’re not going to have anything more to say tonight.”

As Podesta recalcitrantly refused to recognize reality early Wednesday morning, Hillary Clinton called Donald Trump to offer congratulations. The juxtaposition of the campaign chairman publicly vowing to fight around the time the candidate privately conceded the election left observers scratching their heads.

Tyrrell’s reporting indicates that Mrs. Clinton’s mental state made it impossible for her to address her supporters on election night as custom requests. So, instead, Podesta gave a rah-rah speech on a boo-hoo night to cover for the absence of the first woman president, her fireworks, and her victory speech shout-outs to the mothers of the Black Lives Matter martyrs.

“She is not done yet,” Podesta claimed. Tyrrell’s reporting indicates that, indeed, Clinton remained far from done.

“Her aides could not allow her to come out in public,” he writes. “It would take her hours to calm down. So Podesta went out and gave his aimless speech. I wish we could report on Bill’s whereabouts but we cannot.”

Bill appeared the following day at Hillary’s belated concession speech wearing a purple tie but, thankfully, no purple marks about his face, suggesting experience dictated avoidance the previous evening.

“People say they’re amazed Bill’s marriage survived,” Tyrrell noted to Breitbart. “I’m amazed Bill survived his marriage.”

Tyrrell’s reporting remains a thorn in the side of the Clintons more than two decades after the American Spectator published its Troopergate stories detailing Bill Clinton’s escapades as told by his Arkansas security detail, stories that first referenced Paula Jones and pushed the president on the road to impeachment. Nearly 19 years after Hillary Clinton imagined a “vast, right-wing conspiracy” out to get her husband, the cabal’s charter member again relies on the accounts of the Clintons’ long-suffering security to unmask the public faces worn by the power couple now out of power.

“In the ’90s, we published several pieces that documented her throwing lamps and books,” Tyrrell tells Breitbart. “This happened pretty often. She has such a foul mouth that the Arkansas state troopers learned a thing or two from her. She has a foul mouth and a good throwing arm.”

Hillary Clinton Screaming Obscenities and Throwing Objects in Election Night Meltdown